Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Several scientists are "waiting to see what happens" with proposed legislation banning embryonic stem cell research before deciding whether to accept jobs in Texas, a University of Texas official told a state Senate committee this week.

Dr. Kenneth I. Shine, executive vice chancellor for health affairs for the University of Texas System, said he is recruiting several researchers who "don't want to be in positions where they can't pursue this line of research."

And if the Legislature does ban stem cell research, there will be a "giant sucking sound" as researchers already here flee the state to more hospitable political atmospheres in California or New Jersey, said Dr. William Brinkley, dean of Baylor's graduate school of biomedical sciences.

It's unlikely the stem cell research ban will pass in the legislative session's final week. But its mere consideration by state lawmakers is one piece in a larger mosaic, as the political fractures evident in the two most recent presidential elections begin reaching into statehouses and city halls.

As many states tip strongly toward either Republicans or Democrats, they are increasingly considering, and sometimes enacting, policies that reflect the extremes of the country's politics.

These decisions are affecting where people choose to live and work.

Los Angeles removes the cross from its county seal. Texas asks the U.S. Supreme Court to let a granite tablet of the Ten Commandments remain on the state Capitol grounds.

Kansas places a ban on same-sex marriages in its state constitution, and the Connecticut Legislature votes to allow gay unions.

The Democratic Maryland Legislature requires Wal-Mart to provide health insurance, only to have the plan vetoed by Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. The Florida Legislature passes its "Stand Your Ground" legislation allowing pistol-packing citizens to use deadly force in a public place if threatened, and the National Rifle Association vows to export the legislation to other states.

California (especially Los Angeles), Connecticut and Maryland all voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2000 and 2004. Texas, Kansas and Florida voted for George W. Bush.

"You can't wait for Congress; you fight it out where you've got the votes," said Alan Rosenthal, a Rutgers University political scientist. "You have the blue states and the red states. You might say we've got two political cultures, or the development of two political cultures."

In the past 30 years, most U.S. communities have become increasingly Democratic or Republican, as people cluster in communities of like-mindedness.

Greater polarization leads to "greater efforts at the state level to enact policies that reflect the views of the public in that state," said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz. So states pick sides. They bypass Congress and the president and choose futures that often fall far to one side of the national political divisions.

Twelve states and two cities in early April asked a federal appeals court to make the federal Environmental Protection Agency regulate greenhouse gases.

All but one of the states voted Democratic in both of the past two presidential elections, and the 12th -- New Mexico -- tipped Republican only in 2004. The two cities, Washington and Baltimore, were among the nation's most Democratic metro areas in 2004.

There is an explicit attempt to move national policy locally.

"What we did in Connecticut in passing civil union legislation was not only to confer full legal equality under law to same-sex couples but to send a powerful message to the rest of the country," said Connecticut state Sen. Andrew McDonald, sponsor of the state's new gay union law.

"Everybody understood that this was not just a Connecticut issue, that this was going to serve as a platform for many other discussions and debates around the country," McDonald said.

States are "sending signals," said Abramowitz, telling the world about the kinds of places they intend to be. And these signals in turn "might influence decisions about where people choose to live."

It's one of the vagaries of science that a jellyfish that produces green fluorescent protein could help stem cell research advance in Houston.

Michael Mancini holds up a panel of six photographs of a cell, all different colors.

"It's my tribute to Andy Warhol," Mancini says of the cells colored with the neon intensity of the artist's homage to Marilyn Monroe. Using the jellyfish protein, Mancini plans to begin a study of stem cells.

These days stem cell researchers keep one eye trained on government. In 2001, Bush announced a policy limiting embryonic stem cell research, which anti-abortion groups strongly oppose.

Suddenly, stem cells became one of those issues that defines a community's politics.

California voted last year to spend $3 billion on stem cell research. Meanwhile, in Republican Texas, Gov. Rick Perry told an anti-abortion rally early this year that embryonic stem cell research "requires the destruction of human life. . . . As long as I am the governor of this great state, I will oppose any taxpayer dollars being used and spent on research that ends a human life."

Legislation pending in the Texas House would ban research using embryonic stem cells. Missouri, another red state, has also considered restrictions. Meanwhile Democratic-leaning states -- Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts -- have all encouraged stem-cell initiatives.

The politics of stem cells is influencing where people live. Researchers flood California with résumés. At the Texas Capitol, legislators are warned that if they pass a stem cell proposal, scientists will leave the state.

Scientists such as Mancini. Thanks to incredible technology and shining jellyfish protein, he can now watch live cells change one at a time. He'd like to extend his research at the place he describes as "the center of the biological universe."

Mancini grew up near Eminem's Eight Mile Road outside Detroit.

He dropped out of school, started a family, opened a landscape company, went back to school and found his way to the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, one of 65,000 people -- all seemingly garbed in green scrubs, white lab coats, jeans and running shoes -- who work at the Texas Medical Center. The labs are filled with researchers of almost every race and nationality. Mancini is collaborating with Austin Cooney, a 44-year-old from Ireland. Cooney works with Thomas Zwaka from Germany.

The world inside the medical research center is racially diverse, collaborative, secular. "But it's not the world out there," Cooney says, waving vaguely in the direction of Austin and the rest of Texas.

Those two worlds are colliding. "This is why there's going to be an exodus," says Mancini. "If your state is going to make it miserable for you not just in the absence of support but in the presence of political disdain, people are going to leave."

Cooney says people may leave Texas. So does Ferid Murad, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and medical doctor at the Texas Medical Center.

