The Politics of Science

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In Missouri, though, stem-cell research is only one issue in a target-rich environment for Democrats: McCaskill is spending more time talking about the Iraq war and Republican corruption than about Talent's opposition to stem-cell research. And as she campaigns in conservative rural areas, McCaskill is making the issue more of a test of Talent's character than of his ideology, pointing to instances in which he has waffled in his opposition. So it's hard to predict how much the stem-cell question will figure in the Senate race's outcome.

And yet, on the face of it, stem-cell research would seem to have all the makings of a perfect wedge issue. In nearly every poll, voters say they disagree with the President's veto by about a 2-to-1 ratio. Almost half of those surveyed in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last week said that either they or someone in their family suffers from one of the conditions--cancer, Parkinson's disease, juvenile diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, spinal-cord injuries or heart disease--for which stem-cell research is believed to hold the greatest promise. "There are a lot of things we do here [in Washington] that don't touch people directly. This one does," says Congressman Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

But to make a wedge issue work, it helps to have a crisis--or, as the gay-marriage issue showed, to manufacture one. As private research continues even without federal funds and Governors like California's Arnold Schwarzenegger rush in to fill the void with state money, voters end up concluding that Bush's veto is not likely to prevent science from going forward in some way. Unlike issues like abortion and gay marriage, the stem-cell debate is seen by few people as one of moral absolutes. While Americans overwhelmingly disagree with Bush's action, they give him credit for having acted on conviction and not politics, though Republicans have made no secret of their hopes that it could help rally their dispirited base.

In the meantime, stem-cell research is moving into areas where Americans are likely to have stronger moral qualms about it. Most voters don't object to destroying embryos that would otherwise be discarded, but far more of them are ambivalent when it comes to what scientists have taken to calling "somatic cell nuclear transfer"--a term researchers use to avoid the more incendiary word cloning, even though it is the same technology that created Dolly the sheep. "A lot of Americans way beyond the religious right are going to be troubled by some of the implications of all this," says influential conservative activist Gary Bauer. "Science is just running a lot faster than our moral discussion of it."