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Presentation at California's Stem Cell Initiative: confronting the Legal and Policy Challenges, Boalt Law School, University of California, Berkeley, CA
Stem cell research is part of a set of extraordinarily powerful biological tools. The emerging biomedical, genetic, and reproductive technologies will affect the lives and the life chances of individuals; they will confer and withhold health, wealth and power; they will shape social and economic arrangements. They are likely to affect all these social outcomes at least as much, and in many cases far more, than do particular political candidates, or laws, or sets of policies and regulations in other areas.
So democratic control of their development and implementation is both appropriate and very important. And there's a lot at stake in how we answer one of the questions asked in the summary description of this panel: How can we have intelligent public debates about highly technical issues like stem cell research?
I'm going to address that question by tweaking it slightly, by asking How can we ensure that we will NOT have intelligent public debates about highly technical issues...