The Ramazzini Institute
for Occupational and Environmental Health Research   

Who Are We?

Moral Questions
Dear Unsigned: Hayek Would Not Regulate
Stem Cell Research With "Market Strategies"

     A reader accessed our archives and in our October 2000 issue found an article relevant to the current international debate on the morality of using stem cells in biomedical research: Moral Questions: Stem cells in the Marketplace? Read also our last [April 2001] issue: What Jefferson Would Have Heard About Cost/Benefit Analysis and The Moral Arithmetic of Market Strategies.
     Unfortunately, he or she sent us an unsigned e-mail. Unfortunate because the author should be credited for asking a good question! The question has to do not with whether or not “federal” or public money should be used in the funding of such research, the focus of most of the debate before the Congress and the President, but of non-governmental or private funding, leaving the issue to be resolved by “marketplace strategies.”
     The reader reacted to my contention that the concept of a “free marketplace” is at best a “political shibboleth.” “Isn’t that statement just a political, not a moral one?” the e-mailer asked, with quotes from Friedrich Hayek to support unfettered market strategies rather than government as a means of resolving moral questions.
     Hayek, an idol of many who decry governmental regulation and call for “market strategies” instead, ought to be carefully read. Given the fundamental sense in which these essays are written, Hayek would answer “NO”, the question is moral. The statement reflects no particular political philosophy or argument for weak or strong regulation.
     When two or more people get together to buy, sell, or trade, to participate in a process of bartering, a practice of exchange that must be almost as old as humankind itself, a market or marketplace is created. To elevate this artifact of natural human behavior into a political philosophy is to distort a humble, necessary social function. Others obviously disagree. But, arguably, the artifact itself needs no ideological justification, and actions that regulate it, including what is bought and sold, do not necessarily constitute unwarranted government regulation. Hayek was very clear about the necessity of “the rule of law”: the state must protect us from transactions that either favor or harm “particular people” [1].
     Most of what we read about a “free” marketplace is what George Orwell would call “double think”, i.e. the label is used with two contradictory beliefs in mind about what the label means. The idea of a functioning market contradicts the idea of an unfettered “free” market. Consider the first requirement of a “free market”, as defined by a leading economist and fellow faculty member [at The University of Chicago] of Hayek, Frank Knight: freely contracting individuals. [2]. Both would say government regulation is necessary to protect the freedom of contracting. 
     In the pristine labyrinths of biomedical research, stem cell research in particular, a new test of what is meant by “freely” contracting individuals is the use of paid “volunteer” research subjects. In our October 2000 issue, we visited an analysis of that practice in an article on EPA’s new regulations governing the protection of research subjects. The agency made a point of noting that the varying amount of money often paid to “volunteers” varies with their economic circumstances, not their degree of altruism. To repeat what we wrote in October, that “clouds the voluntariness” of the transaction. Was it Ben Franklin, dear e-mailer, who said something about how good bad bread is to a poor man?
     Existing regulations would discourage or prohibit the practice of paid research subjects, or the purchase of embryos or fetal material, in federally-funded stem cell research. The practice is apparently legal when no federal money is involved, but does that make it moral?
     An Associated Press dispatch to the New York Times of July 13, titled: “Cos. Compete to Create Stem Cells” gives us an idea of what happens in a “Free Market.” In Worcester, Massachusetts, Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. pays women to take fertility drugs to produce excess eggs. The Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk, Virginia, “after long ethical review” creates embryos expressly for stem cell research, using eggs and sperm from “paid, consenting adults.” [This has become a political issue in the current race for Governor of Virginia.]
     Rick Weiss, in the July 14 editions of the Washington Post provides a few more details on the Massachusetts case, where an “ethical review’ has also been done by an ethics advisory board. Glenn McGee of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned from the board, of which he was chairman, in October. He charges that the ethics board was not kept informed or involved in the company’s decisions.
     The press reports we have seen tell nothing about what the “voluntary” research subjects are told about the risks involved. In both cases, they may have received the same or a higher level of protection afforded research subjects in federally-funded research.
     Factually a market is always governed: well governed when fairness is favored or poorly governed when harm or discrimination in any form prevails. The poverty of the “free market” fallacy should stimulate honest thinkers to find another way to express themselves. Freed of meaningless labels, “the right” and “the left” might more often find common cause based upon a commonly-held moral sense. Research subjects are “particular people”, too!

[1] Hayek, Friedrich. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1944 Phoenix edition, pp. 80-81.

[2] Knight, FH. The Ethics of Competition. Freeport: New York 1969, pp49-54