Stem cell research is wrong
Larry Goldstein is perturbed with George W. Bush. The scientist at the University of California San Diego suggests that the president’s restrictions on stem-cell research are standing in the way of medical progress.
Goldstein, a professor of cellular and molecular biology, is testing a theory that could someday lead to new drugs for Alzheimer’s patients, he told Copley News Service. He has tested his theory on fruit flies and mice. And now he needs to test it on human brain cells.
If only that scientific Luddite in the White House wouldn’t make it so difficult.
But President Bush is not stopping Goldstein, or any other scientist, from conducting stem cell research. That is, as long as the research uses adult stem cells or one or more of the 78 existing embryonic stem cell lines the president authorized three years ago.
However, if a scientist wants to conduct medical experiments using embryonic stem cells that are not among the 78 existing lines authorized by Bush, he or she must do so without federal funding.
And although Goldstein suggested that the White House restrictions are a hardship on medical researchers like himself, he has managed to make ends meet. Indeed, he has obtained much of his research money from the private Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he told CNS. So he is free to experiment on the stem cells of human embryos, however inhumane that may be.
Yet, Goldstein, like many of his fellow scientists, insists that Bush is doing a disserve to patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, diabetes and other degenerative diseases by refusing to allow taxpayer subsidies of embryonic stem cell research.
And their sentiments are shared by at least 58 U.S. senators, who sent the president a letter last week urging him to loosen restrictions on such research, which involves the destruction of day-old embryos.
The lawmakers even invoked the name of the much-mourned Ronald Reagan, who went gently into the good night last week after his long struggle with Alzheimer’s.
“This issue is especially poignant given President Reagan’s passing,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., one of the letter’s authors. “Embryonic stem cell research might hold the key to a cure for Alzheimer’s and other terrible diseases.”
And Nancy Reagan, God bless her, apparently agrees. Because she also urged Bush to lift restrictions on embryonic stem cell research — notwithstanding recent confessions of stem cell experts that such research is unlikely to produce a cure for Alzheimer’s, as Rick Weiss reported in The Washington Post.
It is unknown how a healthy Ronald Reagan himself would feel today about embryonic stem cell research. But the Reagan who sat in the Oval Office almost certainly would have agreed with President Bush, who this week refused again to lift restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, who finds the harvesting of embryonic stem cells morally repugnant. Reagan did, after all, sign an executive order banning fetal tissue research.
Meanwhile, adult stem cells are a non-controversial alternative to embryonic stem cell research that requires no destruction of human embryos.
Stem cell researchers have previously suggested that adult stem cells were not as useful as embryonic stem cells because they could not make every tissue type.
But scientist Catherine Verfaillie laid that argument to rest when she and her team at the University of Minnesota Medical School isolated a stem cell from adult bone marrow that can produce all tissue types.
So there really is no need to harvest stem cells from aborted fetuses or embryos “donated” by fertility patients. And there is no need for the federal government to fund medical experiments using embryonic stem cells.
Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at Joseph.Perkins@UnionTrib.com.