The Boston Herald has been pretty good lately on the question of stem cell research – and they’ve been particularly good at calling Romney out on his posturing. So today’s editorial is a disappointment. The Herald’s view, presumably in response to this story that Senate President Travaglini is considering some state funding for stem cell research once the legalities are cleared up (over Romney’s inevitable veto), is that state government isn’t good at funding scientific research, so it should stay out of that game and leave funding to the feds.
That’s all well and good in most cases. But it doesn’t work at all in this case, because the feds, at President Bush’s direction, have basically shut off funding for embryonic stem cell research. So the Herald’s observation that "in Washington at least the National Institutes of Health have a long-established process for vetting research projects before they are funded," while true, is irrelevant, because NIH can’t fund precisely the research projects that the scientific community, Travaglini, and even (apparently) the Herald, want to see go forward in Massachusetts. The reason that California, New Jersey, and other states are stepping up is that there’s a vacuum at the federal level, and states are starting to fill it.
The question whether Massachusetts should ante up state money to fund stem cell research is a complicated one. Maybe private money will be enough, maybe we can’t afford it, blah blah blah. But saying that "the feds do it better" does not contribute to answering the question – if the feds were in this game at all, the states wouldn’t have to worry about it.
