Realizing Potential: Let’s Find Middle Ground in the Stem Cell Debate

I have a confession to make.  I am in favor of embryonic stem cell research.  I know I’m not supposed to be.  I know, as a good Republican, I should have grave bioethical concerns about destroying a human embryo to generate a line of stem cells for study.  I know I should subscribe to the slippery slope logic that says the next step after ES cell manipulation is human cloning and that this is all getting dangerously close to playing God.  But I’ve weighed the arguments (a simple intro to the debate can be found here), I’ve looked at the potential benefits of stem cell research (most recent good news here), and I’ve decided that we as a society have a moral imperative to conduct ES cell research, not a moral imperative to restrict it.
Here’s confession number two: I do believe the bioethical concerns surrounding ES cell research have validity.  I do believe we should take them into account.  And I do believe that we should try to move away from ES cells, eventually.
Stay with me on this one.
Too often we paint the stem cell debate in black and white terms.  Either you’re against stem cells and you hate scientific progress, or you’re for stem cells and you don’t value the early stages of life.  This is about as silly as Anti-Choice and Anti-Life posturing on abortion (but that’s a topic for another day).  Liberals seem to be especially guilty of this, sometimes going so far as to insinuate that moral concerns about stem cells are completely baseless and that only crazed religious zealots have qualms about ES cell research.  This, of course, is ridiculous, and some of the top stem cell researchers in the world, including Shinya Yamanaka, have admitted that destroying human embryos gives them pause.  Portraying stem cell opponents as uninformed or uneducated is as deleterious to the discussion as calling liberals socialist.
There is also the very important point that not all stem cells are created equal.  The Washington Post recently reported on the newest method for making somatic cells (say, skin cells) act like embryonic stem cells.  The new method, which utilizes modified RNA to “reprogram” cells and create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, is just the latest advancement in iPS cell techniques.  Small molecule reprogramming is another method that has shown promise, and should not be ignored.  The science behind all of these developments is complicated, but suffice it to say that researchers here at Harvard and elsewhere are making strides in literally making stem cells.
Great.  So we should abandon ES cell research and all of the accompanying political and ethical headaches and focus on iPS cells, right?  Not quite.  Put simply, iPS cells are not yet as good as ES cells, and they are certainly not as far down the decades long pipeline from discovery to treatment.  The potential of ES cell therapies (no pun intended) is too great to hold back while we wait for a less controversial technology to catch up.  Instead, both ES cells and iPS cells should be studied and developed freely and without restriction on federal funding, which, lets be honest, drives scientific research in this country.  In addition, umbilical chord blood banking should be encouraged and incentivized, as it too represents another piece of the stem cell puzzle.  Really, the onus lays on Congress, whatever its makeup a month from now, to provide clarity on the stem cell issue, and to allow innovation to proceed without restriction.
The question I hope you’re asking after I just suggested we fund all aspects of stem cell research is: isn’t that more expensive?  The short answer is: yes.  The more subtle addition is: not by as much as you might think.

In the basement of Harvard’s Northwest Labs is a veritable warehouse of scientific gizmos.  Scanners, readers, sorters, spinners, robots.  They’re all down there.  Millions of dollars of equipment.  Much of it federally funded.  Some of them bear a bright green sticker: hES cell approved.  Want to use a spectrophotometer to quantify a fluorescent tag of a specific gene in the line of human embryonic stem cells you’re studying?  You better hope you see one of those stickers.  If there isn’t one, or worse, if there is a red sticker, you have to come up with the private funds to buy a new machine.  An identical machine.  The machine you already have.  This is the kind of gross wastefulness that ill-advised government policies produce.
On a deeper level, yes, funding stem cell research is expensive.  But these are the types of things we need to be spending on.  Now more than ever, America has to rely on its greatest strengths: the ability to innovate and the ability to lead.  If we end up developing some life saving treatments in the process, I must confess, I’m alright with that.
If you want to read an in depth look at small molecule reprogramming and the accompanying political questions, check out my essay here.
Photo Credit: http://www.grtl.org/newsarchive.asp