Lead Into Gold: Moral Value of Embryo Led to Great Breakthrough
In the NRO, I credited President Bush's ESCR funding restrictions for having played a part into the quest to find non-embryonic sources of pluripotent stem cells--cells "the scientists" insisted they needed to fulfill the total promise of regenerative medicine. My thinking is this: Without the Bush plan and its indirect defense of the intrinsic moral value of nascent human life, the ethical issue would have long been swept aside in the stampede to create regenerative medical treatments and by now the fight would have been over federally funding human cloning research in the quest to find the "gold standard" of patient specific, tailor made ES cells.
James Thomson, while not crediting Bush, has admitted that he had qualms about using embryos. And now, Shinya Yamanaka, the Japanese researcher who first discovered the process of creating iPSCs has suggested that the importance of the embryo also played a big role in his work. From the New York Times story:
Dr. Yamanaka was an assistant professor of pharmacology doing research involving embryonic stem cells when he made the social call to the clinic about eight years ago. At the friend's invitation, he looked down the microscope at one of the human embryos stored at the clinic. The glimpse changed his scientific career.Yamanaka has said that some ES cells will continue to be needed for basic research. But that means the Bush approved lines should be up to the job."When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters," said Dr. Yamanaka, 45, a father of two and now a professor at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences at Kyoto University. "I thought, we can't keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way."
This debate has always been larger than the sum of its parts. Had we just swept aside the moral concern of turning human life into a mere thing to be used like copper from a copper mine, I believe our society would have been changed unalterably. President Bush saw this and kept the focus on the importance of all human life. Thank goodness good scientists like Yamanaka also had moral concerns and found an ethical way to move forward.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:37 AM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
President Bush and the importance of all human life are terms I don't think should be connected in the same sentence. But that's just a personal opinion and observation.
Had he vetoed this proposal on Constitutional grounds it would have been more appropriate.
This shows that making the moral argument helped lead to this and that making moral arguments makes a difference even when you are down in the polls.
Mort, I suppose you are talking about the Iraq war.
I suppose >100,000 dead Kurds, and the fact that we had to maintain the no-fly zone (at considerable danger and expense) to prevent Hussein from completing this genocide, mean nothing.
TWEET! The Iraq war is off limits, please, either by implication or explication. As you were. Thank you.
This from a reader of SHS from Germany:
"In order to demonstrate that their new human "iPS" cells performed like "real" human embryonic stem (hESC) cells, both Yamanaka and Thomson used "old" hESC lines for comparison.
In fact, they used the world's earliest known hESC lines, those first described by Thomson in his famous 1998 publication. Yamanaka compared his iPS with Thomson's H9 hESC line. Thomson compared his iPS with all of his five NIH-registered hESC lines: H1, H7, H9, H13 and H14.
So this year's most celebrated stem cell breakthrough has been achieved by using hESC lines as a gold-standard that are fully eligible for US federal funding.
Clearly, human iPS cells open a wide range of basic research opportunities including, but not limited to, the study of disease development at the cellular level with patient-specific pluripotent stem cells.
Human iPS cells do not raise ethical concerns, as no human embryos need to be destroyed in order to obtain them.
However, therapeutic use of these "artificial hESC" seems highly unlikely. Just because the new human iPS cells are so much like embryonics they also carry the most important intrinsic risk of hESC: tumors. Once pluripotent hESC have been isolated from their natural environment, i.e. the intact embryo, they lack this natural environment's coordinating role, yet they still "want" to form all tissues of a nascent human being: they form teratomas in vivo. So many lab animals have died from tumors caused by embryonic stem cells, while not one human has been cured with them.
In nature, adult stem cells are designed to repair the body, embryonic stem cells are meant to form a complete organism.
So, if we want therapies, why not concentrate on understanding and enhancing the natural repair cells, i. e. adult stem cells?"
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