Yes to Cell Research Funds
President-elect George W. Bush’s striking campaign promise to double the budget of the National Institutes of Health by 2003 excited medical researchers, but another pledge that Bush made as a candidate--to oppose federal funding of stem cell research--could cut off the most promising frontier of all. Bush, an abortion opponent, is troubled that the research involves the destruction of newly created human embryonic cells, the “master” cells created just after sperm and egg mix during fertilization.
Wisconsin Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, Bush’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, is also an abortion opponent, but he has supported stem cell research since it was pioneered in 1998 by University of Wisconsin scientists working with embryos donated by couples undergoing fertility treatment at a clinic in Madison.
At his confirmation hearing later this week, Thompson should be pressed about the urgent need for policies to oversee and support stem cell research. While Congress has prohibited the use of government funds to extract stem cells, last fall the Clinton administration issued guidelines allowing private researchers to extract and then pass along to federally funded scientists stem cells from surplus frozen embryos that are destined to be discarded by fertility clinics.
Bush, unfortunately, could reverse those guidelines with the flick of an executive order. Such an order would cut off support for research that--according to Cure, a coalition of 28 groups representing patients with cancer, Parkinson’s, paralysis and other maladies--offers “the best hope in recent history” for overcoming once-incurable diseases.
There’s a second, less obvious reason why Bush should agree to allow federal researchers to work on stem cell research: such involvement helps the government monitor the field and ensure that it does not lead to ethical abuses such as the needless destruction of embryos.
Stem cell work--which studies how cells created hours after fertilization develop into brain, heart, bone and other specialized cells--is not nearly as ethically troubling as fetal tissue research, the federal funding of which Congress has authorized.
However, like any new biotechnology field, stem cell work should be scrutinized by the government for ethical lapses, and government’s ability to provide such oversight has been diminishing since the late 1990s, when stem cell researchers began migrating to private labs not subject to federal restrictions. If the National Institutes of Health do not participate in stem cell research, it will only exacerbate the ethical issues that trouble Bush by pushing private research into greater secrecy.
Congressional testimony about stem cells’ potential for curing disease last year led even outspoken abortion opponents in Congress like Republican Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, who the National Right to Life Committee says voted its way on abortion every time last year, to support stem cell research. As Smith explained, “Part of my pro-life ethic is to make life better for the living.” Bush needs to recognize the wisdom in those words.
