Therefore, I’ve had to do a little reading in order to understand and appreciate the scope of this issue. There really is a lot more to stem cell research than what gets reported in the news.
First, there are actually two avenues of stem cell research: embryonic and adult. In 2001, President Bush refused to allow federal funding be used to open up new strains of embryonic stem cells (ESC’s) for research. He has been under fire ever since, and advocates of ESC research continue to roll out celebrities — Mary Tyler Moore and Christopher Reeve, for example — to help turn public opinion in their favor.
What’s not getting told is that stem cell researchers, and those who benefit from that research, are getting what they need from adult stem cells (ASC’s). ASC’s are found in a variety of tissues in human beings of all ages, and are even plentiful in umbilical cord blood and placentas. (Source: Michael Fumento, “Out of touch,” Citizen, August, 2004.)
The importance of ASC’s is that scientists have learned to culture and grow them into an awesome array of human tissue that are used, for example, to treat various diseases, yield skin grafts, and perform bone-marrow transplants. Dr. Marc Hedrick of the UCLA School of Medicine explains “Adult stem cells are like babies who, when they grow up, can enter a variety of professions” and that ASC’s “can become many tissues by making certain changes in their environment.”
On the other hand, there are currently no medical therapies that involve ESC’s, and there are no human trials using them. Very few ESC’s have even made it to animal testing. Furthermore, ESC’s have a much higher tendency than ASC’s in certain situations to keep growing after implantation and become cancerous. ESC’s are also usually rejected by the recipient’s immune system. ASC’s are obviously not rejected when taken from the patient’s own body, and are rejected less often than ESC’s when transferred from one human to another.
Then there is the ethical side to the issue. ESC’s are obtained by dismantling human embryos that are either left over from in-vitro fertilization attempts or grown specifically for the purpose of deriving stem cells. Furthermore, ESC research contributes to human cloning, as both processes are identical up to the point of implantation into the womb.
So what, then, is the driving force behind ESC research? As it turns out, the success of ASC’s has dried up the well of private funding for ESC research, and this has led those researchers to turn to the taxpayers as a source of income. ESC research proponents have engaged in a campaign of misinformation whereby the promise of ESC’s has been overly embellished, while successes of ASC research have either been falsely spun or ignored altogether.
The media have become convinced the debate is between right-wing zealots and objective scientists, and that’s where politics enters the arena. As a result, the American people are being led to believe that medical science is missing out on a bonanza by not allocating more federal funds to ESC research, when we are actually realizing great potential from ASC’s.
Indeed, the field of stem cell research has become so politically polarized that most Americans are simply unaware of the underlying advancements that are being made in medicine. In the end, ASC research is already providing what ESC advocates are demanding. Because of this, there is no need for ESC researchers to “play God” by creating human embryos simply for their destruction. If only the facts weren’t obfuscated by politics, I believe both sides would be satisfied.
[...] the way, I published two columns on this topic in the Lebanon Democrat last year, “Media blur facts of stem cell research” (July 20) and “John Kerry, the healer” (October [...]