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Comment by jpgvm | Hacker News Reader

Thankfully there is still Canada/EU/Australia on the cutting edge of stem cell and gene therapies. That said the Trump administration is likely to be a great blow to science overall, to be felt worldwide I would imagine.

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This may be a bleak way to look at things, but the money the rest of the world will start making with this in the future will ensure that we eventually come around. Money wins over morals and ethics much of the time.

Not to say that this research isn't ethical or moral. More that we'll eventually benefit from this.

Generally the well-educated believe it is ethical and moral research, but there's a vast swath of America that believe that it is unethical, either from a misunderstanding of how the research is done, or simply from a total moral objection to the research at all.

So you're right, but it's still an issue until we can solve the misinformation problem.

What misunderstanding do you think they have? Producing embryonic stem cells requires destroying an embryo. Yes, the embryos are mostly castoffs from fertility clinics and would likely be destroyed as medical waste anyway. But that doesn't matter one bit to people who believe embryos are human beings and deserve legal protection.

Yeah that is potentially true. Many of these types won't let morals or ethics get in the way of making money.

They just aren't too keen on spending money on the good of mankind however.

>They just aren't too keen on spending money on the good of mankind however.

What if they cut your taxes? Then you can spend your money on anything you think might benefit mankind instead.

That doesn't follow.

If the government cuts taxes but at the same time prohibits an activity I can't then use the money I've saved by paying less tax on that banned activity.

For some things it does work. I could spend the money on recreational drugs, for example, because they are available, however I don't personally know any stem cell therapy practitioners, nor any who are prepared to flout the law.

Edit: removed a word because it made a sentence ambiguous

Luckily, I think this is one of those cases where investing in this particular field will be good for humanity _and_ profitable.

Hopefully not $900 Epi Pen profitable, though...

@cmdrfred I don't really know where is the best area to invest in, personally I prefer to just pay my taxes and have a government in place that either consists of or consults with the appropriate experts.

In Australia we are fairly lucky in this regard, our government is 'mostly' good, for some value of mostly at least. I'm not saying it couldn't be more efficient but definitely more efficient than research institutions needing to market to the broad public for funding.

Hello fellow Australian.

Tip: if you don't see a reply link on the comment you want to reply to try clicking on the time stamp link to the right of the commenters username, the reply comment box should then appear on a new page.

Thanks!

I didn't know it worked that way, that seems.. unintuitive to say the least heh.

I've not read any explanation as to why it is that way, only that it is. Such is life.

Reply link does not appear straight away. In the time it took for you to read comments and click the specific link, enough time had passed so that the reply link was available

I believe there's a delay in place before you can reply to a reply to your own comment (presumably to force you to breathe a bit if you're potentially about to engage in a flame war).

Meanwhile death and suffering will happen that could have been averted.

Or to put it in a stronger business-context, the money to be made here in the US will have been squandered by politics.

Because while there is a moral argument here, it's been thoroughly coopted by politicians using it to gain/keep power.

That's why medical tourism is a big and growing industry. Much like other political policies fruitlessly trying to end legitimate supply/demand as long as people want it there are always ways around it.

I'm sure any paralyzed person would easily take a $300 flight to Canada for the surgery.

The only risk is that the US has the highest amount of human scientific capital.

But much like the EPA thing that turned out to be overblown (according to multiple EPA reps who said the memo was routine and that Obama did much the same, without drawing the subsequent outrage) I'm going to wait until legitimate threats to stem cell research are made before I'm concerned.

This. On a more local scale (EU) medical tourism is huge. I know of many family members travelling a short distance to avail of much cheaper dental work abroad. In fact I am surprised this isn't advertised more.

I suspect the anti-science bit has more to do with approving Keystone/DAPL than some hard line policy.

If Balaji Srinivasan is confirmed for the FDA, I'd expect gene therapies and stem cell treatments to become more commonplace. After all, Balaji's first startup dealt with genetic testing.

What is more concerning is that the US might face a brain drain in the coming years, due to the visa ban from so-called "terrorist" states (funny how Saudi Arabia is conspicuously absent from that list...)

Step into any university Chemistry or Engineering building and it becomes very clear that the only reason the USA is still at the forefront of scientific advancement is because it has still convinced the highly educated of other nations that this is the place to be.

Remove the desire for the Chinese, Indian, and Russian engineers to try to study and work here, and you remove the USA's competitive advantage, and you give back all that talent straight to the USA's biggest competitors.

> you give back all that talent straight to the USA's biggest competitors

Or to Canada. The US isn't the only western country highly skilled workers emigrate to.

I consider Canada a US competitor.

EU is not consistent. I know Italy for example banned most of that type of research (because you don't want to make the Holy Father cry), whereas in UK it's still pretty liberal. I'm pretty sure other "holy" countries like Poland and Ireland also have very strict laws.

My cyberpunk education would point to the Far East as "the" place for this sort of thing to spring up unregulated.

As an American, one thing that really annoys me about the rest of the world is that, even though we only have 5% of the world's population, everyone (esp. in the rest of the industrialized nations) seems to expect us to be the leaders on everything, and then they get mad when we fail.

If Canada/EU/Australia think stem cell and gene therapies are important, along with things like climate science and any other kind of science, and we in the US are failing on these things thanks to our crappy voting, then why can't you guys pick up the slack? Personally, I'm not at all happy about the prospect of what's going to happen to science funding here real soon. But that doesn't excuse all these other advanced economies from doing their part too. The rest of you should be trying to take the lead on these things, if not many more things, esp. when we so obviously screw up.

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