Stem Cell Technology Advances Vindicate President Bush

Two important recent studies on stem cells have been announced: one says that it looks possible to produce all types of embryonic cells from ambiotic fluid without harm to mother or fetus; the other study indicates that stem cells can be produced from embryos without killing the embryos. If either or both of these developments prove valid, federal funding can be limited to these methodologies without the current moral and ethical objections to the killing of embryos. Of course, there still will remain the problem that embryonic cells have not yet produced much in the way of results, and some caution must be applied to the commitment of tax dollars to support this research area.

As usual, the mainstream press described the President’s position as neaderthalish, and promoted the absurd comments made by the actor, Michael J. Fox, who suffers terribly from Parkinson’s disease, in order, in Missouri, to defeat the Republican candidate for the senate in November. It’s interesting to note that the European Union, not a bastion of conservatism, also voted to ban funding of embryonic stem cell research.

January 12, 2007
Stem Cell Miracle? (Excerpts)
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON – “When President Bush announced in August 2001 his restrictive funding decision for federal embryonic stem cell research, he was widely attacked for an unwarranted intrusion of religion into scientific research. His solicitousness for a 200-cell organism -- the early embryo that Bush declared should not be destroyed to produce a harvest of stem cells -- was roundly denounced as reactionary and anti-scientific. And cruel to boot. It was preventing the cure for thousands of people with hopeless and terrible diseases, from diabetes to spinal cord injury. As John Edwards put it most starkly and egregiously in 2004: If John Kerry becomes president, Christopher Reeve will walk again….

This kind of stem cell advocacy did not just shamefully inflate its promise. It tended to misrepresent the basis for putting restrictions on embryonic research, insisting that it was nothing more than political enforcement of the religious fundamentalist belief that life begins at conception.

You don't need religion to tremble at the thought of unrestricted embryo research. You simply have to have a healthy respect for the human capacity for doing evil in pursuit of the good. Once we have taken the position of many stem cell advocates that embryos are discardable tissue with no more intrinsic value than a hangnail or an appendix, then all barriers are down. What is to prevent us from producing not just tissues and organs, but human-like organisms for preservation as a source of future body parts on demand?

South Korea enthusiastically embraced unrestricted stem cell research. The subsequent greatly heralded breakthroughs -- accompanied by lamentations that America was falling behind -- were eventually exposed as a swamp of deception, fraud and coercion.

The slope is very slippery. Which is why, even though I disagreed with where the president drew the line -- I would have permitted the use of fertility-clinic embryos that are discarded and going to die anyway -- I applauded his insistence that some line must be drawn, that human embryos are not nothing, and that societal values, not just the scientific imperative, should determine how they are treated.
Congress will soon vote to erase Bush's line. But future generations may nonetheless thank Bush for standing athwart history, if only for a few years. It gave technology enough time to catch up and rescue us from the moral dilemmas of embryonic destruction. It has just been demonstrated that stem cells with enormous potential can be harvested from amniotic fluid.

This is a revolutionary finding. Amniotic fluid surrounds the baby in the womb during pregnancy. It is routinely drawn out by needle in amniocentesis. The procedure carries little risk and is done for legitimate medical purposes that have nothing to do with stem cells. If it nonetheless yields a harvest of stem cells, we have just stumbled upon an endless supply.

And not just endless, but uncontroversial. No embryos are destroyed. The cells are just floating there, as if waiting for science to discover them.

Even better, amniotic fluid might prove to yield an ideal stem cell -- not as primitive as embryonic stem cells and therefore less likely to grow uncontrollably into tumors, but also not as developed as adult stem cells and therefore more "pluripotential'' in the kinds of tissues it can produce.

If it is proved that these are the Goldilocks of stem cells, history will record the amniotic breakthrough as the turning point in the evolution of stem cell research from a narrow, difficult, delicate and morally dubious enterprise into an uncontroversial one with raw material produced unproblematically every day.

It will have turned out that Bush's unpopular policy held the line, however arbitrary and temporary, against the wanton trampling of the human embryo just long enough for a morally neutral alternative to emerge. And it did force the country to at least ponder the moral cost of turning one potential human being into replacement parts for another. Who will be holding the line next time, when another Faustus promises medical nirvana if he is permitted to transgress just one moral boundary?
Charles Krauthammer

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New Stem Cell Method Avoids Destroying Embryos (Excerpt)
By NICHOLAS WADE

Biologists have developed a technique for establishing colonies of human embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos, a method that, if confirmed in other laboratories, would seem to remove the principal objection to stem cell research.

“There is no rational reason left to oppose this research,” said Dr. Robert Lanza, vice president of Advanced Cell Technology and leader of a team that reported the new method in an article published online by the journal Nature.

But critics of human embryonic stem cell research raised other objections, citing the possible risk to the embryo from using the technique, and the fact that it depends on in-vitro fertilization, the generation of embryos outside the womb from a couple’s egg and sperm.

The new technique would be performed on an embryo when it is two days old, after the fertilized egg has divided into eight cells, known as blastomeres.

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European Union Denies Funding for Embryo-Destruction (Excerpt)
By Bradford Short
www.MichNews.com
Jul 29, 2006

(NEW YORK - C-FAM) On Monday the European Commission decided to deny funds to researchers engaged in the destruction of human embryos to obtain stem cells. The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union and its members report to the foreign ministries of EU member governments.

The European Commission engaged in vigorous debate late last week where members of the Commission from Germany, Poland, Austria, Malta, Slovakia, Lithuania and other nations proposed that the EU science budget cease funding for all research that directly or indirectly involves the destruction of human embryos. For years, the EU has funded embryo-destructive stem cell research with few restrictions on the use of such funds.

After negotiations ended on Monday, the only position that a majority of the Commission could agree on was that the actual killing of a human embryo, which is necessary for a scientist to then collect that embryo’s stem cells, would not be paid for by EU funds.