Dodging Bullet on Stem-Cell Ethics

By Editorial

Perhaps science and ethics can coexist.

Three research teams recently reported being able to take skin cells from adult mice and transform them into an embryonic state.

Embryonic stem cell research has been the focus of a political tug-of-war between those who say life-saving research must go forward and those, including President Bush, who oppose destroying human embryos for scientific purposes on ethical grounds.

If the research – by scientists at Kyoto University in Japan, Whitehead Institute in Massachusetts, Harvard and UCLA – holds up and can be duplicated with human cells, the ethical debate is over.

The new technique – reprogramming adult stem cells into an embryonic state – is easier than the controversial transfer of an adult cell’s nucleus into an embryonic cell. And it does not destroy embryos, meaning it would be an easier sell to the American people.

The studies, published last week, seemed to please just about everyone.

“It would change the way we see things quite dramatically,” Alan Trounson, of Monash University in Victoria, Australia, told the journal Nature, which published two of the studies.

Trounson, who wasn’t involved in the studies, said he plans to start using the technique “tomorrow.”

“I can think of a dozen experiments right now – and they’re all good ones,” he said.

And Irving Weissman, a leading stem-cell biologist at Stanford University, had this to say to The New York Times: “From the point of view of moving biomedicine and regenerative medicine faster, this is about as big a deal as you could imagine.”

On the side of ethical caution, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was equally impressed.

The new technique “raises no serious moral problem, because it creates embryonic stem cells without creating, harming or destroying human lives at any stage,” the bishops’ spokesman Richard Doerflinger said.

It’s too bad the studies didn’t come a little sooner.

As it was, their appearance in Nature and Cell Stem Cell, another medical journal, came the same day the House voted to loosen restrictions on federal funding of stem-cell research.

The House’s 247-176 vote last Thursday was 35 votes short of the 282 needed to override a veto. The Senate’s 63-34 vote in April was four votes short.

Democrats clearly had hoped to make stem-cell research an issue in 2008 – appealing to those who hope stem-cell research can cure Parkinson’s, diabetes and other debilitating diseases.

Now everyone but the most ardent partisan can root for progress on this new procedure. It’s easier. It involves only the recipient’s cells. And it does not tread near an ethical line many do not want science to approach: The prospect of creating human embryos only to destroy them for medical purposes.

There are hurdles to be overcome, of course.

Twenty percent of the mice in one study developed cancer. The transfer of this approach from mice to humans might not be easy. And, as with stem-cell research overall, it might not result in any cures, at all.

But this medical advance certainly clears the way for all people of good will to work hand-in-hand in a fight all want to win.

In an otherwise contentious world, those caught up in the stem- cell debate can appreciate a medical advance that is based both on good science and sound ethics.

(c) 2007 Intelligencer Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.