Science Quote by David Baltimore

A scientist of David Baltimore's stature doesn’t reach for the phrase “lots of other issues” unless he’s trying to re-order the room. The line is almost comically mild, but that’s the point: it’s a strategic deflation of a culture-war balloon. By naming “policy” first and “the stem cell issue” second, Baltimore tucks a headline-grabbing controversy into a larger, messier portfolio of government choices - funding priorities, regulation, public trust, research infrastructure. He’s signaling that science doesn’t live or die on a single moral panic, even when politics insists it does.

The subtext reads like a rebuke to how U.S. debates often work: pick one ethically charged biomedical topic, inflate it into a proxy battle over modernity, and let everything else - basic research support, peer review integrity, disease burden, scientific literacy - slip off the agenda. Baltimore’s syntax performs triage. “Including” is doing heavy lifting, demoting stem cells from the center of the universe to one item on a longer list.

Context matters: stem cell research, especially in the late 1990s and 2000s, became a political litmus test, where the scientific promise was constantly cross-examined through religious and partisan frames. Baltimore’s intent isn’t to dismiss the ethical stakes; it’s to insist on proportionality. In that insistence is a quietly political act: reclaiming the policy conversation from symbolic fights and pulling it back toward governance, evidence, and tradeoffs.