Stem Cell Breakthrough Uses No Human Embryos

Editor’s note.  Great news just before Thanksgiving.  Please send me your thoughts at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

“Scientists have made ordinary human skin cells take on the chameleon-like powers of embryonic stem cells, a startling breakthrough that might someday deliver the medical payoffs of embryo cloning without the controversy. … ‘This work represents a tremendous scientific milestone the biological equivalent of the Wright Brothers' first airplane,’ said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief science officer of Advanced Cell Technology, which has been trying to extract stem cells from cloned human embryos. ‘It's a bit like learning how to turn lead into gold,’ said Lanza.”

November 20, Associated Press.

“Researchers in Wisconsin and Japan have turned ordinary human skin cells into what are effectively embryonic stem cells without using embryos or women's eggs -- the two hitherto essential ingredients that have embroiled the medically promising field in a long political and ethical debate. …’Apparently there are various ways to get to Rome,’ said Rudolf Jaenisch, a stem cell researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. ‘We don't have to do it like the egg. We can do it differently.’"

November 20, Washington Post

“Finally, the promise and potential of directly reprogrammed cells calls into question whether embryonic stem cells are useful any more. Why go to the trouble of creating embryos when stem cells can be coaxed directly from properly manipulated cells?... ‘I think this is the future of stem cell research,’ says Dr. John Gearhart, the biologist who first discovered human fetal embryonic stem cells. ‘It's absolutely terrific.’"

TIME Magazine, November 20

In the messy world of bioethical politics, truth and stands taken on the basis of principle don’t necessarily carry every day. But sometimes they can carry THE day.
Two incredibly important research papers, published online yesterday, completely vindicate President Bush. Two renowned researchers published results which show that embryonic-type stem cells can be produced directly from ordinary human cells, such as a skin cell, without first creating an embryo.

The work of Dr. James Thomson, published in Science and Prof. Shinya Yamanaka, published in Cell, potentially means that all the controversies sparked by the use of stem cells from human embryos/cloning can be averted. No more persuading parents to “donate” so-called “spare embryos”; no more human embryos lethally harvested; no more creating human life (by cloning) to destroy it in a mad dash for stem cells; and no more inducements to women to super-ovulate to produce mountains of unfertilized human ova.

Writing about all the many ethically acceptable alternatives that have shown such promise in the wake of President Bush’s firm stance, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith concluded, “I believe that many of these exciting ‘alternative’ methods would not have been achieved but for President Bush’s stalwart stand promoting ethical stem-cell research.”

Writing at www.nationalreview.com, Smith observed, “Indeed, had the president followed the crowd instead of leading it, most research efforts would have been devoted to trying to perfect ESCR [embryonic stem cell research] and human-cloning research — which, despite copious funding, have not worked out yet as scientists originally hoped.”

So, what exactly did Drs. Thomson and Yamanaka discover? The San Francisco Chronicle summarized the breakthrough this way: “Separate teams of scientists on two continents are reporting today that they have transformed ordinary human skin cells into stem cells using a technique pioneered last year in laboratory mice.”

In other words, what Dr. Yamanaka demonstrated over the past year or so would work in mice—“direct reprogramming”-- seems to work equally well in human beings, according to the reports published online Tuesday.

The labs used different cells types. Yamanaka reprogrammed skin cells from a woman’s face while Thomson's team worked with foreskin cells from a newborn, according to published accounts. After laborious trial-and-error, the teams inserted into the skin cells “four genes that are apparently used by eggs to start the natural embryonic development process,” the Chronicle reported, causing them “to produce a full complement of stem cells."

(NPR’s Joe Palca put it this way: “The crux of the discovery, published online Tuesday by the journals Cell and Science, is a ‘direct reprogramming’ technique that adds a cocktail of four genetic factors to run-of-the-mill human skin cells.”)

Dr. Thomson said straightforwardly, "By any means we test them they are the same as embryonic stem cells."

There are many other noteworthy facets to this powerfully encouraging story. For one, it is apparently now okay for reporters to point out the major problems associated with embryonic stem cells and cloning, even if they did not mention that all successful therapies to date have been based on stem cells obtained from ethically unobjectionable sources, such as skin, fat, bone marrow cells, cord blood, and amniotic fluid.
 
For another, we learn that Ian Wilmut (of Dolly the cloned sheep fame) is giving up the use of cloning to produce stem cells and plans to pursue direct reprogramming instead. Wilmut told the Daily Telegraph, “The odds are that by the time we make nuclear transfer work in humans, direct reprogramming will work too.”
 
He added, “I am anticipating that before too long we will be able to use the Yamanaka approach to achieve the same, without making human embryos. I have no doubt that in the long term, direct reprogramming will be more productive, though we can't be sure exactly when, next year or five years into the future.”

We’ll talk more about this next week. For now, let’s close with Wesley Smith’s well-deserved tribute to President Bush. Because of his “courageous leadership,” Smith wrote, “we now have the very real potential of developing thriving and robust stem-cell medicine and scientific research sectors that will bridge, rather than exacerbate, our moral differences over the importance and meaning of human life.”

Please send your comments to Dave Andrusko at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.