Opinion

Stem cells offer hope for cures

Many regard regenerative medicine as the string theory of life sciences — elegant, global and controversial. Born in 1998, on the hands of Dr. James Thomson, the now world-renowned University of Wisconsin researcher, the science of stem cells already has scientists and economists gushing over its seemingly endless applications. In fact, if proven clinically useful, regenerative medicine may well be the fourth of the scientific paradigms that have revolutionized the way people reason, after those of Copernicus, Lavoisier and Darwin.

Imagine a world where, instead of ingesting pills when your body needs help, you can go to the local stem cell bank for an injection of fresh, customized, pluripotent cells. Got cancer? Try a cocktail of bone marrow cells, capable of giving birth to an army of cytotoxic cells highly trained to eradicate your tumor. Injured your spine? An injection of neural stem cells will have you walking again in no time. This is a desirable alternative to organ transplants, as the risk of rejection is greatly reduced. The scientific advances that can be made using stem cells, however, are not limited to these clinical settings. Researchers would also like to grow embryonic stem cells with particular deleterious genes, like those of cystic fibrosis, to monitor the onset of the disease at the embryonic stage.

The quest for the promised cell, however, has clashed with a wall of ethical, religious and political conundrums. Fearing a violation of the moral status of embryos, the Bush administration has imposed a moratorium on federal funding for cell lines derived after August 9, 2001. Unfortunately, the only stem-cell lines eligible for federal funding have proved to be unfit for human trials because of contamination.

The Bush administration has been promoting adult stem cells as an alternative to embryonic stem cells. These partially specialized stem cells are found in some parts of the adult body, where they help reconstitute damaged tissue throughout life. While these cells have already given promising clinical results, their potential is extremely limited compared to embryonic stem cells. “Adult stem cells do not answer questions about the earliest events in human development, they cannot be cultured to sustain and they are mortal. And some adult tissues such as heart tissue have shown a lack of effective stem cells,” Thomson said.

Currently, UW seems to be a leader in stem cell research within the U.S.: not only do we possess the most advanced technology and the most prominent researchers, but we also distribute cell lines to researchers all over the country, thus contributing to the advance of the research in other states as well.

Due to the limited federal funding, however, U.S. researchers are still at a relatively primitive stage compared to other countries as they struggle to answer basic questions: How are these cells cultured? How are they prompted to differentiate into a desired cell type? Many scientists feel they should already be at more advanced stages, but rapid progress has been impeded by the scarcity and irregularity of philanthropic and state funding. As for private biotech companies, they mostly avoid investing in such a volatile field.

What is the ethical problem with embryonic stem-cell research? The research involves destruction of five-day-old pre-embryos. Then the question really is: is this five-day-old zygote a person? In the Catholic tradition, the answer is yes. Most other religions disagree to some degree. Islam and Judaism both strongly encourage such research, with the rationale that it holds great promise to improve human health.

From a pragmatic point of view, the monumental public benefit that can be achieved through this research far outweighs the small number of zygotes that are needed. This is nearly the same reasoning that is used when deciding whether to abort a fetus to save an endangered pregnant woman or to spare a rape victim. Given that this research promises to provide cures for life-threatening or severely debilitating diseases, shouldn’t it be acceptable, or even encouraged, to sacrifice a number of zygotes to harvest the needed cell lines? Moreover, more generous funding may help researchers discover new sources of embryonic stem cells, which would not involve destruction of a zygote.

In its September 1999 report entitled “Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research”, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission recommended that federal funding be provided to conduct “research involving the derivation and use of human ES cells from embryos remaining after infertility treatments”. The fact that President Bush has banned federal funding on such research anyway has had researchers grumbling. The Boston Globe even claimed that the Council on Bioethics was a mere “afterthought that served primarily to give an ideologically rigid president the veneer of open-mindedness.”

Many ethicists fear that the federal government’s stance on stem-cell research has made ethical violations more probable and harder to detect: instead of having a unified, government-monitored agency to which all researchers have to answer, like the British stem-cell bank, “embryonic stem-cell research in the US has become fragmented”, said Jonah Lehrer from Technology Review. Even the new California Institute of Regenerative Medicine “will be subject to almost no governmental or ethical oversight.”

Despite the lack of federal funding, embryonic stem-cell research in the US is likely to continue, even if at a slower rate. It seems obvious that the only way to prevent privately funded science from going out of control is for the federal government to assume its natural role of principal funding source for this research.

Ibrahim Khansa (izkhansa@wisc.edu) is a sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering