From The New York Times

Labels: beginning of human life, embryo, stem cells

San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, January 18, 2008 --Scientists at a California company reported Thursday that they have created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, a significant advance toward the goal of growing personalized stem cells for patients suffering from various diseases.

Creation of the embryos - grown from cells taken from the La Jolla company's chief executive and one of its investors - also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies.

Five of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors consider ready for transfer to a woman's womb - a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved.

No one knows whether those embryos were healthy enough to grow into babies. But the study leader, who is also the medical director of a fertility clinic, said they looked robust, even as he emphasized that he has no interest in cloning people.

"It's unethical and it's illegal, and we hope no one else does it either," said Samuel Wood, chief executive of Stemagen, whose skin cells were cloned and who led the study with Andrew French, the firm's scientific officer.

The closely held company hopes to make embryos that are clones, or genetic twins, of patients, then harvest stem cells from those embryos and grow them into replacement tissues. When transplanted into patients, the tissues would not be rejected because the immune system would see them as "self."

"All our efforts are being directed toward personalized medicine and diseases," said Wood, adding that the scientists did not try to extract stem cells from the first embryos they made because they were focused on proving they could make the clones.

Continue reading.

Labels: clones, cloning, embryos, stem cells

The New York Times, Andrew Pollack, November 27, 2007 -- If researchers were oil prospectors, it could be said that they struck a gusher last week. But to realize the potential boundless riches they now must figure out how to build refineries, pipelines and gas stations.

Biologists were electrified on Tuesday, when scientists in Japan and Wisconsin reported that they could turn human skin cells into cells that behave like embryonic stem cells, able to grow indefinitely and to potentially turn into any type of tissue in the body.

The discovery, if it holds up, would decisively solve the raw material problem. It should provide an unlimited supply of stem cells without the ethically controversial embryo destruction and the restrictions on federal financing that have impeded work on human embryonic cells.

But scientists still face the challenge of taking that abundant raw material and turning it into useful medical treatments, like replacement tissue for damaged hearts and brains. And that challenge will be roughly as daunting for the new cells as it has been for the embryonic stem cells.

“Even though we have this nice new sources of cells, it doesn’t solve all the downstream problems of getting them into the body in useful form,” said James A. Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, who led one of the teams that developed the stem cell substitutes. Dr. Thomson was also the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells, about a decade ago.

Still, the new discovery should accelerate progress — if only because with the ethical issues seemingly out of the way, more scientists and money will be drawn to the field.

Continue reading article.

Labels: embryonic stem cell, stem cell research, stem cells

My colleague here, jt, has already noted the big news of the week, month, year, possibly even decade -- the news of induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells, grown from skin cells and behaving much (maybe exactly, no one knows yet) like embryonic stem cells, thus able to be directed in whatever way desired to produce blood cells, bone cells, brain cells...

It's hard not to view the new development with delight, if only because it has the potential to put behind us the acrimonious, sometimes hateful and maybe unresolvable arguments about medicine-vs.-God. Maybe now we'll be able to come together, if not over abortion rights then at least over the issue of "harvesting" genetic matter from embryos -- to say nothing of the debate over when, exactly, human life begins. Is that progress or is that progress?

Well, as Ivan Doig and others might say: Maybe so, and maybe no.

Nobody knows exactly what will happen with the new technology. Nobody knows how it will behave in the real world, or even how many years it will be before those other questions can be answered. But let's assume that all goes swimmingly, exactly as hoped for.

What then?

My fear is not really that we have not dodged the big bullet. I think we have. My fear is that we've been so frozen, mesmerized, by our fear of that big bullet and what it could do to the temper of our lives, we've watched with such frightened fascination as it has borne down upon us, that we've missed something important: the other big bullet, which has been hiding behind the first and traveling at least as fast, aimed straight for our faces. That second big bullet, I fear, isn't the question of "When does human life begin?" but the starker question, "What is human life for?"

The skin cells from which iPS cells will be grown, after all, will still have to come from people. How much "skin farming" is too much? Is there a "too much"? Are there potential black markets in the offing, with skin cells with particular genetic compositions more highly valued and hence more expensive (and hence more out of the reach of people who need them most) than others? If iPS cells can be used to make a heart, or a spine, or a fingernail, at what point -- if any -- do we step in and say, "Okay, fine, but you're not going to be allowed to assemble those organs into full-blown organisms?"

