Deja Vu All Over Again

My wife and I spent several hours last night going through my office, cleaning out junk and categorizing and filing what remained. To my delight I ran across a copy of a dissent written in 1988 by NRLC General Counsel James Bopp, Jr. as a member of the NIH Human Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel.

Back in the 1980s, the hullabaloo over tissue scavenged from the brains of aborted babies was so loud you had to place your hands over your ears. According to exuberant proponents, harvested fetal brain tissue was a medical breakthrough so profound that it would provide the raw material to cure everything from AIDS and Alzheimer's to the common cold.

In 1987 NIH had received a request to fund a proposal to transplant fetal brain tissue into the brain of a Parkinson's patient. A moratorium was placed on any new NIH-funded fetal transplants pending convening a panel to address issues relating to science, ethics, and the legal status of fetal tissue transplants.

Seventeen of the 21 members of the Human Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel were easily recognized as likely proponents. Thus the final 17-4 tally in favor caught no one off-guard.

Bopp's dissent to the majority proposal was brilliant in every sense, not to mention prescient. Although there were periodic attempts to revive the research, within a few years of the panel's report the media and medical circus closed its tents.

It turned out that fetal brain tissue cured nothing and was profoundly dangerous to the patients who received the tissue. Some of the side effects were described as "absolutely devastating" in a New England Journal of Medicine article that reviewed the science. (See www.nrlc.org/news/2001/NRL03/fetal.html.)

As I began to reread Bopp's critique, naturally I thought of the same pie-in-the-sky, this-will-cure-everything propaganda for stem cells extracted from "surplus embryos" or from cloned human embryos.

Just as was the case with fetal brain tissue, embryonic stem cells have yet to show any progress in human beings. There is an important difference, however, between fetal brain tissue and embryonic stem cells.

With the latter there are proven alternatives--options that have worked with human beings around the world. An article in the August 4 issue of National Journal gives the reader the necessary background to fully appreciate the radically different approaches taken by the United States and much of the rest of the world.

There are two quotes the reader sees before he or she begins "Two Roads on Stem-Cell Policy," written by Neil Munro.

The first is, "The U.S. focuses on using embryonic stem cells to boost the pharmaceutical industry's development of drugs"; the second is, "Foreign countries are using adult stem cells for immediate therapies to help patients with various diseases."

For our purposes here, the most important single reminder is that the media "template" (the description is bioethicist Wesley J. Smith's) is completely wrong. According to Munro,

"Few companies and researchers are working to develop embryonic stem cells for transplantation into people partly because these cells tend to proliferate and produce teratomas--disorganized, cancer-like tumors of many cell types. Singapore-based ES Cell International announced in July that it had stopped trying to develop embryonic-stem-cell transplants for people suffering from diabetes and heart problems. 'The likelihood of having products in the clinic in the short term was vanishingly small,' Alan Colman, who was chief executive of ESI until recently, told Science magazine. One of the few U.S. companies pushing ahead with embryonic-stem-cell transplants is Geron in Menlo Park, Calif., which hopes to test a treatment in 2008 for spinal injuries."

Remember how in 2004 then Democratic Vice President nominee Sen. John Edwards, alluding to embryonic stem cells,  boasted that "when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of their wheelchair and walk again." Although the general public doesn't know this, practically no one's crazy enough to say that now for two reasons.

As noted above, there is the ever-present risk of creating tumors, on the one hand. On the other hand, most research dollars are "boost[ing]" the "long-term approach of using embryonic stem cells in the development of novel drugs to help patients in the future." (Emphasis mine.) It would not be unfair to say we are talking about the distant future.

Fortunately, there are some American companies developing adult stem cell therapies. And "In Japan, scientists are employing a breakthrough technique to convert mouse skin cells into multipurpose embryo-like cells," Munro writes. "If the technique can be made to work on human cells, a patient's skin might provide the raw material for a variety of organ-rejuvenation transplants."

Measurable progress on every front, except from efforts to use stem cells harvested from human embryos. And that is good news for anyone who understands (as President Bush has said), "Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical--and it is not the only option before us." 

If you have any comments or questions, please write Dave Andrusko at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.