Cloning Proponents Rethinking Support -- Part One of Two

Editor's note. Please send along your thoughts to daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

While there is a lot to get to today, I would be remiss if I didn't first thank all who responded to yesterday's requests for comment. When the last respondent has his or her say about the "ABCs" of abortion literacy, I'll try to summarize the key conclusions.

And before I begin Part One, let me just say that Part Two was stimulated by a quote found in George Will's column that appears in today's Washington Post. I hope you will take a moment to read it as well.

You can almost always find a plentiful source of provocative topics covered with intelligence and wit at bioethicist Wesley Smith's invaluable blog (www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog). Wesley does many things extremely well, but probably none better than when he calls our attention to scientists who have repudiated, or at least seriously revisited, their prior support for various anti-life proposals.

Many of you know the name Ian Wilmut, the man whose team cloned Dolly the Sheep. As Smith points out, Wilmut had expanded his horizons, receiving the go-ahead (never hard to obtain in Great Britain) to "create cloned embryos from the DNA of motor neuron disease patients, known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease in the USA." However, Wilmut called off the experiment when "Shinya Yamanaka invented Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells" (IPS cells).

As we've discussed many times in this space, IPS cells offer an ingenious alternative to slaughtering human embryos for their stem cells. Researchers induce mature human cells (often skin cells) to "go back in time" by "turn[ing] on genes that are active during embryonic development," as the Los Angeles Times explained it.

By trial and error Yamanaka's team found a combination of genes which, when activated, would "coax the cells back in time to a point in embryonic development before they had committed to becoming a particular type of tissue." The resulting IPS cells are virtually indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells and were able to grow into all the main tissue types in the body.

Wilmut was so impressed by Yamanaka's work he said he thinks Yamanaka is due a Nobel Prize and wants to undertake joint research on IPS cells with him. He said the discovery of IPS cells was "equivalent to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA."

Most encouragingly Wilmut "said it will be unnecessary in years to come to conduct studies to develop [Embryonic Stem] cells from cloned human embryos," according to the newspaper The Yomiuri Shimbun.

Closer to home, Wesley's web page also alerted me to a story about our solders from Iraq and Afghanistan who are being treated with their own stem cells to treat wounds involving bones.

"Orthopaedic stem cell surgery has been practiced by only a handful of doctors nationwide," reported Juju Change and Roxanna Sherwood. "[T]he stem cells [Dr. Thomas] Einhorn uses don't come from embryos; they come from the patients themselves." The stem cells are extracted from the patient's bone marrow, drawn from the pelvis.

Dr. George Muschler pioneered the surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. He told ABC News, "I think [the procedure] has applications to some challenges that might have previously cost patients their leg, because we didn't have a way to heal their bone." Muschler "says he is convinced that the method results in the growth of strong, new permanent bone."

The "peg" for the story is the news that last week the federal government announced plans to dedicate $85 million for the creation of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine to fund orthopedic stem cell surgery procedure for veterans injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The hope is that the new funding will offer wounded soldiers a chance to heal from injuries that might otherwise have left them unable to return to work, or even walk," according to Change and Sherwood.

Finally, we've reported several times on the sharp increase in the number of Italian gynecologists who on moral grounds refuse to perform abortion. Now nearly 70% are claiming a conscientious objection, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday. In 2003, 58% asked for the exemption, the Health Ministry reported. By 2007 the figure had soared to 69.2%. Another piece of good news is that the number of abortions declined slightly-- from 131,018 in 2006 to 127,038 in 2007, a decrease of three percent.

If you have a moment, please read Part Two, "Our Own Version of 'A Nation At Risk.'"

Part Two