On September 29, the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space held a hearing to examine the ethics and scientific advances of human embryonic stem cell research. The panel heard testimony concerning research on adult stem cells on July 14 (see The Source, 7/16/04).
Arguing that the “science is being distorted” in the debate over stem cell research, Chair Sam Brownback (R-KS) stated, “A human embryo is, biologically speaking, a young human life. It is not a scientific statement to assert that it is not a life or that it is a potential life. In fact, to assert that a human embryo is not a human life is a belief unsupported by the facts. To assert that a human embryo is not a human life is inaccurate.”
Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR) expressed his concern that the Bush administration’s policy on stem cell research has resulted in a limited number of stem cell lines available for federal research: “What troubles me is, as a result of these federal restrictions, in terms of funding in particular, we are going to end up with what amounts to a crazy quilt of rules and certainly ethical kind of standards at a minimum. We’ll see California take one approach. New Jersey will perhaps take another approach. We’ll have a set of rules at the federal level. What the scientists have been telling us, what the NIH [National Institutes of Health] scientists who have been writing in on this have said, is that it’s important that there be one ethical standard.”
Dr. Laurie Zoloth, director of bioethics at the Center for Genetic Medicine at Northwestern University, said that embryonic stem cells “represent a therapeutic intervention that, unlike heart transplants, could be universally available, replicable and scaleable,” adding, “Unlike adult stem cells, which would have to be created each time for each particular user, the premise of application is the wide use…Stem cell research is aimed at a wider community of vulnerable patients, and at no one particular category, age, ethnicity, or class. The sort of injury and diseases that stem cells are indicated for are not boutique, or rare cell death and cell growth is at the core of nearly all disorders. Research into these essential causes would be precisely the sort of research we ought to insist on. Further, understanding how embryonic cells are programmed and reprogrammed might allow us to understand how to de-program cells, allowing adult cells to regenerate, teaching the body to heal itself.”
Urging Congress to “compromise” its “faith policies” as it has in the past, Dr. Zoloth explained, “We do not agree on prenatal diagnosis, yet this is widely done, as is IVF [in vitro fertilization] even if it means embryos are destroyed to get one successful pregnancy. We do not agree, but we publicly fund and publicly go forward with research about these policies and we allow each family and physician to make private choices. We do this by a combination of courage and compromise you shape our policy in different ways: Republicans in one way, Democrats in another, but both allow for research to go forward with limits, based in time, or geography. Now it is time to revisit these limits.”
Deputy Director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Richard Doerflinger explained that Catholic moral teaching states that “every human life, from the first moment of existence until natural death, deserves our respect and protection,” adding, “The principle…is also already reflected in numerous areas of federal law. At every stage of development, the unborn child in the womb is protected by federal homicide laws as a separate victim when there is a violent attack upon his or her mother. That same child is recognized in federal health regulations as an eligible patient deserving prenatal care. And of course, for the last eight years that same embryo has been protected, in much the same ways as other subjects, from being harmed or killed in federally funded research.” Responding to arguments that excess embryos in fertility clinics should be made available for research, he stated, “When these clinics produce more embryos in a given cycle than parents need for their immediate reproductive goals, they do indeed freeze the ‘excess’ embryos and ask the parents what should be done with them after a given time. Most clinics offer the options of continuing to preserve the embryos, using them for further reproductive efforts by the couple, donating them to another couple for reproduction, discarding them, or donating them for research. But these are mutually exclusive options. For example, it would violate the professional code of the fertility industry to take embryos ‘to be discarded’ and use them for research instead. And among embryos donated for research, no researcher or government official can tell which embryos ‘would have been discarded’ if this option had not have been offered.”
Mr. Doerflinger concluded, “In short, no new breakthroughs have shown that embryonic stem cells are ready or almost ready for clinical use. Use of new cell lines from frozen embryos has not been shown to be necessary for current basic research, and would still be completely inadequate for any large-scale clinical research suggesting that proposals for expanding the current embryonic stem cell policy are themselves only a transitional step toward mass-producing embryos (by cloning or other means) solely for harmful experimentation. The for-profit biotechnology industry has known this for years, and has begun paving the legislative road toward large-scale human cloning and ‘fetus farming’ in case these prove necessary for technical progress in this field.”
Testifying on behalf of the American Society for Cell Biology, Dr. George Daley explained that he performs research on both embryonic and adult stem cells. He rejected claims that adult stem cell research should “trump” embryonic stem cell research, stating that the opinion is “at the fringe and not the forefront of scientific thinking. While the differentiation spectrum of adult stem cells is restricted, it is an incontrovertible fact that embryonic stem cells have the ability to form all cells in the body. Such is the natural endowment of the stem cells of the early embryo, and the very reason they inspire such fascination among stem cell biologists. Scientists are seeking to discover the natural mechanisms that drive formation of specific cells and tissues, so that these principles can be faithfully reproduced with embryonic stem cells in the Petri dish. I would argue that coaxing embryonic stem cells to do what comes naturally to them is more likely to prove successful in the near term than reengineering adult stem cells towards unnatural ends. The American Society of Cell Biology and every other major scientific society support the study of both adult and embryonic stem cells.”
Macropore Biosurgery President Marc Hedrick said that his company views adipose tissue, the storage site for fat in the form of triglycerides, as “a low cost, high volume alternative to other stem cell sources. This technology enables us to rethink how patients may be treated using their own stem cells. This is an important breakthrough for adult stem cell therapies. From adipose, we can obtain at least two of the key types of adult stem cells that can potentially treat many diseases such as: heart disease, stroke, injured bones and joints, degenerative spinal diseases, and vascular disease.” In conclusion, he stated, “Some think that adult stem cells are too rare, don’t multiply well enough, or are too limited in their potency to ever be useful. But all of these misconceptions are just that, they are not factually correct. The truth is that both bone marrow and adipose tissue are plentiful and clinically promising sources of adult stem cells. They grow well and have the ability to make and repair tissue types throughout the body. We often make the mistake of referring to the promise of stem cells as if it’s a future event. In fact, this ‘promise’ has become a reality. The list of successful therapies using adult stem cells grows each year, as does the list of patients helped. While there is still a lot of work to be done, I would humbly remind you that, in many cases, the promise is already being realized.”
