Kerry on Radio Pushes Stem Cell Research

WASHINGTON – John Kerry challenged the Bush administration Saturday to relax restrictions on stem cell research to pursue the potential of finding cures for conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

Ethical questions raised by the use of human embryos can be resolved through “good will and good sense,” he said.

Kerry, the Democrats’ presumed candidate to face President Bush in November, cited Nancy Reagan’s efforts to help find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, which debilitated her husband, former President Reagan, for at least a decade before his death last weekend.

“She told the world that Alzheimer’s had taken her own husband to a distant place, and then she stood up to help find a breakthrough that someday will spare other husbands, wives, children and parents from the same kind of heartache,” Kerry said in the Democrats’ weekly radio address.

He spoke after an emotionally stirring week during which the nation honored and buried former the former president.

“Stem cells have the power to slow the loss of a grandmother’s memory, calm the hand of an uncle with Parkinson’s, save a child from a lifetime of daily insulin shots or permanently lift a best friend from his wheelchair,” the Massachusetts senator said.

Stem cells from human embryos can form all types of cells, and scientists contend they could be used one day to replace cells damaged from such conditions as diabetes, spinal cord injury or Parkinson’s disease.

President Bush signed an executive order in August 2001 that limited federal help to financing stem cell research on 78 embryonic stem cell lines then in existence. Stem cells typically are taken from days-old human embryos, then grown in a laboratory into lines or colonies. Because the embryos are destroyed when cells are extracted, the process is opposed by some conservatives who link it to abortion.

Shortly before Reagan’s death, Kerry and 57 other senators asked Bush to relax the restrictions, and Mrs. Reagan has long argued that using stem cells from embryos could lead to cures for such diseases as Alzheimer’s.

Since she spoke out at a research fund-raiser in May for renewed government commitment to stem cell research, experts have said finding a cure to Alzheimer’s, because of how it attacks the brain, would pose a far more daunting challenge than other conditions through the stem cells approach.

On Saturday, Kerry urged the lifting of barriers that block science and medical exploration, so that “researchers can find the cures that are there, if only they are allowed to look.”

Ethical issues exist, he said without elaborating, “but people of good will and good sense can resolve them.”

Kerry said financing of stem cell research must be a priority in universities and the medical community, as well as federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

“If we pursue the limitless potential of our science, and trust that we can use it wisely, we will save millions of lives and earn the gratitude of future generations,” he said.