Lines That Divide: The Great Stem Cell Debate is a conservative propaganda film arguing that Americans should forgo embryonic-stem-cell research in favor of research using stem cells derived from adults and from other sources that do not require the destruction of a human organism. It was recently shown to an audience at the National Press Club and is being distributed on DVD. (You can buy a copy here.)
The film puts, or should put, conservatives in a difficult position. Its premise is sound — creating and destroying human beings for the purpose of medical and biotechnological research is a ghastly project and one that is, literally, inhumane. But the film, which is earnestly well intended and clearly created by intelligent people, engages in a great deal of intellectual dishonesty of types familiar to students of rhetoric: the straw man, the false choice, the placing of an invisible authorial thumb on the evidentiary scale, &c.
The film repeatedly asks: Are there to be “no moral restraints” on scientific research? Are we willing to seek medical progress “at any price”? But the question is not one of conducting research with “no moral constraints,” nor is it of progress “at any price.” We have been asked to evaluate particular sets of moral constraints, and asked whether we are willing to pay a specific price, in particular the destruction of unwanted embryos created for in vitro fertilization procedures— which are very likely to be destroyed in any case — and of the clones created from them.
But instead of addressing these questions, which are difficult, the film argues that embryonic-stem-cell research is both morally repugnant (true) and devoid of scientific value (untrue). It treats issues such as pluripotency, the ability of a stem cell to develop into any sort of tissue, in a cavalier way: Pluripotency in embryonic cells is abominated as a cause of tumors, but pluripotency induced in non-embryonic stem cells is celebrated as a triumph, and the complexities of the issue are not adequately addressed. Biotech companies consistently are treated as the villains of the story, and they are criticized simply for being profit-driven, as though research undertaken for profit were inherently impure; the risks of certain drugs and procedures are exaggerated, as is the vulnerability of the women who undergo egg-harvesting procedures for money; and many facts and arguments are given without sufficient context.
But films are not graduate seminars in logic: They are assemblages of light and sound. While clever propagandists can make great use of decontextualized data (51 million Americans don’t have health insurance! some Wall Street clod got paid $100 million! children in small towns are 104 percent more likely to use crystal meth than those in big cities!), cinema works through images. Images such as this one:
That’s Michael Clarke Duncan playing a clone about to be killed to have his organs harvested in the dystopian film The Island. It is a powerful image, and one that Lines That Divide appropriates, along with those of disgusting human-animal hybrids from The Island of Doctor Moreau, creepy corporate geneticists in Gattaca, and, inevitably, the monster from Frankenstein.
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