Stem cell funding renews debate
By GILL DONOVAN
NCR Staff
Reacting to the Aug. 23 announcement by the National Institutes of
Health that the U.S. government intends to begin providing funding for cell
experimentation using human embryos, and to the recommendation by Liam
Donaldson, the chief medical officer in Britain, that cloning of human embryos
should be allowed there for the purpose of obtaining such cells, bioethicists
are calling for a larger understanding of the social and ethical implications
of the research.
The moral obligation to save as many people as possible must
be considered in a very broad framework, said Thomas A. Shannon,
professor of religion and social ethics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Like all bioethical considerations, you cant argue it in a
vacuum.
Condemned by the Vatican as gravely immoral, the
research approved for U.S. funding involves the removal from embryos of
stem cells, so called because they have the potential to become any
of the bodys cells.
In England, scientists will now be allowed to clone embryonic
cells to obtain stem cells for research use.
The U.S. guidelines for those seeking federal funding stipulate
that embryos are to be taken only from among those discarded in fertility
treatments, and only after patients have consented to allowing their use for
research. The reproductive procedure known as in vitro fertilization often
produces spare embryos.
Federal law, furthermore, prohibits government-funded research
that requires destroying or harming embryos. As a way to circumvent the law,
National Institutes of Health guidelines require that stem cells first be
harvested by private laboratories and then taken to federally funded labs.
Daniel Perry of the Alliance for Aging Research has written that
approximately 128.4 million Americans could potentially benefit by treatments
derived from stem cell research for conditions such as diabetes,
Alzheimers, Parkinsons, heart disease, cancer, spinal cord injuries
or birth defects.
Cardinal Thomas Winning of Glasgow, chairman of the Bioethics
Committee of the Catholic Bishops of Great Britain and Ireland, explained the
churchs position in an Aug. 16 statement: Obtaining stem cells from
a human embryo is morally wrong because it involves the destruction of a human
life.
Some bioethicists take a different view. The three-day-old
embryo is not a single individual, Shannon said. You have human
nature in its basic form, but the biological prerequisites of a central nervous
system and individuality are missing.
The moral argument is not murder,
but killing
and not every act of killing is unjustified.
James J. Walter, who holds the Austin and Ann OMalley chair
in bioethics, at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said that in the
future people who receive therapies from stem-cell research might not have to
worry that they are becoming accomplices to an immoral act. The St. Louis
Archdiocesan Pro-Life Office has declared that using the hepatitis A vaccine,
which originates from cells of an aborted fetus, is acceptable because there
are no other alternatives to check the spread of the disease. Walter wonders if
this reasoning might someday apply to those who benefit from future
breakthroughs in stem cell research.
There may however be an alternative to using stem cells derived
from embryos in research, one the Vatican supports. A little more than a year
ago it was discovered that stem cells taken from adults, most often from an
adults bone marrow, could prove to be a viable alternative. The
issue now, is into how many cell types can adult cells be differentiated. We
wont know that until the research is done, said Walter, noting that
Johns Hopkins and George Washington University have made significant progress
in such research.
Thomas H. Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a medical
ethics research center in Garrison, N.Y., believes that both forms of research
should go forward. The answer is that we simply dont know if adult
stem cells will turn out to be as useful. Youd be putting things off for
years, if not decades. Murray is a member of President Clintons
National Bioethics Advisory Commission that recommended federal funding be
approved for embryonic cell research.
Murray believes it will not be long before the cloning of embryos
for research purposes recently approved in Britain will be legal in the United
States as well. I would say within the next five to 10 years it will be
approved here. He said that his committee had not recommended that
cloning be approved to date because all safety concerns havent yet been
satisfied.
But the potential benefits of cloning stem cells are significant,
he said. Cloning cells and putting the materials back in the body will end the
risk of the bodys rejecting cells. Even if we dont permit
cloning for reproductive purposes we will certainly allow this kind of
research.
Edmund Fischer, who won the 1992 Nobel prize for medicine for work
in cellular research, responding to the churchs criticism of the work
with stem cells, said in an interview published Aug. 27 in Italys La
Repubblica, The condemnation of this research appears similar to that
which once confronted autopsy. Remember? The Catholic hierarchy was against the
study of the bodies of the dead and for some centuries persecuted doctors who
tried it.
According to Shannon, funding for embryo stem cell research must
be seen in a larger social context as well as an ethical one.
We are in the middle of a change in health care technology.
Part of rethinking health care in the United States is rethinking high tech
aspects. Millions have no health insurance -- we must see that as a context for
how we use funding.
Should we be putting our money in more preventive
kinds of things?
Gill Donovans e-mail address is
gdonovan@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, September 8,
2000
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