Stem Cell Debate Impacts Stanford
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Bunch of undifferentiated cells, or human being? The controversy of stem cell research has never died, but it came swinging back into the picture this July when President Bush exercised his veto power for the first time, banning federal funding to any stem cell research not in existence before 2001. President Bush stated in his letter to the House of Representatives, “if this bill were to become law, American taxpayers for the first time in our history would be compelled to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos.” The veto took no one by surprise, although Governor Schwarzenegger’s $150 million loan to rekindle stalled research in California the following day somewhat did.
Traditionally, controversy has surrounded embryonic stem cell research because it often involves the destruction of an embryo to obtain pluripotent stem cells—a process many view as de facto homicide, claiming that life begins at conception. Ramesh Ponnuru, a Hoover Media Fellow and Senior Editor of the National Review said, “I mean you don’t have the relationship with that cell that you have with your spouse or your father or so on and so forth. But you can see that that is a living member of the human species. It is an organism that is capable of directing its development according to its genetic template through the embryonic, fetal, newborn, adolescent, et cetera, stages of human life under the right circumstances.”
In addition, many view the process as dangerous because it seems to be a “slippery slope” on the way to reproductive cloning—a procedure that was banned in 2004 after experiments such as Dolly the sheep.
Stem cells can, however, come from many different sources. Researchers have found adult multipotent stem cells that can come from bone marrow or even adipose tissue, and many are found in the blood of the umbilical cord that can cure many children’s diseases. As Judie Vivian, CEO of Promedica International CME said, “adult stem cells can cure many patients, including paraplegics and diabetics.”
She has worked with researcher and cardiac surgeon Federico Bennetti, who has used adult stem cells in procedures to cure several patients. This seems to pose a noteworthy solution since adult stem cells can be taken directly from the patient, so there is no risk of contamination and no bioethical controversy. Mike Fumento from National Review writes, “By the 1980s, adult stem cells were literally curing a variety of cancers and other diseases; embryonic stem cells have never been tested on a human. Adult stem cells now treat about 80 different diseases; again embryonic stem cells have treated no one. Adult stem cells obviously aren’t rejected when taken from a patient’s own body, though they may be from an unmatched donor; Embryonic stem cells have surface proteins that often cause rejection. Implanted embryonic stem cells also have a nasty tendency to multiply uncontrollably, a process called ‘cancer.’”
Unfortunately, adult stem cells are only multipotent, meaning that they can only produce cells of a closely related family, which limits the possibilities of cures that these cells can be used for. The Kass Council on Bioethics in 2004 went as far as to state that research on embryos after ten to fourteen days should be prohibited, in effect forcing reliance on fresh embryonic stem cells and rejection of adult ones.
In an interview for “Uncommon Knowledge,” Stanford Prof. Irving Weissman, a proponent of stem cell research, claimed “You can’t make a pluripotent stem cell line after 5-8 days because the very next step starts the process of those cells differentiating and then they can’t be made.” This threshold of adult stem cells has led to the current focus on embryonic stem cell research.
The Bush administration had allowed research on lines existing before 2001, but if those were the last hopes of researchers, the numbers originally touted at 78 have been narrowed down to 19, although all of these lines are corrupted because they were grown in culture dishes coated with mouse cells. Many prominent figures, both from the right and the left, have been urging President Bush to allow America to move forward on this issue. Governor Schwarzenegger wrote to President Bush, “Mr. President, I urge you not to make the first veto of your presidency one that turns America backwards on the path of scientific progress and limits the promise of medical miracles for generations to come.” Many Stanford Nobel Laureates, including Hoover fellow Milton Friedman, signed a letter to President Bush on February 21, 2001 urging him not to ban federal funding to pluripotent stem cell research.
Many others feel that the ban on stem cell research is doing a disservice to this country as researchers migrate to other countries such as the United Kingdom, South Korea, Singapore, Argentina, and Ecuador, to name a few. “The government is making ideological decisions to ban or not fund the kinds of research that certainly will affect the lives of people; to sit by and not do anything is against the medical oath that I took,” says Prof. Weissman, who is also the director of Stanford’s Stem Cell Institute, in an article for Stanford’s School of Medicine.
Stanford’s Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine was established in December 2002—one of the first institutions of its kind in the nation. However, despite the $12 million received in 2002 as start-up money from a private donor, the directors of the Institute do not want to rely on private money. Because of its location in California, Stanford is able to profit from Proposition 71, approved by voters in 2004, which devotes $3 billion over ten years to stem cell research, including cloning projects solely for research purposes. The bill also established the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). Stanford’s School of Medicine received a $3.7 million grant from the CIRM to be distributed over three years to finance sixteen researchers at Stanford. It was one of sixteen grants from CIRM to further stem cell research. It seems that, regardless of the federal stance, investigation into the possibilities of stem cells will continue in California and on the Stanford campus.
It is true that there are millions of Americans that could potentially benefit from the cures that stem cell research promises. It is difficult to watch family members struggle with Parkinson’s disease, cancer, and diabetes. But it is also true that there are also people who will not tolerate the destruction of life to save life. For the moment, it seems that the most productive thing one can do is to search for other alternatives to embryonic stem cell research. Even now, there are new methods being discovered every day; Advanced Cell Technology, an Alameda biotech company, announced on August 23 that it had discovered a new way to create stem cell lines from a single cell extracted from an embryo. So we wait, but in the meantime, people must not forget that Bush is not the only President to legislate against stem cell research—in 1995, President Bill Clinton signed the Dickey Amendment which made it illegal for Federal money to be used for research where stem cells are derived from the destruction of the embryo. Some things never seem to change.
