Stem cell debate resurfaces after lingering in background
Restrictions on funding, research gain prominence
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The issue of stem cell research, while not at the forefront of this year's presidential campaign, has surfaced in political advertisements and again during Wednesday's presidential debate - casting a potentially revolutionary field of scientific research into the political spotlight once again.
Seven years ago, President Bush altered the future of stem cell research when he banned federal funding for embryonic stem cell lines created after Aug. 9, 2001. In select places, including Harvard University, donors or voters funded continued research on their own.
Now, scientists say, the field needs national support to take embryonic stem cell research from its promising early stages to the next level - despite development of a different type of stem-like cell - known as iPS cells - that is not from human embryos, and thus not as controversial.
"The idea that a field of science would be subjected to a kind of election politics . . . doesn't really further the normal trajectory of science," said Kevin Casey, associate vice president in the Office of Government and Community Affairs at Harvard University.
Or, as Kevin Eggan, a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, puts it: "I still feel we're balanced right on a razor's edge. . . . The government really needs to step up."
In 2004, John McCain joined 57 other mostly Democratic senators in signing a letter to President Bush requesting that restrictions on funding for embryonic work be relaxed. Both McCain and Barack Obama voted in 2006 and 2007 for a bill to expand funding for embryonic stem cell research.
Obama's campaign has explicitly said that, if elected, Obama will overturn the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said the GOP nominee supports overturning the ban, too, even though some have questioned whether his position has shifted with the choice of running mate Sarah Palin, who opposes the research. McCain's support for funding embryonic stem cell research is also at odds with the GOP platform.
Rogers said this week that McCain's position has not changed, and that as president McCain would "absolutely" support embryonic stem cell research. "He bucked his party and [the Bush] administration in supporting stem cell research, including embryonic stem cell research," Rogers said, and will continue to do so.
But in a response to Science Debate 2008, an initiative to learn candidates' position backed by scientific organizations, McCain also said "recent scientific breakthroughs raise the hope that one day this debate will be rendered academic."
The Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, education director for the National Catholic
The campaign comes in the midst of a remarkable time for stem cell research, in which scientist have made breakthroughs in reprogramming adult cells to create embryonic-like stem cells capable of developing into any tissue in the human body.
These reprogrammed iPS cells - induced pluripotent stem cells - do not involve human embryos. They have been touted by Bush and others that research involving embryos is no longer needed.
Still, scientists at leading institutions insist that work on embryonic stem cells is necessary.
Dr. Kenneth Chien, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cardiovascular Research Center, is continuing to work on both types of cells. "Particularly in my field," where patients would need mature heart muscle cells capable of long-term work, "I'm not convinced yet" of iPS cells' equivalent value, Chien said.
Scientists also point out that the most notable research to date on iPS cells has come from labs that also research human embryonic stem cells. "Those are the places where the iPS breakthroughs happen," Eggan said.
Restricted funding policies have discouraged young researchers who depend on federal grants from entering the field, say scientists, and limited research on embryonic stem cells to scattered places - such as Massachusetts, California, and Wisconsin - that mustered enough financial support to fund it.
But in Massachusetts, the funding challenge prompted an unprecedented collaboration between scientists, donors, hospitals, and Harvard University. Embryonic stem cell research is also supported by the state's $1 billion investment in biotechnology.
"In one sense . . . the government essentially laid down a challenge to investigators by saying you can't do this unless you find some [funding] alternative. It bent the path of research, and galvanized people who didn't have access to federal money," said Dr. Mahendra Rao, a vice president at
Still, if the ban had never been put in place, said Dr. George Q. Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, "there's no telling how much further along we would be in the attempt to turn cells into medicine."
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.