Am I being paranoid here? I don't know. All I know is that the law of unintended consequences isn't likely to just sit in the corner, knitting booties, while this technology works its way to reality. According to the Wikipedia article on this perverse law, sociologist Robert K. Merton identified five causes of such consequences:

1. Ignorance (It is impossible to anticipate everything, thereby leading to incomplete analysis)
2. Error (Incorrect analysis of the problem or following habits that worked in the past but may not apply to the current situation)
3. Immediate interest, which may override long-term interests
4. Basic values may require or prohibit certain actions even if the long-term result might be unfavorable (these long-term consequences may eventually cause changes in basic values)
5. Self-defeating prophecy (Fear of some consequence drives people to find solutions before the problem occurs, thus the non-occurrence of the problem is unanticipated)

I don't know about you, but it kind of gives me the squirms to recognize in that list many, many possibilities which might come to bear in this case.

Labels: stem cell research, stem cells

And the rest of the quotation, originally from Winston Churchill, regarding what used to be the Soviet Union: "...but perhaps there is a key."

Mike Doonesbury's daughter Alex joins the rest of us who are confused about the Russian-nesting-doll of puzzles for our time. See the complete strip here.

Labels: blastocyst, Doonesbury, stem cell research, stem cells

A few days ago, Reuters summarized two papers published in the current issue of Nature on using mouse and rat embryonic stem cells in lieu of those from humans, which "should speed up research into regenerative medicine and help in the hunt for cures to a range of diseases." That the two papers -- one from a team at Oxford, the other from a Cambridge group -- were developed concurrently and independently "is a sign of momentum picking up in stem cell research," says the Reuters piece:

Laboratory mice have long been a favourite model for human disease but researchers have been frustrated by the fact that human and mouse stem cells behave very differently.

Now scientists think they may have cracked the problem.

Here on this blog we tend to focus (rightly or wrongly) on the stem-cell debate as a case of common sense at odds with deep-seated religious moral and/or religious beliefs. But it's interesting to think about how the use of non-human embryonic sources both (a) seems to sidestep the debate altogether, and (b) doesn't really sidestep anything after all -- just shoves the real issue out of sight, by removing it from the scrutiny of partisans (on both sides) otherwise focused on the word "human." The issue, not to put too fine a point on it, is that human life is a subset, a special case, of animal life. Hence the question: If we can comfortably come to a consensus about the use of non-human embryonic stem cells for the betterment of human life, can't we come to a consensus about the use of human embryonic stem cells for that purpose? Particularly when the cells in question are earmarked for no other purpose other than disposal?

Note that I'm not arguing here for what the consensus should be. (It would hardly be a consensus if I just told everybody what to believe, hmm?) Given a Sophie's Choice-type dilemma requiring that I save the life of a human or the life of a mouse, but not both, I'd choose the human just as I suppose most of you would. It would be fair to say that I hold human life to be sacred, just as most of you do.

That very notion of the sacredness of human life, perhaps, is where the potential for consensus is greatest. If a human embryonic stem cell is destined for the waste can anyway, why not use it instead to affirm the sacredness of human life as it is or will be lived by actual living, breathing erstwhile embryos who at some time come to term?

Labels: bioethics, embryonic stem cells, medical research, stem cell research, stem cells

As with just about every other flash-point issue confronting the world today, clever presentations of one perspective or another tend to be reductio ad absurdum-style exaggerations of the opposing point of view. Here's a recent example, from YouTube.

Labels: embryonic stem cells, George W. Bush, stem cell research, stem cells, YouTube

As a college freshman, I had to take a course in World History. I remember nothing about the course except (a) the professor's name, and (b) his striking description of a particular element of medieval philosophy. Item (b) had to do with how people knew that a thing was that thing, and not another. These medieval philosophers believed, said my professor, that "a table is a table because it partakes of table-ness."

I loved that. And it leads me to the subject of this post. If an acorn is an oak, why? and If a blastocyst is a person, why?

A recent Wired Science posting directs us to a Boston Globe column by Michael J. Sandel, who "teaches political philosophy at Harvard." He is also a former member of the Presidential Council on Bioethics -- yes, during the Bush administration. We may then safely assume that he is well-informed, regarding both the philosophical issues (on both sides of the stem-cell debates) and the position of the Bush administration.

