Saletan the Magnificent: On Zoloth on Hurlbut on Stem Cells

In a piece that is just a bit too clever, William Saletan accuses Laurie Zoloth of being a bit too clever. He reviews a dialog between Zoloth and William Hurlbut that took place at a typical forum about stem cell research. The impression he takes from the encounter can be summarized very briefly, although the nuanced "I was there-ness" that Saletan's pieces have taken on will be lost in my summary. Which is not, you will see if you read his new piece, an altogether bad thing.

Saletan points out that Hurlbut's dopey idea (altered nuclear transfer, which we have written about so much in this blog that I won't bother to put the links here anymore) unraveled under Zoloth's retorts, leaving Hurlbut livid and incoherent. If you read this blog you will find the latter fact easy to believe. Hurlbut, I have argued, has devolved into a charlatan selling a snake oil science-based solution to the stem cell debate. But he does a fabulous impression of a sincere and devoted scientist who only means well. And, equally, Saletan performs: his act is "the liberal who feels bad for neoconservatives," and when he is in character he writes with a voice that can be quite annoying.

In what seem like a dozen columns for Slate it goes like this: he begins his commentary by telling us that he is 'sitting in the audience' at events in which the neoconservatives participate, and the message he brings back each time is that although he himself is liberal, the problem with liberals is that they are too cavalier, too loosy-goosy with the facts, and not ... Second ... here it comes ... serious enough.

So the account he gives of this event is all-too-familiar to me as a loyal reader of his new and fairly comprehensive writing about bioethics issues. It amounts to the claim that Zoloth wins the debate but cheats, and not because she is intending to cheat but instead because the overconfidence of liberals leads them to fail to question facts.

The problem with this argument is simple. It is wrong. Zoloth, he claims, had her facts wrong. His example is the question of whether ANT will reliably produce an embryo that will not implant. He says that he trusted Zoloth - her authority on the matter as a disputant - until she got them wrong:

At lunch, Zoloth said the idea behind ANT—knocking out a gene called Cdx2 to prevent development of an implantable embryo—wouldn't reliably succeed because gene knockouts produce a range of outcomes. I asked for her evidence that a range of implantation outcomes would occur with Cdx2 deletion. That's how it works, she assured me. But as I write this, I'm looking at the published report on the ANT experiment. It says "none of the Cdx2[-deleted] nuclear transfer blastocysts formed visible implantation sites (0 out of 40)." There goes my faith.

Well, that is a clever claim to make but all Saletan had to do was look deeper and he would see that while this is the report made in the Nature piece, it does not in any way exhaust the claim Zoloth is making. Her point is not that the group who conducted this single experiment should have found "implantatability" but that work on Cdx2 deletion has shown that there are a wide variety of effects on the developing cells that would include some embryos having the potential to be implantable, and that from a pro-life point of view if that potential exists at all, we're killing someone. Her point is subtle and frankly that is what makes me furious. And not with some sort of simple "liberal indignation" of the sort Saletan has begun to assert that liberal bioethicists hold.

So there's the rub. Saletan misses the fact that Hurlbut is at bottom disingenuous, he has heard countless times from many disputants including many of the top biologists in several related fields that his purported solution is voodoo and a political tactic at best. Hurlbut is clearly thrilled that the bad science that undergirds the attempts to avoid the stem cell debate has advanced as far as it has, so far in fact that perfectly respectable stem cell researchers are publishing wacky science in Nature in order to keep the dogs at bay. Hurlbut, it should be restated in this regard, apparently has no training in ethics, and is not a stem cell researcher. He is the one playing fast and loose, and Saletan should perhaps have taken just a few minutes to identify the multiple claims to that effect in the voluminous literature on such 'solutions'.

So why, when Laurie presents cogent arguments that position stem cells in relation to complex social and political phenomena and scientific issues, is Saletan hammering her for that sin?

Simple. He likes the seriousness, the monasticism of the Kass crowd. It is appealing because it feels academic, sincere, earnest. When Hurlbut pleads for us to take things more seriously, to not be "rude," it is because that political - and strictly political - tactic works for him. But when Hurlbut leaves the cathedral, he is flying all over the country on an entrepreneurial mission to kill stem cell research, shows up everywhere he can and courts profile articles like nobody in the history of bioethics, never once confessing to be an amateur in a field where most folks believe you should actually be a scholar of ethics before professing to be an ethicist.

Saletan is taken in by the claim that moral seriousness is a phenotype, a thing you can see and smell on people when they talk. It isn't. Real moral seriousness comes from thinking and writing carefully, and that is precisely what Hurlbut does not do. In fact with the exception of the one piece in which he argues for cheating the stem cell debate through the theoretical use of ANT, Hurlbut does not as best I can tell write in the field at all. Either field, in fact, stem cells or bioethics. How can you be a morally serious tutor of bioethics if you don't write in the field? This the problem Saletan misses. It isn't about trust, it's about scholarship. I am quite sure that the folks who trust Saletan enough to have lunch and discuss the issues would prefer he start there, no matter how exciting the performances of bioethics may be.
[updated 11/20 and pushed to the top]