[extropy-chat] Three-quarters of N. American's support stem cellresearch

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, Reason wrote:

> It is annoying that people make this argument while ignoring the effects of
> government policy - existing and threatened - on private funding. In case
> you hadn't noticed, the threat of a complete ban on therapeutic cloning and
> stem cell research has been hovvering close over the industry in the US for
> the past two years. The same or worse goes for Europe.  [snip]

But you are thinking that medical research revolves around the U.S. or Europe.
Countries like Japan, Korea and China don't have some of the historic moral
(actually religious) problems that might exist in the U.S. or Europe.  And
I know that China has been throwing money at the construction of stem cell
research facilities.

You have to make an argument that pouring money on the problem would produce
results faster.  Over the years I've learned that with Science things happen
in two stages "research" and "development".  When things are in the "research"
stage they are very difficult to accelerate -- it is questionable how much
one can accelerate the search for the right combination of growth factors,
substrates, supporting cells, etc. that allow the support and differentiation
of stem cells.  A lot of the process requires the integration of many small
discoveries and observations into a picture of what is really going on.
You can't easily "brute force" that problem.  On the other hand once you
understand those processes the 'D' part (which is mostly engineering)
can use increased financial support to try different approaches to solve
problems.

Up until ~2001 we only had the tip of the iceberg with regard to what
the components were.  Now we are in the middle of looking at an extremely
large jigsaw puzzle (and only so many hands can work with a piece at the
same time).  Once the pieces begin to be assembled into much larger
blocks -- then will be the time to be pushing for more funding.

Robert