Science: Stem cells and the overlap of technology and morality

As a molecular biologist, the embryonic stem cell debate was a difficult one. Possible cures on one hand; moral problems on the other.

Scientists as a group hunger for new knowledge. On the positive side, they dedicate their careers to the progress of their respective fields. Their personal traits are dogged determination to figure out why this experiment failed and how another approach might push back the boundaries of the unknown. As a group they exhibit all the worst of human behavior in pettiness and ego just like any other group in any other profession. But at its best, it is filled with the joy and wonder of discovery, passion and commitment to truth.

As we expand the boundaries of what we know, scientists began to push into territory where morality was standing in the embryonic stem cell technology.

Do we destroy existing embryos to find cures?

Do we deliberately make embryos to destroy them to advance the research?

If scientific progress is the end all and be all why not?

Is there a line where thou shalt not pass?

One of the tenants of human subjects research is informed consent. Researchers have to defend their work on scientific merits but also must show they are not taking advantages of their subjects. Proper consent and confidentiality procedures that pass review committees are required by law for research on human subjects to occur. Violations of such are severely punished.

The default position is that if consent is not given either because the subject opts out or is incapable of consent then that subject is ruled out as a subject for human subjects research.

Thus, the moral problem with embryos: they are incapable of consent. People say well the parents of the embryo can give consent. Is that just?

There are unfortunately people who are alive only because medical devices keep them alive. They have no capacity to consent. Should they be used for research?

President Bush tried to find a Solomon like solution for the Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Critics blasted him for stopping the progress of science and for imposing morality by putting some barriers up.

Well, it would appear that new advances may have cleared up the morally murky world of embryonic stem cell research by mooting the need for them.

The new breakthrough is the ability to de-differentiate adult cells into a more naive state possibly eliminating the need for embryonic stem cells.

To read about the societal and political significance of this, see this item from Charles Krauthammer who is a paralyzed from the waist down and could potentially benefit from research in stem cells.

Here is a WaPo article about the science behind it.

Excerpt:

Researchers in Wisconsin and Japan said yesterday that they have turned ordinary human skin cells into what are effectively embryonic stem cells without using embryos or women's eggs -- the previously essential ingredients that have embroiled the medically promising field in a nearly decade-long political and ethical debate.

The ability to turn adult cells into embryo-like ones capable of morphing into virtually every kind of cell or tissue, described in two scientific journal articles yesterday, has been a major goal of researchers for years. In theory, it would allow people to grow personalized replacement parts for their bodies from their skin cells and give researchers a powerful means of understanding and treating diseases.

Until now, only human egg cells and embryos, both difficult to obtain and laden with legal and ethical issues, had the mysterious power to turn ordinary cells into stem cells. And until this summer, the challenge of mimicking that process in the lab seemed almost insurmountable, leading many to wonder whether stem cell research would ever unload its political baggage.

As news of the success spread in recent days, stem cell scientists seemed almost giddy that their field could suddenly become like other areas of biomedical science: appreciated, eligible for federal funding and wide open for new waves of discovery.
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Many teams had been racing to be first to create human embryonic stem cell equivalents without embryos after researchers in June succeeded with mice. Yet scientists around the world agreed that nobody deserved to win that race more than the two competing scientists who did: James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who first isolated stem cells from 5-day-old human embryos, and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, who led the recent effort to obtain mouse stem cells without embryos.

Thomson, a shy and laconic laboratory researcher whose 1998 discovery made him the focus of religious opprobrium and repeated congressional hearings, expressed relief that he may now be able to work without being at the center of what had become America's other abortion debate.

"What a great bookend," Thomson said in an interview. "Ten years of turmoil and now this nice ending. I can relax now."

Yamanaka also expressed relief -- and surprise, upon learning that others were so close on his heels.

"Many people in other labs were kind enough to tell me they were working on it," he said. "But I did not know they had actually generated" the cells.

Thomson's and Yamanaka's reports were released online yesterday by the journals Science and Cell, respectively.

Human embryonic stem cells, from days-old embryos, can multiply without limit and also develop into all of the 200 or so types of cells that make up the body. But because extracting them typically destroys the embryo, experiments with them have been attacked by those who believe that even the earliest stages of human life have moral standing.

An alternative way of making the cells, in which scientists fuse a skin cell to an egg cell whose own DNA has been removed, proved that egg cells harbor chemicals that can turn adult cells into embryonic ones, apparently by turning key genes on or off. But this method, too, raised concerns because large-scale harvesting of eggs from women can be medically risky and exploitative.

The dream of doing in a lab dish what an egg cell does naturally began to come true in June, when Yamanaka's team identified four genes in mouse skin cells that, when operating at high levels together, can turn countless other genes on and off in just the right pattern to make skin cells almost indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells. Yamanaka put copies of those four genes into retroviruses, Trojan-horse-like viruses that insert their genetic payloads into the DNA of cells they infect. Once infected, the skin cells took on virtually all the characteristics of embryonic ones.