As you can see from the page on the Wired site, both the summary and the complete Globe article have stimulated some of the usual reductio-ad-absurdum exaggerations of opponents views at both extremes of the debate, generally stopping juuuust this side of name-calling.

But, with thanks for bringing our attention to Sandel's column, let's leave behind the Wired blog entry, and focus on the column as it appeared in the Globe. It strikes at the heart of many issues at the heart of this Beginning of Human Life blog, here on sossisson.com.

The column may be broken basically into two sections.

In the first section, Sandel points out that neither pro-life nor pro-choice advocates typically expend a lot of effort trying honestly to understand and respect each other's arguments. He then takes up the gauntlet he has cast down, beginning with the pro-life perspective:

It is important to be clear, first of all, about the embryo from which stem cells are extracted. It is not implanted and growing in a woman's uterus. It is not a fetus. It has no recognizable human features or form. It is, rather, a blastocyst, a cluster of 180 to 200 cells, growing in a petri dish, barely visible to the naked eye. Such blastocysts are either cloned in the lab or created in fertility clinics. The bill pending in Congress would fund stem cell research only on excess blastocysts left over from infertility treatments.

The blastocyst represents such an early stage of embryonic development that the cells it contains have not yet differentiated, or taken on the properties of particular organs or tissues -- kidneys, muscles, spinal cord, and so on. This is why the stem cells that are extracted from the blastocyst hold the promise of developing, with proper coaxing in the lab, into any kind of cell the researcher wants to study or repair.

The moral and political controversy arises from the fact that extracting the stem cells destroys the blastocyst. It is important to grasp the full force of the claim that the embryo is morally equivalent to a person, a fully developed human being. For those who hold this view, extracting stem cells from a blastocyst is as morally abhorrent as harvesting organs from a baby to save other people's lives. This is the position of Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, a leading advocate of the right-to-life position. In Brownback's view, "a human embryo . . . is a human being just like you and me; and it deserves the same respect that our laws give to us all."

And then he moves on to summarize the position of advocates of embryonic stem-cell research:

[Brownback's] argument can be challenged on a number of grounds. First, it is undeniable that a human embryo is "human life" in the biological sense that it is living rather than dead, and human rather than, say, bovine. But this biological fact does not establish that the blastocyst is a human being, or a person. Any living human cell (a skin cell, for example) is "human life" in the sense of being human rather than bovine and living rather than dead. But no one would consider a skin cell a person, or deem it inviolable. Showing that a blastocyst is a human being, or a person, requires further argument.

Some try to base such an argument on the fact that human beings develop from embryo to fetus to child. Every person was once an embryo, the argument goes, and there is no clear, non-arbitrary line between conception and adulthood that can tell us when personhood begins. Given the lack of such a line, we should regard the blastocyst as a person, as morally equivalent to a fully developed human being.

But this argument is not persuasive. Consider an analogy: although every oak tree was once an acorn, it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or that I should treat the loss of an acorn eaten by a squirrel in my front yard as the same kind of loss as the death of an oak tree felled by a storm. Despite their developmental continuity, acorns and oak trees differ. So do human embryos and human beings, and in the same way. Just as acorns are potential oaks, human embryos are potential human beings.

It's important to note (despite the hair-trigger vitriol with which some commenters at the Wired site respond) that Sandel is here not laying out his own position. He is attempting to describe the positions of others, in a way which shows respect for both sides. And he does a fair job of it.

The second section of the column addresses the real reason why he wrote the whole thing: To call the bluff of the Bush administration on the issue, because in their handling of it so far they have (as usual, hence unsurprisingly) demonstrated a shameless amoral hypocrisy:

...it is a striking feature of the president's position that, while restricting the funding of embryonic stem cell research, he has made no effort to ban it. To adapt a slogan from the Clinton administration, the Bush policy might be summarized as "don't fund, don't ban." But this policy is at odds with the notion that embryos are human beings.

If harvesting stem cells from a blastocyst were truly on a par with harvesting organs from a baby, then the morally responsible policy would be to ban it, not merely deny it federal funding. If some doctors made a practice of killing children to get organs for transplantation, no one would take the position that the infanticide should be ineligible for federal funding but allowed to continue in the private sector. In fact, if we were persuaded that embryonic stem cell research were tantamount to infanticide, we would not only ban it but treat it as a grisly form of murder and subject scientists who performed it to criminal punishment.

