Science is one arena of national status competition. In competition, both scientists and scientific know-how are deployed in the effort to achieve victory. The prize varies. The meanings attached to that prize shift over time and political space. In the domestic debate about human embryonic stem cell research, one of several pro-research positions is that government funding of human embryonic stem cell research is necessary to maintain U.S. primacy in the international arena. This paper explores some of the material and normative implications of this competition for women.
In U.S. culture and in capitalist markets, science is understood as a body of knowledge separate and apart from “other” knowledge. In addition, science is privileged knowledge. Knowledge that is deemed science is valued more than, for example, social knowledge, cultural knowledge, and experiential knowledge. Science is valued more or taken more seriously than knowledge deemed to be in other categories because we impute science with neutrality, empirical underpinnings, and irrefutability. On the other hand, we both value and denigrate social, cultural and experiential knowledge as subjective, not provable, and often, emotional. Sometimes, the worst thing you can say about a claim to knowledge is that it is unscientific.
As a privileged form of knowledge, science is often positioned oppositionally with “soft” forms of knowledge – morality or politics, for example. It is also used to confer status upon those wielding scientific knowledge. Or science is paired with other forms of privilege to form a trump card of sorts against whatever is positioned opposite. Science and professionalism have trumped morality more than once in public discourse.
The ways in which science is constructed as separate and independent of “other” knowledge obscures the ways that science intertwines with cultural formations to trump its challengers. In the U.S., science has intertwined variously with imperialism, anti-communism, racism, racial equality, Social Darwinism, liberalism, etc. In national status competition, scientific innovation and technological know-how are often conflated with democratic and economic progress. That conflation informs both the U.S. domestic debate about human embryonic stem cell research and the formation of an international research enterprise sector in stem cell research.
At present, the gold rings of human embryonic stem cell research are the creation of additional cell lines and the ability to use somatic cell nuclear transfer to create tailored cell lines. Given present limitations in scientific knowledge and technological ability, these goals require human blastocysts and human eggs as the raw materials of research. These needs form a point of interface between the fertility industry and the stem cell research enterprise.
The fertility industry and research enterprise are forming at least three points of interface. The first is direct. The raw materials of research are being transferred from fertility clinics to researchers. The second and third points of interface follow from those transfers. Practices in pre-embryo creation, storage and transfer, as well as human egg procurement are well-established in the fertility industry. Fertility industry practices are shaping practices in the research sector. And emerging practices in the research context are influencing practices in the fertility industry. In addition, fertility industry practices have had normative implications, particularly for women. Stem cell research, as a subject of public discourse largely informed by the abortion debate, and as an endeavor laden with promises of both therapeutic and economic benefit, contributes to the shape and content of the gender norms at play.
Both the fertility industry and stem cell research are competitive ventures in emerging global markets. But it is stem cell research that has been cast as a means of achieving national primacy. Consider: A global market with national primacy as its prize; the means of winning the prize is an understanding of science that divorces and obscures it from its normative effects; among those effects is the use of women as a source of raw research materials, and the accompanying shifts between women, nation, and scientific commerce.
