Experiments in democracy: The science, politics and ethics of human embryo research in the United States, 1978--2007

This dissertation examines the scientific, ethical and political deliberations surrounding human embryo research in the United States from 1978 to 2007. During this thirty-year period, debates about the biological and moral status of the human embryo led to vigorous arguments about technology and the public good, about the forms of deliberation appropriate to public policy making, and about the tacit social contract between science and the state. The dissertation examines how a series of public bioethics bodies responded to scientific and technological developments from in vitro fertilization to human embryonic stem cell research. Each had to contend with the technical uncertainties of embryo research and with America's moral pluralism; and each proposed a mode of public reasoning to resolve the tensions.;I argue that each of these bodies accepted the notion that scientific knowledge stands outside of politics, but that they conceptualized the role of scientific authority differently because they varied in their conceptions of democracy. Debates over the definition of scientific terms like "preembryo" and "therapeutic cloning" were conducted simultaneously with arguments about whether the public was "confused" and whether such confusion should be corrected by experts or through democratic politics. I examine how these issues spilled over from ethics bodies into politics as states like California and Missouri became laboratories for new approaches to public support of biomedical research.;By tracing the successive controversies that laid bare competing visions of democratic deliberation---from scientific technocracy to procedural pluralism, and from Rawlsian public reason to anti-Rawlsian communitarianism---the dissertation paints a dynamic picture of the co-production of science and politics. A central contention of the dissertation is that the ways in which science figured in politics---as a source of knowledge, as a wellspring of life-improving goods, and as a locus of rational and ostensibly extra-political authority---depended on the ideas of democracy that were advanced in parallel. Thus, the dissertation is at once a history of the human embryo as an object of laboratory research, of public and private institutions of biomedical research in America, and of the changing political role of public bioethics.