President Barack Obama added fuel to the fire of controversy surrounding the use of embryonic stem cells in research Monday when he lifted a Bush-era provision banning federal funding for such studies.
Obama’s executive order overturned former President Bush’s policy, which barred federal dollars from researchers using stem lines created after Aug. 9, 2001.
The president’s move further polarizes embryonic stem cell proponents and opponents in an ongoing ethical debate regarding their use.
Embryonic stem cells can morph into any of the body’s more than 200 cell types, including those that may be used to replace weak cells associated with Parkinson’s and
Alzheimer’s diseases and spinal cord injuries.
The cells’ illness-curing potential excites researchers, including those at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
But the embryos must first be destroyed, which troubles opponents who see it as taking a human life.
UNMC researchers have been working with cells harvested before Bush’s mandate took effect in 2001, but because the old stem lines were produced through an outdated process using animal proteins, the medical center is looking forward to receiving new ones.
Stephen Rennard, UNMC professor of medicine, “is very enthusiastic about the possibility of getting new cells” to replace the old stem lines he uses in his research on lung tissue. Using non-controversial adult cells, which embryonic opponents support, aren’t effective for his work, Rennard said.
David Crouse, UNMC’s associate vice chancellor for academic affairs, said Obama’s reversal will simplify funding and remove federal barriers that make studying embryonic stem cells difficult.
But until the National Institutes of Health’s guidelines are released, UNMC will have to sit tight, Crouse said.
Opponents to the research, however, aren’t playing the waiting game.
The Nebraska Coalition for Ethical Research has started an online petition encouraging the NU Board of Regents to keep Bush’s cutoff date in place.
The board’s current policy is to follow federal regulations. Regent Chuck Hassebrook said he didn’t know if Obama’s reversal will become an issue for the regents, but he said personally he’d like to see UNMC expand stem cell study.
NCER Executive Director Chip Maxwell said the coalition was “disappointed” with Obama’s shift.
“We’re worried that this announcement and this hoopla about it is going to draw attention and resources away from where the science is really going, where the world leaders say the future lies,” he said.
That future, Maxwell said, is in a process those leaders created called direct reprogramming, which adds four genes to human skin cells to morph them into what seems to be embryonic cells.
Crouse said some researchers at the medical center already use direct reprogramming. He said it’s “conceivable” that the method could even eventually wipe out the use of embryos.
But, he added, “There’s a huge amount left to be learned from embryonic stem cells,” to find more genes for direct reprogramming.
James Thomson, a University of Wisconsin researcher and one of the first to use embryonic stem cells, pioneered the direct reprogramming method at the same time Japanese professor Shinya Yamanaka was doing similar work on the other side of the globe.
Both Thomson and Yamanaka acknowledged the ethical problems of destroying human embryos for research in separate New York Times articles in 2007, saying it’s what led them to develop an alternative technique.
Their testimony, Maxwell said, is proof enough embryonic stem cell research should not be expanded.
Nebraska’s congressional representatives side with Maxwell against the growth of embryo use.
According to the Lincoln Journal Star, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry labeled the president’s change “a bailout for unsuccessful scientific ventures,” and Rep. Lee Terry blasted embryonic stem cell research as “inappropriate and immoral.”
And from there the battle rages on.
teresalostroh@dailynebraskan.com
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