Stem cells: controversy averted?

The LA Times reports:

Scientists reported Thursday that for the first time they have made human embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos, a development that the government's top stem cell official said would make the controversial research eligible for federal funding.

Story Landis, who chairs the National Institute of Health's stem cell task force, said that with certain safeguards, the new method appeared to comply with federal restrictions that have largely cut scientists off from the $28 billion the government spends on medical research each year.

But:

Though the technique spares embryos, it still raises ethical concerns.

The Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, an ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, said that removing a single cell from an embryo turns it into "a starting source for harvestable raw materials, in a gesture that reduces young humans to commodities."

And because the single embryonic cell can be grown into stem cells, some scientists and ethicists wondered whether the cell itself has the potential to become a whole new embryo.

"It would be hard to rule out," said Martin Pera, director of the Center for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at USC.

Read it all.

Posted by Jim Naughton on January 12, 2008 11:14 AM | |
Comments (1)

The report in the Kansas City Star included this regarding any change in funding policy under this administration:

But that is not likely, said Story Landis, who heads the National Institutes of Health stem-cell task force, which oversees grants for studies on the medically promising cells.

The embryos Lanza used, which were donated for research, appear not to have been damaged, Landis acknowledged. However, she said, it is “impossible to know definitively” that the embryos were not in some subtle way harmed by the experiment. And “no harm” is the basis of the Bush policy, she said.

Landis said the only way to prove that the technique does not harm embryos would be to transfer many of them to women’s wombs and see whether the resulting babies were normal. But it would be unethical to do that experiment, she said, so the question cannot be answered.

This is a wonderful Catch-22: it might work; it even looks like it works; but since there's no way to definitively prove that it's worked, we won't change our stance.

Marshall Scott

Posted by mscottsail [TypeKey Profile Page] | January 12, 2008 12:37 PM

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