Clear all paths on stem cells
RESEARCH ON human stem cells should proceed along as many avenues as possible to seek cures for disease. This week, scientists in Kyoto, Boston, Cambridge, and Los Angeles announced the development of a way to produce stem cells in mice that might eventually lead to treatment using a patient's own cells. The scientists are to be commended for their breakthrough.
Scientists working with stem cells do not know which approach, if any, will produce effective treatments for disease. For a decade they have tried to determine whether a person's own cells could be coaxed into regressing to the primitive, embryonic stage. They announced this week that they have made mice cells regress, and now they must try the process with humans.
Two of the teams making the announcement were from the Boston area, a group led by Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge and another by Konrad Hochedlinger of Massachusetts General Hospital . The work is gratifying confirmation that the Boston area is a center for stem cell research, which depends on cooperation and competition across geographic boundaries.
The discovery also complicates the political debate over stem cell research, because it offers, in theory, a path around the controversy over using human embryos, a promising source of therapeutic stem cells. This latest advance should not be an excuse to maintain the ban on federal support for embryonic stem cell research.
Just after the House voted to lift the ban yesterday, President Bush affirmed his intention to use his veto. "American taxpayers would for the first time in our history be compelled to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos," he said in a statement. In explaining his threatened veto, he talks about "crossing a moral line."
The reality is far more complex than Bush lets on. Medical research a generation ago resulted in fertility treatments that allow children to be born who would never otherwise have lived. This process, however, can produce excess embryos -- each a clump of several hundred cells -- that will be destroyed if not used for medical research.
Where is the morality in denying scientists the funds for basic research that might eventually help people with hitherto incurable diseases?
The 247-176 House vote, and the 63-34 Senate tally in April, are insufficient to override a presidential veto. This week's breakthrough is encouraging, to be sure. But scientists will have to await a new administration to get federal resources for an all-out campaign to deploy stem cells in the pursuit of human well-being.
