Freese and stem cells

If you have even wondered why stem cell researchers are getting more involved in political campaigns by speaking out and supporting candidates that support their work, look no further than news stories from 2001 about Rep. Steve Freese (R-Dodgeville) for their motivation.

Freese actually compared the potentially life-saving research on a ball of cells to Nazi experimentation on the Jews. From the Capital Times on 8/9/01:

"The Nazi Holocaust arose from small beginnings," Freese said. "Technology has been advancing incredibly fast ... Clearly, we need to have a debate."
Freese compared the scientific arguments for embryonic stem cell research to the propaganda in Nazi Germany that led to the extermination of millions in the 1930s and 1940s.

He also planned a bill to ban the research, throw people in jail providing embryonic cells to researcher and clamp down on all those renegade fertility clinics having the never to try and help couples have babies. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on 8/10/01:

Freese said the bill he and Sen. Bob Welch (R-Redgranite) would introduce within a week was more comprehensive than the stem cell research ban proposed by Assembly Republicans during budget negotiations but later rejected.

Freese said the bill would allow research on adult stem cells, but not cells taken from embryos 6 to 8 days old. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been the leading research institution on embryonic stem cells. Freese said UW researchers should work on adult stem cells, not embryonic cells.

Freese said the bill would make the intentional destruction of a living human embryo a crime. Anyone providing researchers a human embryo, knowing it would be destroyed, also could be prosecuted, he said.

The legislation also would prohibit cloning. Finally, it would call for a legislative council study on ways to regulate infertility clinics and the production of embryos, and to facilitate adoption of spare embryos.

In an opening statement, Freese talked about the medical experiments the Nazis conducted during the Holocaust and the United States' Tuskegee experiment, in which the U.S. Public Health Service withheld penicillin and watched poor, uneducated African-American men die of syphilis.

In drawing the comparisons, Freese said later, he was only attempting to illustrate a need to understand the consequences of research and have controls in place.

Not surprisingly, Freese's comments were not well received by the Jewish community. Also from the Capital Times article:

Steven Morrison, executive director of the Madison Jewish Community Council, said those who died in Nazi death camps should not be used as political fodder.

"It's just utterly disgusting when one uses the Holocaust and uses murdered individuals for political gain," he said today. "If someone wants to make a political point, leave the memory of dead people out of it."

Perhaps it's time the voters of his district left Freese out of the decision making process in the legislature.