Even the archconservative Dallas Morning News can’t resist mocking Washington ethicist-in-chief Tom DeLay’s use of the phrase “dismemberment of embryos” to describe stem cell research. The paper went looking for debate about whether or not DeLay was in some sense justified for describing stem cell research as a deliberate torture and slaughter of little people. But what’s to discuss? Nobody could defend the choice of “dismemberment” as a metaphor to describe embryonic stem cell research, right? Well, there is one guy who will. Just when I was ready to believe he might not be completely without shame,

William Hurlbut, a Stanford University bioethicist who sits on the
President’s Council on Bioethics, defended Mr. DeLay’s description.

‘The point he is trying to get at is conceptually correct. He is trying
to make vivid the realization that even though they are very tiny, they
are integrated organisms, not ‘inchoate clumps of cells’ as some
scientists have misleadingly said,’ Dr. Hurlbut said. … ‘the truth is that even though it is very tiny, the blastocyst-stage embryo from which ES [embryonic stem] cells are harvested does have distinct parts. To disaggregate it to get the ES cells is to pull apart a human body in its incipient but unfolding form.’

Yes, Bill, I’m sure Rep. DeLay worked hard dumbing down his sophisticated sense of embryonic dismemberment, and was only “trying to make vivid the realization that even though they are very tiny, they are integrated organisms, not ‘inchoate clumps of cells.'” Just checking, but did DeLay work on his position about “inchoate clumps of cells” while he was riding in some corporate jet? Or maybe it was while he was up late at night worrying about Terry Schiavo? I’ll give you $50,000 if you can find a single instance of Tom DeLay using the word inchoate in a sentence. Though I am sure that he has given the deepest of thought to stem cell research. Ethics are on his mind.

Lakoff’s fellow linguist Deborah Tannen has another interesting interpretation of the rationale for DeLay’s comment, one not hatched (like Hurlbut’s) on the moon:

Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown University linguistics professor, said that by using the word dismemberment, Mr. DeLay and others opposed to embryonic stem cell research are trying to associate it with the controversial late-term abortion, which critics also refer to as “partial-birth” abortion.

“That was such a successful campaign because it gave the impression that they were dismembering a child,” Dr. Tannen said. “They are trying to create an association with babies, and they want to push it back earlier and earlier. I guess stem cells would be the extreme of that, but they’re just cells. In order to dismember something, it has to have limbs, and cells don’t have limbs.”

So, oddly, the question of language has become front burner in the stem cell debate. New York Times science writer Gina Kolata, for example, points out that the uses and abuses of the terms ‘cloning’ and ’embryo’ in particular have become very important to the debate over stem cells – with both sides arguing that their description of the term is based on science and the other’s based on politics, religion or some other such superstition:

… cloning opponents are disturbed by the way stem cell scientists these days almost always speak of “somatic cell nuclear transfer” rather than “cloning.” “The most important thing to be said is that the language is changing and it seems to have an agenda behind it to make things more acceptable,” said Dr. John Kilner, the president for the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, which opposes cloning and destroying human embryos to extract their stem cells.

“I’m concerned,” he added. “People ought to debate the scientific issues on the merits.”

Ah yes, the merits.

The truth is that the abuses of the language game are in fact on both sides. I’m not sure that it could ever have seemed truly reasonable to describe the product of a procreative process as a “clump of cells;” the language is truly loaded and deliberately uses science to confuse the listener. However, the abuses of science by proponents of stem cell research pale by comparison to the abuses of the right wing, including many who use their pretentious language to obscure the fact that they have no idea whatsoever what they are talking about:

Dr. Leon Kass, the [President’s Commission on Bioethics’] chairman, argued last week that the South Koreans’ feat should not be disguised by jargon.

“The initial product of their cloning technique is without doubt a living cloned human embryo, the functional equivalent of a fertilized egg,” Dr. Kass wrote in an e-mail message.

“If we are properly to evaluate the ethics of this research and where it might lead,” he continued, “we must call things by their right names and not disguise what is going on with euphemism or misleading nomenclature.”

The silky language doesn’t disguise a simple claim: the product of reproductive nuclear transfer is “without doubt a living cloned human embryo, the functional equivalent of a fertilized egg.” Find me one stem cell researcher, indeed one embryologist, who would agree that “without a doubt” that is true. Having studied embryologists’ perceptions of stem cell research, I can tell you there’s no such person out there. Find me a scientist who will speak of the “functional equivalent” of an embryo. Get started now, though, because no scientist has used the language of function in basic biology in 50 years, and because nobody – and I mean nobody – in science would argue that embryos have a clearly defined “function.” What would the function of a fertilized embryo be? To develop into a baby. The Korean cells can’t.

Both sides of the stem cell debate want to control language – but neither can really claim to have accessed facts or even “scientific reality.” In this debate, the politics – resulting in socially accepted language – really will determine the science.
[updated 6/1]