Got that? Sandel is telling Bush (and his subordinates) to put up or shut up: If it's truly immoral to harvest stem cells in this manner, then at least have the cojones to make it illegal as well. Sandel concludes:

Rather than simply complain that the president's stem cell policy allows religion to trump science, critics should ask why the president does not pursue the full implications of the principle he invokes.

If he does not want to ban embryonic stem cell research, or prosecute stem cell scientists for murder, or ban fertility clinics from creating and discarding excess embryos, this must mean that he does not really consider human embryos as morally equivalent to fully developed human beings after all.

But if he doesn't believe that embryos are persons, then why ban federally funded embryonic stem cell research that holds promise for curing diseases and saving lives?

To which the only response we can offer, really, is: Amen.

Labels: bioethics, Bush administration, embryonic stem cells, philosophy, stem cells

It would be hard for me to admire Elizabeth Edwards more. She is one brave, classy lady, who seems determined to turn her personal bad news (she has incurable cancer) into good news for just about everybody else. First, she talked her husband, John Edwards, into continuing his run for President despite his concerns for her health, and now she's publicly advocating more federal funding for stem cell research. As CNN reports:

In her first public speech since announcing last Thursday that her breast cancer had returned, Elizabeth Edwards appealed Monday for more federal funding for health research of all kinds, including stem-cell research.

"I think that we're foolhardy to not be engaging in federal funding of stem-cell research in the most aggressive way we possibly can," the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards of North Carolina told a luncheon meeting of supporters at the City Club of Cleveland.

The reason the issue has become so controversial is largely because people don't understand it, she said.

"If people think that you're throwing babies out, dissecting children, to do stem-cell research, I'm not for that," said Edwards, who had accepted the speaking invitation before receiving her diagnosis of Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer...Edwards noted that stem-cell work uses blastocysts containing clumps of 16 or 32 cells that were collected by fertility clinics but are no longer needed and would otherwise be thrown away.

[Although] some opponents of the work believe that life begins at conception and that using stem cells is tantamount to killing a human, Edwards said, "We're talking about using something to save ourselves and our children. Instead of throwing it away, don't we want to use it in a way that's productive?"

Thank you, Elizabeth. We sincerely hope your treatments guarantee you many more years to enjoy your family and continue your good works.

Find a copy of Elizabeth's book here.

Read entire article.

Labels: beginning of human life, Elizabeth Edwards, stem cell research, stem cells

Today's Tallahassee Democrat includes an op-ed column by Bernard Siegel of the Genetics Policy Institute. Headlined "Charlie Crist's stem-cell dilemma," the column rightly takes the Governor to task for his colorless stand on embryonic stem-cell research:

When President Bush dashed patients' hopes last July by vetoing the bill to lift funding restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research, then-gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist signaled his support for the science, saying he disagreed with the veto. But he was silent as to whether he supported Florida's funding embryonic stem-cell research.

Gov. Crist last month announced his support for a modest proposal that called for $20 million in funding for adult, amniotic-fluid cell and embryonic stem-cell research limited to the stem-cell lines approved by President Bush back in 2001.

Modest indeed, as such a measure simply duplicates federal policy and fails to meet the urgent unmet need - the funding of new embryonic cell lines.

Crist (whose approval rating is currently quite high, even among moderates) here embodies the dilemma faced by many elected officials: In order to win a general election -- and barring any extraordinary circumstances, as 9/11 afforded the current occupant of the White House -- politicians must seem firmly in the center of almost any controversial issue. During the 2006 gubernatorial campaign, Crist apparently positioned himself to the left of the Republican party line on the issue. See, for example, this article from the Lakeland Ledger, dated August 2006:

Crist -- whose father, a retired doctor, now suffers from a progressive eye disease -- hopes that research will soon be able to go forward without destroying embryos. Meanwhile, the state attorney general expresses lukewarm support for spending money on it with current technology.

"I'm not opposed to it," Crist said in a recent interview. "It's important that we continue to advance technologically and medically to help people."

At the time, then-Attorney General Crist was engaged in what turned out to be a not-very-close primary campaign for the GOP nomination. If you were a moderate of either party, you could project into the above passage a tentative step into the 21st century by a politician not afraid to confront the conventional wisdom of what a Republican "should" believe. If you were a conservative, on the other hand, you might see in those two paragraphs a coded message of reassurance. There was the "lukewarm," and there was the "not opposed to it" -- at least one full step short of "support it."

