Embryo Stem Cell Work Could Get Public Funding
Reviving a debate over how society should treat the earliest stages of human life, the National Institutes of Health is close to authorizing a plan to fund medical research that relies on the destruction of human embryos.
The NIH plan, in the works for more than a year, would clear the way for the first public funding of potentially groundbreaking research on embryo “stem cells,” which scientists first isolated only 21 months ago.
These cells have the remarkable ability to grow into nearly every component of the body. Scientists hope to learn how to guide them to become new brain tissue for Parkinson’s patients, new pancreas cells for diabetics, nerve cells for spinal injury victims and cures for many other diseases.
Under NIH’s draft rules, scientists could obtain the cells from embryos created by couples during fertility treatments but not used.
Lobbyists who follow the NIH’s work say that the plan will be released by the end of August, assuming it wins final approval from the Clinton administration, which so far has been supportive.
But once it is released, the plan will face a host of political and legal uncertainties and it will raise difficult ethical issues that could ricochet through Congress and the presidential election.
“This issue pits two very important moral considerations against each other: the effort to cure disease and the effort to respect the sanctity of human life,” said Ronald Green, an ethics professor at Dartmouth College. “It’s going to be a political hot potato.”
Abortion opponents say that the research is immoral because embryos are destroyed in the course of culling their stem cells, sacrificing one form of human life to benefit another. Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee and an abortion rights foe, has said through surrogates that he opposes the research. If elected president, he could block the NIH plan with an executive order.
Patients’ groups, who have an ally in Vice President Al Gore, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, say that stem cell research is ethical because it uses embryos donated by fertility patients who would have destroyed them anyway. Couples commonly create more embryos than they need in trying to produce a child. The extras are usually frozen until the potential parents attempt another pregnancy or decide that they are no longer needed and have them destroyed.
“Is it more ethical for a woman to donate unused embryos that will never become human beings or to let them be tossed away as so much garbage when they could help save thousands of lives?” actor Christopher Reeve, a victim of spinal cord injury, asked during congressional testimony earlier this year.
The issue could land in Congress just before the fall elections. In the House, lawmakers led by Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) say that the NIH plan violates a 1996 congressional ban on federal funding for research in which embryos are destroyed. The NIH insists that its plan is legal, but Dickey has vowed to block the agency, either through legislation or in the courts.
“Dismembering a cell is like dismembering a person . . . , pulling the legs and arms and body parts off,” Dickey said in an interview. “We don’t think our country is going to be better off having that sort of thing done with federal funds.”
In the Senate, supporters of stem cell research plan to press for passage of legislation that would give the NIH explicit authority to proceed. Lobbyists on both sides of the issue say that the measure likely would win a majority but not necessarily the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural maneuvers that could block the bill.
If they take up the issue, lawmakers and candidates could find themselves on tricky political terrain, a place where public views are nuanced and not always readily apparent.
Some people who might benefit from stem cell research believe that it should nonetheless be stopped.
A stem cell treatment “would be derived by evil means. I wouldn’t accept it,” said Mary Jane Owen, the 71-year-old director of a Roman Catholic disabilities group who is blind and a victim of spinal cord injury. “My life is no more valuable than any other human life on the planet . . . and an embryo is human life.”
Other groups support a woman’s right to abortion but are wary of destroying embryos during research. They include the United Methodist Church, with 8.5 million members. Stem cell research could be “a step toward the commercialization of human life,” said Jaydee Hanson, a social policy official of the church.
At the same time, advocates of the research have won over several prominent lawmakers who hold traditional anti-abortion views. Among them are Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), who has said that he backs stem cell research in part because it might help his daughter, who has juvenile diabetes.
In the stem cell debate, research advocates have worked to replace the image of the embryo in lawmakers’ minds with the image of a patient desperate for a cure. That effort received a big boost when actors Reeve and Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease, agreed to lobby lawmakers.
The political environment has been made even more complex because of the NIH’s own legal position.
In 1996, lawmakers led by Dickey won a ban on federal funding for “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.” That was more than two years before scientists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, using private funds, first isolated and cultured stem cells from human embryos.
The Wisconsin work caused a sensation, and Dr. Harold Varmus, then director of the NIH, said that it could “revolutionize” medicine. “We want to pursue every possibility for a cure, and this is the most promising,” said Dr. Robert Goldstein, chief scientific officer for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.
The NIH, the largest single financial backer of medical research in the United States, said that the 1996 ban merely bars scientists from using federal money to derive stem cells from embryos and that researchers can use tax dollars for experiments once the cells have been harvested.
But even some advocates of the research say that reasoning is flawed. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission, created by President Clinton, said that the NIH is operating under a “mistaken notion” that scientists can use stem cells while distancing themselves from how the cells are obtained. It argued that the 1996 ban should be overturned.
The NIH legal reasoning also angers antiabortion groups, who said it is a clear evasion of the law. “If we had a law that barred research in which porpoises were killed, no one would entertain for five seconds that a federal agency could arrange for someone else to kill the porpoises and then proceed to use them in research,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.
Anti-abortion groups point to recent research suggesting that other types of stem cells, found in adults, could yield cures for disease without raising the ethical quandaries of using cells from embryos. Scientists have been able to turn skeletal muscle cells from mice into blood cells, and mouse brain cells into blood cells. This suggests that adult stem cells are more versatile than had been known. But patient groups say that embryo cells are probably the most versatile and that no research avenue should be foreclosed.
The NIH plan is essentially a set of ethical guidelines that scientists must follow if they apply for federal money for stem cell work. In addition to barring the use of tax money to derive the cells, the rules seek to make sure fertility patients are not coerced into donating embryos.
Under a draft version of the rules, patients may not be paid for their embryos and a researcher using the stem cells also may not act as the doctor supervising the donors’ fertility treatment.
