Right the First Time -- Part Two

What can you count on coming from the lips of proponents of anti-life initiatives whenever a scientific breakthrough vanquishes their hype and overblown promises? They do not want to be accused of exhibiting the behavior they always falsely attribute to pro-lifers—being “anti-scientific.” So proponents will offer two cheers, but all the while they’ll be insisting that this really changes nothing!

A case study is the stunning breakthrough announced less than two weeks ago that provides a way out of the quagmire stem cell research had fallen into.  Scientists in the United States and Japan have produced embryonic stem cells—the “Holy Grail” of researchers these days— without scavenging “spare embryos” or cloning new embryos to be strip-mined for their stem cells.

In a nutshell ordinary skin cells were reprogrammed when four genes were inserted. Voila!

As Colleen Carroll Campbell put it last week, “In the face of the reprogramming breakthrough, such justifications [for extracting stem cells from human embryos] no longer stand. There now appears to be an efficient, cost-effective way to produce an unlimited supply of genetically matched, pluripotent cells without exploiting women or cloning and destroying embryos.”

But, as I knew would happen, one of the two men whose laboratories helped us leapfrog the ethical morass has co-authored a piece in Monday’s Washington Post. What was previously described by James Thomson, one of the two authors, as an advance that will render the embryonic research debate "a funny historical footnote," is today trivialized as nothing more than “souped-up skin cells.”

Gone are any signs of Thomson’s candid confession to the New York Times’s Gina Kolata about his own ethical concerns over hollowing out living human embryos ["If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough”], or his delight at being able "to start a field and then to end it.”  

Instead more hype about embryonic stem cells, revisionist history about how the breakthrough came about, and a misreading of a devastating column by Charles Krauthammer, who flatly announced, “The embryonic stem cell debate is over.” [See www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/29/AR2007112901878_pf.html]]

I don’t know Thomson, but I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when this op-ed was proposed to him. Just two quick points.

Thomson and Alan I. Leshner mention public opinion polls that supposedly show that 60%  “support human embryonic stem cell research.” Aside from a simplistic and selective reading of the polls, what would be the results today if people were asked, “Do you favor or oppose a research technique that produced embryonic stem cells without killing/creating human embryos?” The number would likely be in the 90s.

Second, they employ the most threadworn, hackneyed clichés to “reinforce” their argument. For example, we’re lectured that people used to be made uncomfortable with heart transplants. The moral of that story? “Struggling with bioethical questions remains a critical step in any scientific advancement.”

But it precisely because the donor is no longer alive when the heart is taken that qualms were eventually overcome. (Ironically, it is the desire of some transplant surgeons to cut ethical corners that is re-igniting controversy.)

Not only is the human embryo alive and well when stem cells are harvested, some want to get around the problem of tissue rejection by cloning cells from the recipient’s own body. Human life would be created to be destroyed.

In 2001 President Bush was vilified in astonishingly demagogic terms for drawing an ethical line in the sand. He stood firm and was  proven to be right.

Krauthammer—who was a critic himself of the President’s decision—had it right when he concluded, “[T]he moral disquiet that James Thomson felt -- and that George Bush forced the country to confront -- helped lead him and others to find some ethically neutral way to produce stem cells. Providence then saw to it that the technique be so elegant and beautiful that scientific reasons alone will now incline even the most willful researchers to leave the human embryo alone.”

Part One