As Siegel's column points out, now that he's in the Governor's Mansion Crist can't have it both ways. He can support the party line (which might be summarized as "First, do as little as possible" (not exactly the Hippocratic principle you want your doctor to embrace), or he can say, in effect, Look, this is ridiculous: Let's do everything in our power to help those who are already desperately ill and those who may become desperately ill in the future.

But fence-sitting creates merely the illusion of evenhandedness, at the expense of suffering severe pain in the part of a guy's body where he wants least to suffer any pain at all (let alone the severe kind).

C'mon, Charlie. Hop off the fence onto the side of common sense and decency, away from ideology. It'll help you in the long run (as well as your dad, and the dads and moms and sisters and brothers of countless Floridians in the future).

Labels: Charlie Crist, Florida, medical research, stem cells

As if the struggle to obtain government funding for embryonic stem-cell research wasn't already difficult enough, The Center for American Progress had this on March 1st:

Ongoing stem cell research and cloning debates in Kansas and other states highlight a new frontier in the stem cell debate: attempts to define scientific terms for political advantage.

The federal government’s inaction has left a void in overarching scientific guidelines and regulation. State-level opponents of stem cell research are trying to fill that void with altered scientific terminology that conflates human beings and embryos and overbroad definitions of human cloning. These efforts to politically define complicated biological terms often results in ill-conceived laws that satisfy neither opponents nor supporters, confuse scientists attempting to pursue research in the state, and may even create legal problems for those attempting to conduct cooperative studies across state lines.

Two recent bills passed out of committee in the Kansas House of Representatives are particularly egregious examples of the political manipulation of scientific terminology. Advocates of the first bill, H.B. 2098, claim it is an attempt “to define terms related to human cloning.” Yet in reality, it’s an attempt to politically redefine terms to help opponents of stem cell research.

The companion bill H.B. 2255 is a demonstration of just this strategy. Using identical definitions to those in H.B. 2098, the bill seeks to ban public funding for “human cloning to create a cloned embryo,” defined as SCNT.

Even ignoring the ban on funding for SCNT, which would subvert the will of the people of Kansas and prevent scientists in the state from pursuing cures with the best tools available, the bill is simply a poor piece of legislation. It defines an embryo as “the developing organism from the time of fertilization until significant differentiation has occurred, when the organism becomes known as a fetus or an organism in the early stages of development.” This definition, when considered alongside other references to the “human organism” in the bill, seems intended to blur the line between human beings and embryos.

Unfortunately, the vagueness of the definition also blurs the distinction between a fetus and an embryo. The legislation could be read as stripping away protections for what scientists consider an early stage fetus because it would legally be considered an embryo in Kansas. Certainly the proponents of this bill would not intend this effect, and neither opponents nor proponents of the legislation would condone weakening research protections for the fetus. But by relying on politics instead of science when defining technical terms, legislators may open the door to a whole host of unintended consequences, such as making fetuses more vulnerable to potentially harmful research.

Read the entire article here.

Labels: cloning, embryonic, stem cell research, stem cells

Here's another reason to support stem-cell research:

Stefan Heller's dream is to someday find a cure for deafness.

As a leader in stem cell-based research on the inner ear at the Stanford University School of Medicine, he's got a step-by-step plan for making this dream a reality.

It may take another decade or so, but if anyone can do it, he's the guy to place your bets on.

"Everyone asks, 'How long before we do this?'" said Heller, PhD, associate professor of otolaryngology, whose accent still bears the trace of his native Germany. "I tell them the devil is in the details."

But even at the national level, those in the research community remain hopeful that Heller's work will reap successes sooner rather than later. Heller will discuss his stem cell research during a panel discussion Feb. 17 in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The session is titled "Hearing health: The looming crisis and what can be done about it."

James Battey, MD, director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, lauded Heller as "one of the leading auditory neuroscientists" and points to his stem cell regeneration research as a high priority for the institute.

Heller's vision is to develop a variety of possible cures for deafness. For the past year and a half, since coming to Stanford from Harvard, he's been focused on two paths: drug therapy -which could be as simple as an application of ear drops - and stem cell transplantation into the inner ear to remedy hearing loss.

Currently he's working on perfecting the steps toward eventual stem cell transplantation into humans, with the goal of first curing deafness in mice within the next five years.

Read the entire article on BBS News. There's even a picture of a female embryonic stem cell.

Labels: embryonic stem cell, hearing impaired, stem cells