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Coalition Proposes Amendment to Protect Missouri Stem Cell Research

Posted on: Wednesday, 12 October 2005, 00:00 CDT

By The Kansas City Star, Mo.

Oct. 12--Research scientists and patient advocates launched a campaign Tuesday to adopt a constitutional amendment to protect stem cell research in Missouri and ban attempts to clone a baby.

The Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures -- which includes the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, Washington University in St. Louis, and groups seeking cures for diabetes, Parkinson's disease and spinal injuries -- said it would conduct a petition drive to place the issue on the November 2006 ballot.

The group must gather about 150,000 signatures in six of Missouri's nine congressional districts.

The move is sure to ratchet up a controversy over Missouri's attempts to become a center for life science research amid one of the strongest right-to-life lobbies in the nation.

Supporters said the measure would allow scientists to push the bounds of knowledge while ensuring that the research is done in an ethical way.

"This measure strikes a balance," said Donn Rubin, a St. Louis lawyer who is chairman of the coalition. "It allows Missourians to be treated equally with people in other states and to avail themselves of treatments that may be developed. But it also adopts standards that we believe Missourians feel strongly about."

Opponents of research on early stem cells promised a spirited fight against what they see as a process that creates life only to destroy it.

Larry Weber, executive director of the Missouri Catholic Conference, said his organization would oppose the initiative with all the resources available.

"Many people are blinded by the ends that the research hopes to produce and are willing to go to any means to reach those ends," Weber said. "...This is an attack on human life. We will point out the immorality of what's being proposed."

The initiative drive is a direct response to state legislation introduced early this year that would have banned a laboratory technique to grow early stem cells called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or therapeutic cloning. The proposed ban died on the Senate floor.

But the prospect of having to fight such legislation every year and the possibility that such a ban could become law led advocates of early stem cell research to take their case directly to the public.

In somatic cell nuclear transfer, a researcher takes a human egg cell and removes its nucleus. It is replaced with the nucleus from an ordinary body cell from a patient. The egg cell then reprograms the nucleus to act like the nucleus in an egg cell newly fertilized by a sperm cell. It begins to divide and in about five days grows into a ball of cells with stem cells inside.

Those stem cells have the ability to grow into every type of human cell, from skin and muscle to bone and nerve tissue. Scientists hope to learn how to direct the stem cells to develop into, for example, pancreatic cells to treat diabetes or brain cells to treat Alzheimer's disease.

The process, Rubin said, simply uses a human egg cell to grow replacement cells for a patient who faces a life-threatening illness.

But opponents argue that the moment the cell begins to divide, the microscopic ball of cells is a human being that deserves the protection of the law. When scientists remove the stem cells, they kill a person, opponents say.

The initiative would amend the Missouri Constitution to ban using nuclear transfer to try to create a cloned child. Implanting cloned cells into a woman's uterus or attempting to implant cloned cells would be a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The proposed amendment would also prohibit scientists from using human eggs fertilized by sperm cells solely for growing human stem cells.

Rubin said the restriction on growing stem cells through fertilization was a concession to people who expressed reservations about the destruction of human cells created through sexual reproduction.

"We wanted a measure that the vast majority of Missourians could support," Rubin said.

However, stem cells could be harvested from fertilized eggs left over from fertility treatments that otherwise would be discarded.

The amendment would permit any stem cell research allowed by federal law to be conducted in Missouri. But it would limit research on early stem cells to scientists who have received approval from an oversight board certifying that the research complies with ethical standards and federal law. The amendment would prohibit extracting stem cells more than 14 days after cellular division begins.

Republican Sen. Matt Bartle of Lee's Summit, a leading opponent of nuclear transfer technology, said a ban on implantation of a cloned embryo is not a ban on human cloning.

"Location isn't what makes it a human being," Bartle said. "These researchers want to develop embryos and fetuses and do whatever they want to them as long as they are outside the womb."

Bartle, who said he intends to introduce legislation again next year to ban all cloning techniques, provided a glimpse of a possible campaign issue. He said tying Missouri's constitution to federal law would make Missourians subject to the whims of the federal judiciary.

"This petition asks Missourians to peg Missouri constitutional law to what some federal judge in San Francisco or New York says it is," Bartle said. "I'm stunned that they would include such a wide-open and obvious flaw."

The initiative is already drawing interest from Kansas City business leaders and people on both sides of the national skirmish over early stem cell research.

Business leaders say uncertainty stemming from the perennial legislative challenges to early stem cell research has hindered efforts to recruit scientists and biotechnology companies to the area.

William B. Neaves, president of the Stowers Institute, said approval of the constitutional amendment would reassure Stowers enough to proceed with building a second $300 million major research facility in Kansas City.

Stowers hired architects in January 2004 to begin work on the facility, but pulled back as Missouri lawmakers debated whether to criminalize therapeutic cloning, Neaves said.

Stowers mounted an intensive campaign over the past couple of years to attract scientists from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute who specialize in somatic cell nuclear transfer, Neaves said. The threat of legislation to ban such research undermined those efforts, he said.

Robert J. Marcusse, president of the Kansas City Area Development Council, said other life science organizations also had suffered.

"There is a lot of uncertainty right now about the future of research in Missouri," Marcusse said. "This initiative will have the ability to clear up that uncertainty. There is a lot of potential investment, a lot of potential jobs and a lot of potential cures for disease that are waiting in the wings to be actualized in Missouri."

Daniel P. Perry, president for the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, a Washington, D.C., group that supports wide-ranging stem cell research, said recent legislative proposals in Missouri had been notable because of their attempts to criminalize stem cell research procedures.

Biotechnology has become a hotly pursued industry because a region's success in the field is not dependent on whether it has traditional natural resources such as oil, good soil, tall forests or clean water, Perry said.

"What it takes is brains," Perry said. "The communities that have seized the promise of biotechnology tend to be in clusters where there already are academic institutions and medical research institutions like the Stowers Institute that can attract the best and the brightest."

While the constitutional amendment would apply only in Missouri, the interest clearly will ripple beyond the state's borders.

"You will get a lot of groups, a lot of individuals from out of state chiming in on this," said David Prentice, a former university professor who specializes in stem cell research issues for the Family Research Council in Washington. The council opposes the destruction of any human embryos for research.

Prentice said the Family Research Council would fight the initiative. He said the group would emphasize that research on adult stem cells, which are produced by the body to repair damaged or worn-out tissue, also holds the promise of curing disease without involving the destruction of human life.

By Kit Wagar and Jason Gertzen

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Kansas City Star, Mo.

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Source: The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Missouri)

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