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Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
to scientists and those who administer the institutions in which they 
work. The entire biomedical enterprise in the US, including also the 
training of the next generation of scientific researchers, has come to 
depend heavily on government support. The public generally favors 
this arrangement, and relies on government-funded research for the 
treatment and for the cure of all still untreatable diseases, such as 
cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. 
Consequently, the decision to withhold public funds from any 
particular piece of the biomedical research portfolio looks and feels, 
both to scientists and to the public, like an intrusion of government 
into a place where it does not belong, and it prompts harsh 
accusations that government is engaging in censorship or even 
outright prohibition of medically necessary scientific research. To be 
sure, the FDA regularly imposes restrictions on research, but mainly 
on grounds of safety. When, however, government’s objection to 
research is moral in nature, it strikes scientists as a deprivation: a 
restriction of freedom to inquire, a thwarting of worthy community 
goals, an intrusion of morals into a sphere where they do not belong. 
At the same time, it appears to those members of the public who 
disagree with the decision as a failure by the government to abide by 
its putative moral obligation to use its resources to explore all fruitful 
areas of research in search of cures for dread diseases. 
Moreover, there is reason to single out for special attention those 
decisions about federal funding where powerful moral principles are 
at loggerheads, and the nation is deeply and passionately divided. 
This is the case of stem cell research. It poses a confrontation 
between genuine and conflicting goods: on the one side, respect for 
nascent human life and, on the other side, commitment to unfettered 
scientific inquiry and to the fight against disabling and deadly 
disease. The clash between those who hold that the moral status of 
the embryo is no different from that of a fully developed human 
being, and those who believe that the embryo is a clump of cells, 
utterly devoid of moral worth is not resolved by appeal to shared 
moral premises. This is because what the debate over stem cell 
policy calls into question is how to apply our shared belief in the 
rights and dignity of the individual. 
Despite the powerful presumption in favor of federal funding of 
biomedical research, and the moral steikes which both sides see as 
exceedingly high, the controversy over federal funding of stem cell 
research does not present a special case. In politics, though, how a 
policy appears is important. For this reason, eind despite the fact 
that the common arguments condemning the president’s policy rest 
on false assumptions or unreasonable expectations, and though they 
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