Fueling the Fears of Science

Fueling the Fears of Science

By Arlene Judith Klotzko

Image: Anthony Canamucio

In so many ways, it is hard to remember what life was like before the carnage of Sept. 11. What it felt like to be safe from unknown horrors. What seemed so important and now does not. What was top of the national policy agenda and now is not. All through last spring into the summer it was stem cells, but the events of that terrible day in September sent the whole subject into more or less oblivion, only for it to reappear more recently in the even more contentious discussion of therapeutic cloning.

Fears of science--focusing specifically on the consequences of genetic manipulation--are being stoked on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, worries tend to center on the human applications...