Stem cell pioneer does a reality check

Q: I know you’ve given a lot of thought to the moral questions and the issues that the opponents of this research bring up. People who have questions about the research would ask, “Is it really worth it to go down this long road where we don’t see cures just over the horizon, and we’re using components of human life?”

A: You have to take the other point of view seriously. Nonetheless, the bottom line is that there are 400,000 frozen embryos in the United States, and a large percentage of those are going to be thrown out. Regardless of what you think the moral status of those embryos is, it makes sense to me that it’s a better moral decision to use them to help people than just to throw them out. It’s a very complex issue, but to me it boils down to that one thing.

If you really explain what’s happening – that these frozen embryos are ultimately going to be thrown out – almost everybody except those that have to keep to some kind of party line will say, “What’s the problem with this? We should go forward with this.”

That’s separate from creating embryos. That offends a lot more people, and I can understand why. You’re creating something that’s a tool, and you’re making a tool out of this thing. I haven’t seen polls, but just in my personal conversations, using things that are about to be thrown out offends almost no one, including fairly devout Catholics – whereas actually making something into a tool offends a much larger percentage of the population.

From a public policy point of view, it makes a lot of sense to separate these two issues. Part of what’s happening, and the reason why things kind of stalled, is that nuclear transfer and therapeutic cloning was intermixed with trying to make new cell lines from pre-existing embryos. They’re very separable. There are some scientific reasons why nuclear transfer and therapeutic cloning might have merit, but most of the value of this technology can be captured simply by making cell lines with existing embryos. There’s a diminishing return the more deeply you get into it, and if society is not quite ready for both – well, at least take the one where there’s a great advantage now and move on with it.

So what Congress did recently and what the Senate is trying to do is a good thing and would actually help a lot. I hope President Bush reconsiders his veto. It would change the field dramatically.

Q: The people who use nuclear transfer generally say that the technique is optimized for producing the stem cells rather than making babies. They would not want to equate this with the process that produces embryos that were fit for implantation, and they’d argue that they’re using the reproductive process differently …

FREE VIDEO South Korea makes stem cell advance May 19: Scientists in South Korea are able to create human life at will, cloning embryos in a dish until stem cells can be extracted. NBC's Robert Bazell reports. Nightly News

A: See, you’re trying to define it away, and it doesn’t work. If you create an embryo by nuclear transfer, and you give it to somebody who didn’t know where it came from, there would be no test you could do on that embryo to say where it came from. It is what it is.

It’s true that they have a much lower probability of giving rise to a child. … But by any reasonable definition, at least at some frequency, you’re creating an embryo. If you try to define it away, you’re being disingenuous.

Q: One of the facets of nuclear transfer research is that you get around the tissue rejection issue, and you have the genetic makeup tailored to the patient. That was one of the implications of the research coming out of South Korea. How do you address those issues with frozen embryos? Does it go back to the idea of stem cells as a means of learning about the human body rather than being strictly used for transplantation?

A: Well, it goes back to both. … There’s a mismatch between how close we are to clinical applications and the nuclear transfer work. If the therapeutic applications were ready to go today, nuclear transfer would probably make a pretty big impact. … The trouble is that most of these transplantation therapies are going to take a while to get to, and my personal guess is that there will be other technologies that go around the need for nuclear transfer. But it’s a personal guess, I may be wrong. So my own lab looks at other things.

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