(New York Daily News, Wednesday, August 30th, 2006)—Would you be willing to donate a bit of your blood – or strand of your hair or baby tooth – if it could be used to help find a cure for Alzheimer’s, diabetes and Parkinson’s?
My guess is you’d be glad to – and no one would object, not even the Bush administration, because you’d be harming no one. You’d help humanity and go on your merry way.
Well, thanks to a scientific breakthrough announced last week, it turns out that embryos can do almost the same thing: They can give up a single cell to science while still going on to become a viable fetus. That cell can be grown into the holy grail of research: a new embryonic stem-cell line, the kind that holds such scientific promise.
How do I know this procedure doesn’t harm the baby? Because my own two sons were born after having a cell siphoned off them in the petri dish.
You’d think that this new reality would cause President Bush to jump for joy – or at least rationally reexamine his objections to funding new stem-cell research. And, of course, you’d be wrong. Because now that science seems to have satisfied his objections, his objections are galloping even further away.
In 2001, the President announced that the federal government would not fund research on any new embryonic stem-cell lines because this would “sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos.” He vetoed a stem-cell research bill this year – his first veto in office – for the same reason. Okay. Maybe he actually feels that microscopic cells are the same as people and decided to treat them accordingly. But now, those microscopic cells aren’t threatened anymore.
The new technique, developed by a company called Advanced Cell Technology, works this way: A tiny eight-cell “blastomere” is grown in a petri dish, as it would be for any in-vitro fertilization. At this superearly stage, one cell is removed. This does not kill the embryo the way the older method of harvesting stem cells did.
In fact, it’s the same technique commonly used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis, whereby one cell of an embryo is removed and tested to see if it’s carrying a disease.
That same single cell can, we now learn, be grown into two cells, with one used for testing and the other used to create a new stem-cell line. Thus you end up with three gifts: a viable embryo, a test to make sure the embryo is healthy and a new stem-cell line for science.
So what’s the problem?
“Any use of human embryos raises serious ethical concerns,” the White House is now saying. Note that the “destruction to human embryos” part has been dropped.
But if scientists are not hurting the embryos, why shouldn’t they study them the same way they study people like you and me?
The fact is: This technique holds great promise and does not harm potential life. New York University’s Dr. James Grifo, who pioneered preimplantation genetic diagnosis here, estimates there are 10,000 babies alive today who all started life minus one cell.
The President is not saving any lives with his contortions, only his reputation as a man at war with science.
New York Daily News