Bush’s bioethicist on stem cell alternatives

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The final alternative was in a way also a kind of reprogramming, a modified nuclear transfer. This is [Stanford bioethicist] Bill Hurlbut’s proposal. It’s since morphed into modified nuclear transfer but using oocytes for the insertion of these genetically altered nuclei. The idea there is to produce something which is not an embryo, but from which you can either derive pluripotent stem cells by growth to a certain point, or in the new modified version, you’re putting this nucleus into an egg, and the egg, we know, is capable of reprogramming a somatic cell — witness Dolly — and presumably you could get this to go directly to a stem cell.

I think that the council was divided on this. The majority of us favored allowing this to proceed in animals at this time, but there were people who found the original altered nuclear transfer program raising at least as many ethical questions as it solved. I myself am one of the people willing to see this go forward in animals.

But if I’m a betting man, I’m betting on the thing we talked about at first, which is the reprogramming. It’s ethically neat, it doesn’t require genetic engineering, it doesn’t require eggs, and it can be done with the existing eligible-for-federal-funds cell lines that scientists are now using. And these very promising and exciting results from three independent laboratories over the last few months make me think that we’re going to hear an awful lot about this.

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Here would be my bottom line, and I say this not because I’m interested in influencing the vote about anything, but simply thinking about this as a moral and cultural question: Wouldn’t it be wonderful if scientific ingenuity, mindful of the fact that the research is in fact ethically controversial, comes to the table and says, “Look, we’re going to find a way to get exactly what we want scientifically, in a morally uncontroversial and unproblematic way that all of our fellow citizens can enthusiastically support, and that will not leave a bitterly divided polity.” I think any decent, public-spirited person should say, “Blessings upon that approach.”

This is not to say everybody should stop what they’re doing and do this. But I think it’s an embarrassment when scientists, because they suspect that some people are using this for political purpose, might for their own political purposes be badmouthing what are scientifically reasonable propositions. All of these proposals now have scientists trying to do them. All of them.

MSNBC: Most scientists feel that reprogramming a person’s own cells to create a cure is the desired endpoint. I suppose the differences come in how you get to that endpoint — what research avenues you pursue to gain the understanding about how these cells work their magic, and how far you can go morally and ethically while getting that scientific result.

Kass: Absolutely right, and there are lots of different approaches. There are some people who think what you have to do is to isolate the soluble cellular factors in an egg that are responsible for the reprogramming, or that are responsible for keeping the initial nucleus in its undifferentiated state. There are other people who think, “Look, we don’t to begin with need to have the factors isolated, we simply have to re-create the environment, and if we can do it reproducibly, we’ll eventually get the isolated factors. But in the meantime ... you might still be able, without having the biochemical mechanisms worked out, to get adult cells from any individual with any particular makeup you please, to revert to functional stemness by these processes of cell fusion.

I myself see no ethical problems whatsoever in proceeding to do that right now.

On the political repercussions of the council's report:

Kass: We had absolutely no idea that people would pick this up and it would somehow tie into the ongoing debate about the president’s policy and that legislation.

There are people who will say that this was just an attempt to divert attention. That’s a slander. Precisely because our charge as a council is indeed to think about ways in which we can have all of the benefits of biomedical science and uphold the highest moral principles of our society, we would be remiss in not showing the larger public that there might be just such ways.

We were fulfilling our responsibility, and to say that we were somehow trying to subvert the efforts of scientists to get more federal funding for what they’d like to do is as much a calumny as the people who say the scientists really want federal funding because they really enjoy killing embryos. The one charge is as unfair as the other.

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