Unfortunately, federal policy has remained paralyzed; President Bush has been unwilling to reassess his restrictive five-year-old decision in light of new science and is threatening to veto a bill allowing federal funding for research on new stem-cell lines. Recent discoveries in stem-cell research should be enough to get politicians, not just mice, to start moving again. But don't hold your breath.
A lot has changed since President Bush restricted federal funding to research involving stem-cell lines derived before August 9, 2001. That day, President Bush said scientists would have access to more than 60 stem-cell lines in order to conduct research. Currently, only 21 are still usable. This number is likely to decrease even more in the future because stem-cell lines begin to develop chromosomal abnormalities over time. Worse yet, these lines are all contaminated by the mouse-feeder cells used to grow them, so they are unlikely to be acceptable for use in human beings.
Researchers have been hard at work to correct these problems, deriving new stem-cell lines that are far superior to the older lines that are eligible for federal funding. Scientists at Johns Hopkins determined how to derive uncontaminated stem-cell lines that could be safely used in human beings. As James Thomson, the first person to isolate human embryonic stem cells, reported in an article published in Nature Biotechnology, “[H]uman ES cell lines derived in defined conditions would be more directly applicable to clinical use than are cell lines derived in the presence of animal products.” The scientific community understands that newer stem-cell lines are better than older lines. During the past three years, Harvard University has sent 667 of its new stem-cell batches to labs around the world, while the main distributor of federally approved stem-cell lines has sent just 246.
Restricting American scientists to inferior lines has allowed foreign scientists to close the research gap. A report in Nature Biotechnology tracked a decrease in the American percentage of total scholarly articles published on embryonic stem-cell research between 2002 and 2004. The report concluded that there was a growing gap between the rate of international publication and that of U.S. publications, and that “with current trajectories, if things don't change, that gap is going to continue.”
The federal response to new developments in stem-cell research has been disappointing, especially considering that more than 70 percent of the American people support the research. Instead of updating the policy to allow research on newly derived stem-cell lines, President Bush and other conservatives have argued that we should focus on adult and cord blood stem-cell research -- which receive three times as much funding as embryonic stem-cell research -- and on inventing new means of deriving embryonic stem-cell lines that do not destroy embryos.
While there are certainly benefits to adult and cord blood stem-cell research, the successes have been exaggerated. Proponents of the administration's policy claim that adult and cord blood stem cells have been used to treat 65 diseases, but noted stem-cell researchers Shane Smith, Steven Teitelbaum, and William Neaves have determined that they were only used to treat nine different diseases. Furthermore, the scientific community agrees that embryonic stem cells hold greater promise for curing disease when compared to the less versatile adult and cord blood stem cells.
Meanwhile, developing alternative methods of deriving embryonic stem cells will take a tremendous amount of time and money. At a Senate committee hearing in June, National Institutes of Health (NIH) stem-cell expert James Battey said this research was “pie in the sky” and unlikely to lead to results in the near future. All that time and money could be better spent pursuing cures with embryonic stem cells.
Heeding these new discoveries about the state of American stem cell research, Congress has been working to update President Bush's policy. A bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives passed the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, which would allow federal funding for research on embryonic stem cell lines ethically derived from any of the more than 400,000 excess embryos in fertility clinics already slated to be discarded. The bill is also expected to pass the Senate, but President Bush has already stated he will use the first veto of his presidency to prevent our scientists from using the most effective stem-cell lines. Instead, he will sign two other bills that do not advance research but simply provide political cover. (One bill outlaws gestating embryos for research purposes, something no scientist wants to do, and the other bill allows the NIH to fund alternative means of obtaining stem cells without destroying embryos, which they already have the authority to do.) President Bush and his allies can claim they support stem-cell research while American scientists are left using inferior lines or seeking other places to conduct their research.
A cure for the political paralysis surrounding stem-cell policy is still desperately needed -- and clearly beyond scientists' ability to find alone.
Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor of Biomedical Ethics and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and director of the Progressive Bioethics Initiative. Sam Berger is a research assistant at the Center for American Progress.
TAP invites you to join the discussion on Gather.com.
You can join our group and comment on the article you just read.
