The XX Factor: What women really think.

Flash of Grandstanding

Hanna, I'm glad Obama's grand claim to separate politics and ideology from science bothered you, too. It disturbs me when politicians and pundits talk about science as if it's a separate force all its own, somehow divorced from rational decision-making in which moral forces always come to play. There was a line in last year's movie Flash of Genius in which Greg Kinnear's character points out this political deception to his students. He reminds them that it was engineers who did incredible good when they invented the replacement heart valve and also engineers who were responsible for so much evil when they invented the Auschwitz gas chambers. The examples are extreme, but the point is a good one: Just because science gives us the capability to do something—it doesn't make it the best thing to do. Science allows us to destroy human embryos, but it can't answer whether that's right or not. 

So, if anything, Obama's choice to lift the ban and begin to fund morally questionable research when science is giving us such promising, noncontroversial alternatives seems like more like a "Flash of Grandstanding" than anything else, but one that has some seriously scary consequences.