Pluripotent politics

Americans have great expectations for science. They expect research to solve practical problems such as disease and slow internet connections. But there’s a bemusing expectation that research can also resolve moral and ethical dilemmas. Consider stem cells. Hardly a week goes by these days without a flurry of reports about one medical advance or another using stem cells. Cures for diabetes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are perpetually just around the corner (perhaps people haven’t realized that the roadway is like the spiraling ramp in a parking garage). Increasingly, the hope and expectation seems to be that stem cell research will also resolve the queasiness many Americans feel about using discarded embryos as the source of that tissue. Every time a scientist publishes promising results using adult stem cells (even those derived from rodents), the chorus rises on Capitol Hill that embryonic stem cells are all but obsolete. Take for example Fred Gage’s work in isolating stem cells from human cadavers. USA Today said, sure it could be used to regenerate human organs someday. But it also solves an immediate problem: “The report suggests cadaver brains, if retrieved quickly from deceased infants, may offer a reasonable alternative to embryos and fetuses as sources of cells for neurodegenerative diseases.” “We do not need to go to extreme measures by making and destroying carbon copies of people,’’ said actress Margaret Colin, in an Associated Press dispatch. “She and other abortion opponents told senators that a different type of stem cell can be obtained from adult tissue.” But researchers take pains at every step to point out that they haven’t crossed that Rubicon. In a widely quoted editorial in Science, Caltech President David Baltimore and Irving Weissman at Stanford noted that “The wrong action here could close the door to an important avenue of scientific and clinical discovery.” The Boston Globe noted: “Stem cells found in organs in adult humans are less controversial but also less understood. While some have been shown capable of turning into other cell types — bone marrow into heart cells, for example — they seem to be much more limited in their repertoire.” In its story about cells derived from cadavers, the Chicago Tribune risked sounding a bit didactic to spell out exactly what had — and hadn’t — been ascertained in the cadaver study. “Fred Gage of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, said he is worried that the public has become so inundated by stories about embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells, cloning and the like, that the science that underlies the ethical debate often gets short shrift. He is trying to be very careful about what his lab has done. ‘We haven’t proved that these are stem cells,’ he cautioned. ‘Nor have we shown the cells will actually work; that they could heal an injured brain if transplanted.’” And it doesn’t help that some stories have been over-interpreted because they’re simply too ‘sexy’ — that’s ‘appealing’ in news lingo — to ignore. In particular, journalists went to town on the story asserting that despised fat deposits could actually be gold mines for therapeutic stem cells. The response was entirely predictable. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “When scientists this month reported isolating stem cells in human fat, the American Life League, an anti-abortion group, said the finding gave Bush another reason ‘to leave behind the horrors of embryonic stem cell experimentation, which always involves the killing of human persons.’” The Tulsa World, swayed by a report in the Wall Street Journal, concluded just the opposite. “Alas, using those love handles to build organs and life-saving tissues is too good to be true. Like most things in that category, it is unfortunately not true. But the White House — in playing to the anti-abortion crowd — is pushing the fat cell story.” The Chicago Sun-Times also called that argument a ‘red herring,’ and noted, “just as Galileo’s studies of the solar system evoked religious condemnation, so too does the stem cell research that advances the prospect of preventing and treating heart disease, diabetes, cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s and a host of other life-threatening illnesses.” Even so, the Bush Administration has held off on granting permission for federally funded researchers to conduct research on discarded human embryos. That may play well to the anti-abortion constituency, but Fred Gage noted in an op-ed piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune that it merely submerges the issue rather than resolving it. “While we await action on approved guidelines from the federal government, unregulated research continues to be carried out by private companies using private funding... Oversight of federally funded research would cover such issues as the source of cells, informed consent, and measures to ensure safety and the ethical use of embryonic stem cells.” Of course, that presumes the government would act rationally. Bad assumption.