In the name of “depoliticizing science,” President Barack Obama held an applause-filled rally before supporters Monday to declare that his administration would begin funding research that destroys healthy, living human embryos. This supposedly anti-political move was a victory for one of Washington’s most powerful industry lobbying groups.
The Biotechnology Industry Organization, which represents drugmakers and for-profit laboratories, quickly endorsed Obama’s new policy. “We fully support and are enthusiastic about President Obama’s decision to allow the National Institutes of Health to fund embryonic stem cell research,” said BIO President and Chief Executive Officer Jim Greenwood.
Financial headlines around the world indicated Greenwood and BIO’s member companies had reason to celebrate: “Industry set for stem cell profits”; “Stem cell buzz may help industry”; “Shares of Stem Cells [Inc.] rally on Obama’s news.”
Destroying human embryos to harvest stem cells has never been illegal in the United States, and many laboratories have been carrying out this sort of research for years, either with private money or with state taxpayer money. Obama’s decision gives these businesses — and any that now want to jump on the bandwagon — access to federal taxpayer money for their efforts to turn human embryos into profits.
Consider an analogy. What if President George W. Bush had announced he was lifting many restrictions on oil drilling on federal lands — on Alaska’s Northern Slope, in the Gulf of Mexico, in national parks and forests, and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts? He might have trumpeted this as “depoliticizing drilling” and “restoring geology to its rightful place.” Imagine the outrage of environmentalists — and the catcalls from Democrats charging it was a gift to the oil industry.
One important difference between this imaginary Bush story and the real Obama story: It’s nascent human beings, not virgin tundra, being trampled by Obama’s policy.
Another interesting contrast: BIO spent $7.7 million on lobbying last year, compared with $4.9 million spent by the American Petroleum Institute.
BIO is anything but “apolitical.” It is a well-connected lobbying group. Greenwood is a former member of Congress, a Pennsylvania Republican who consistently voted for and championed legalized and taxpayer-funded abortion and embryonic stem cell research. BIO employs 27 in-house lobbyists, including a former chief health counsel for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
But that’s just the tip of the lobbying iceberg. As of the end of last year, BIO was retaining 18 different outside lobbying firms, including some of the giants of K Street: Covington & Burling, Patton Boggs, Foley & Lardner, and Hogan & Hartson, to name a few.
Many of these lobbyists push BIO’s agenda on biofuels and patent law, but embryonic stem cell funding has always been a top priority. One stem cell lobbyist for BIO is Michael Lerner, who served as senior adviser to then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.
With Democrats now fully in charge of government, BIO has added to its Democratic lineup in recent weeks, hiring two Democrat-heavy firms: Johnson, Madigan, Peck, Boland & Stewart and Bryan Cave LLP. New BIO lobbyists from these firms include Jeff Peck, former top lawyer for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and former Clinton White House lawyer Broderick Johnson.
Somehow, in Obama’s rhetoric, fulfilling the funding requests from these industry lobbyists counts as getting politics out of science.
Throughout its brief history, the embryonic stem cell industry has always been supremely political. It has been busy not warding off regulations — recall, this research has never been banned — but seeking taxpayer money at the federal and state level.
In New Jersey, for example, when the state legislature debated a bill to fund the creation of embryonic stems cells for laboratory experiments, one state senator supporting the measure worked for Pfizer. In Missouri, biotech giant Stowers Institute contributed $29 million to help win passage of a ballot measure providing subsidies for embryonic stem cell research. In California, venture capitalists who were heavily invested in embryonic stem cell research — including some who sat on the board of embryonic research leader Geron Corp. — poured millions into the 2006 ballot campaign to secure billions in state aid for embryonic stem-cell research.
This is an industry nearly entirely dependent on taxpayer money. Somehow, when the industry’s lobbyists — including former congressmen and former top White House and congressional staff — get their way and get access to taxpayer money, this is called getting politics out of science.