"A few senior scientists are beginning to look elsewhere to continue their stem cell research since the climate is not favorable in Texas," Murad wrote in an e-mail. "I believe the stem cell research climate in Texas will tend to influence the decisions of younger people and trainees as they begin to seek their first positions in universities or industry. States such as California will certainly have a significant recruiting advantage."

Not everyone will leave, of course. Mancini is settled into Houston, and his photography work can go on without using embryonic stem cells.

But as states and cities increasingly differentiate themselves by passing laws, scrutinizing school textbooks for their treatment of issues such as evolution or sex education, and raising issues in legislatures, they send signals people hear clearly.

"How did stem cells become such an important referendum on what's valuable?" asked University of Pennsylvania historian Susan Lindee. "It's not like stem cell research does nothing, but it hasn't exactly had dramatic practical consequences. But it has this high profile. It's a referendum on identity -- who you are and what you stand for."

Those values aren't cast in iron. They shift with national politics. It was the political left that voted for stem cell research in California, but in 1977, the first community to place limits on genetic research was Cambridge, Mass. One of the bluest towns in the bluest state nearly outlawed genetic research in its jurisdiction 30 years ago.

"Originally, you evaluated recombinant DNA technology the same way you would evaluate a new kind of pesticide or a large dam," said Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in San Francisco. But since the religious right came out against embryonic stem cell research, it created "this reflexive response to that religious point of view. What's happened is fascinating."

Cooney asks for the specific number of legislation in the Texas House that would bar stem cell research. "This directly affects me," he says as he turns to his computer and Googles the Texas Legislature.

Brinkley testified against a proposal in the Texas Legislature that he said would "make it a felony to do those experiments and even for patients to use the therapy." The legislation that would ban stem cell research has stalled, but with Perry's staunch opposition to this work, the proposals, and more importantly the depth of political support behind them, have researchers here worried.

Polls and election results indicate that the debate over this research has as much to do with partisan politics as science. Staunchly Democratic California voted for the stem cell initiative last year more as a referendum on the president than on the worth of the scientific research, Darnovsky believes.

"The initiative was triggered by the Bush administration's restrictions on stem cell research, certainly," she said. "Democrats, liberals, progressives, leftists saw that vote as a way to poke a stick in the eye of the Bush administration."

Moveon.org championed the California stem cell initiative as part of its effort to defeat President Bush, Darnovsky said. Pro-abortion-rights groups lined up in favor of the research proposal in an election that mirrored the fractured politics of the nation. For the anti-Bush vote in California, "it was, 'If they're agin it, we're for it,' " Darnovsky said.

In early August of last year a statewide poll found California voters split on the stem cell initiative. But voters supporting John Kerry backed the initiative 2-to-1. Bush voters opposed stem cells by the same margin.

What's happened is that the fights over culture and morality that split the nation in the past several presidential elections have become routine parts of state and local politics.

Twenty years ago, said Rosenthal, "legislatures could pretty well keep the most contentious issues off the agenda because they were no-win issues. Everyone would have been bloodied."

Legislatures once could control these issues, keep them bottled up in committees and off the front pages.

"Now they can't," Rosenthal said. "These issues come up. One side wants 'em. The other wants to kill 'em. And they can't push them aside. So they do battle, and the majority side wins."

In Congress, Democrats have grown more liberal over the past two decades. Republicans have grown more conservative. Congressional districts have grown more partisan. Only a handful of congressional districts have a competitive mix of Republicans and Democrats, reports Vanderbilt University political scientist Bruce Oppenheimer.

"And it's even more severe at the state level. State legislative districts are even more lopsided," Oppenheimer said.

There may be less formal participation in politics these days, Rosenthal said. People vote less often. But there are more people interested in particular issues, and their interest is intense.

"Thirty or 40 years ago, more people voted, but they didn't really do anything or care or give money," Rosenthal said. "Now, fewer people vote, but I imagine 35 or 40 percent of the population gets engaged on one issue or another. There's passion out there."

Legislators now represent districts that are less moderate. Interest groups are stronger, and legislators are more dependent on these groups to win primaries. "And that leads to polarized institutions," Oppenheimer said.

Kansas held hearings this spring on replacing or removing the teaching of evolution from the state's classroom.

University of Kansas paleontologist Leonard Krishtalka told the Washington Post that the argument could deter faculty members and students from coming to Kansas.

"There is a great deal of hesitancy," Krishtalka said to the newspaper. "They don't see this as a nurturing academic environment for themselves or their kids."

John Higley, chairman of the government department at the University of Texas, said the conservative policies of state government can deter some potential faculty members from moving to Austin, particularly those from the Northeast.

"Texas can be one of the variables that goes against us," Higley said.

Although several measures were filed this session addressing various aspects of stem cell research, the one considered by the Senate Health and Human Services Committee last week, Senate Bill 943, was not voted out, and there's little time for it to pass. But scientists are as much concerned with the social atmosphere in which they live and work as the legal strictures that define their work.

Testifying Thursday, former Austin Mayor Kirk Watson told the Senate the potential of a ban on stem cell research made Texas appear "backward" and would deter researchers in other disciplines from coming to the state. Indeed, a recent survey of scientists found that researchers felt more constrained by local morality than local laws.

"Our results suggest that informal limitations (on scientists) are more prevalent and pervasive than formal constraints," the authors of the study, "Forbidden Knowledge," wrote this year in Science Magazine.

"There's a ripple effect," Mancini said. "If science is seen as evil, with monsters, it means we'll have to go elsewhere."