NIH Says It Will Fund Human Stem Cell Studies

In a decision likely to ignite a firestorm among abortion foes, the National Institutes of Health announced Tuesday it will begin funding the medically promising field of human stem cell research, despite a federal ban on studies using human embryos.

Stem cells, the earliest cells from which the body organs are developed, could hold the secret to treating a wide range of disorders--including heart disease, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, arthritis, spinal cord injuries and diabetes--as well as for producing now-scarce transplant organs.

“There is tremendous potential medical benefit that can come from this research,” NIH Director Harold E. Varmus said in an interview.

In explaining the decision, he said that the work holds “very rich scientific possibilities” and that NIH had concluded it was “legally entitled to do” the research.

The controversy flared in November, when two groups of scientists funded with private money announced they had isolated stem cells for the first time and had succeeded in growing a supply of them for research. One line of stem cells was derived from embryos, a second from fetal tissue. Federal funding of research using fetal tissue is allowed, but the work is subject to government oversight.

In concluding that working with stem cells grown from embryos is legally acceptable despite the ban, NIH, which can bring vast federal resources to the research, made the distinction between the cells and their origin, stressing that the research will focus on the cells rather than directly on embryos.

These cells “do not have the capacity to develop into a human being,” the NIH’s legal team concluded. Added Varmus: “The ban concerns embryos, and defines them as organisms. These cells are not organisms.”

But abortion opponents condemned this logic, insisting it is still a violation of the ban first imposed by Congress three years ago.

“NIH may think it can protect itself by requiring that the embryos actually be killed by someone not receiving federal funds, or by requiring the federally funded researcher to clock out when he kills the embryos, but these would be subterfuges and do violence to the clear intent of the law,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.

But, Varmus pointed out, “ethical concerns cut both ways, and ethically we have to be concerned with health of human beings.”

The NIH said that it will develop guidelines and safeguards for research into stem cells and that it will not fund any such studies until the oversight process is in place and guidelines are disseminated, a process Varmus said could take “a couple of months.”

NIH emphasized that “federal funding will provide oversight and direction that would be lacking if this research were the sole province of industry and academe.”

But the latest chapter in medical research almost certainly will provoke another battle on Capitol Hill, where many anti-abortion lawmakers oppose any work that involves human embryos--which they view as the taking of a life.

This “is the latest step by the Clinton administration to treat human beings as property to be manipulated and destroyed,” said Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.). Saying cells are “obtained from human beings ruthlessly killed in the first weeks of life,” he added, “To speak of ethical safeguards in this context is a mockery when the research itself depends on the mutilation of children.”

But others see the work as life-affirming and do not believe NIH’s decision violates congressional intent “because Congress dealt only with embryos,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Specter said he plans to take “a close look” at the decision to see whether more congressional action is needed to ensure researchers’ access to discarded embryos, which can occur during in vitro fertilization.

The NIH said that stem cells ultimately could be used for transplantation--to treat a vast array of disorders--and also for better understanding the process of human development and “what goes wrong to cause birth defects and cancer.”

Furthermore, the research could “change the way we develop drugs and test them for safety,” the NIH said. “Rather than evaluating the safety of candidate drugs in an animal model, the drugs could be initially tested against a human cell line. Only the safest candidate drugs would be likely to graduate to animal and then human testing.”