Petri Dish Politics - biomedical revolution

Reason, Dec, 1999 by Ronald Bailey

Stem cells removed from the blastocyst are grown in a culture on a layer of feeder cells that provide the necessary environment to keep them alive and in an undifferentiated state. Researchers are still trying to learn exactly what molecular signals will cause stem cells to develop into specific tissues. Those signals hold the key to using stem cells to develop replacement tissues which would be part of a universal tissue repair kit.

Once those signals are understood, using stem cells will depend, at least in the near future, on technology originally developed in cloning research. As we know from Dolly the lamb, factors in egg cytoplasm can reset an adult cell nucleus, giving it the ability to grow into an embryo as a source for stem cells. Using cloning technology, doctors might one day take the nucleus of one of your skin cells, put it in a human egg from which the nucleus has been removed, and allow that cell to divide to the blastocyst stage. They would then take out the stem cells from its inner cell mass and dope them with the appropriate hormones and proteins to turn the stem cells into, say, heart tissue, which could then be used to repair your ailing heart. Using your own cells in this way would mean that your immune system wouldn't reject the newly engrafted tissues, since the tissues would be a perfect match.

This research obviously promises to significantly advance human health and longevity. And just as obviously, stem cell research is completely entangled with the politics of abortion. It involves the use of embryonic tissues and, eventually, the creation of fertilized eggs that abortion opponents consider full-fledged human beings. To abortion opponents, a blastocyst used to duplicate your heart tissue isn't an extension of your tissue. It's another human being - the equivalent of your identical twin. As Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, told the Los Angeles Times about research on embryonic cells, "It doesn't matter if it's done in the womb or a petri dish, it's still killing."

After Geron scientists announced in November 1998 that they'd isolated human embryonic stem cells from donated embryos and aborted fetuses, President Clinton asked the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to look into any ethical issues associated with stem cells. In January, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ruled that the National Institutes of Health could fund research using already derived embryonic stem cells. This ruling provoked 70 anti-abortion House members, including Majority Leader Richard Armey (R-Tex.), Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), and Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) to sign a letter of protest to the president, declaring that the HHS ruling violated the congressional ban on funding research on human embryos. The congressional ban, adopted in 1996, outlaws the use of federal funds for the creation of human embryos for research in which they are "destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death."