What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
Stem Cell Wars
204 members of the US House of Representatives and 58 Senators have written letters to President Bush asking him to relax his ban on federal funds for embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). The President has all but been accused of single-handedly standing in the way of curing terrible human diseases. The morality of using embryonic stem cells (ESCs) is straightforward. It kills human beings for the benefit of others. Humans have found it convenient to rationalize treating others as less than human, e.g., American Indians, African Americans, the Tuskegee experiment in which blacks infected with syphilis were denied available medication and allowed to die to study the progression of the disease, and of course the Nazi experiments in concentration camps. ESCR is the creation of human life solely for its destruction. It values humanity only as pharmaceutical fodder. Humans may never be destroyed for the benefit of others. This is not a stand against scientific advancement. At best science can discover what is, not what ought to be. Ripping apart the product of human conception invokes images of Nazi eugenicist Josef Mengele. Whatever scientific discoveries he made were at the violation of other human beings. This is the situation with ESCR exactly. There is no morally relevant stage of development of a fertilized ovum and a senior citizen when it is not human.
Apart from the immorality of ESCR it has not demonstrated that it is practical scientifically. Not one person has ever been cured of anything through use of ESCs. There are currently no human trials utilizing ESCs and there may be none for at least ten years. One reason is difficulties in establishing and maintaining stable cell lines. ESCs are subject to genetic instability. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has shown that over time ESC lines develop severe chromosomal anomalies, including a form of cell change found in some cancers. Writers Cowan and Melton in the NEJM noted that ESCs spontaneously develop genetic abnormalities in culture, a problem that will prevent any clinical use of these cells in humans for a long time to come.
ESCR is infested with problems in obtaining pure cultures in laboratories. Many ESC lines are contaminated with mouse cells that could introduce disease in humans. There are problems with immune rejection. The body rejects them just as it does donated organs
They have a nasty tendency to produce malignant tumors. In animal studies ESCs injected into mice caused more than 20% of them to die of brain tumors. Transplanted ESCs have sometimes spontaneously differentiated into a disorganized mass of neurons, cartilage and muscle; sometimes into teratomas (tumors) containing an eye, hair or even teeth.
Ian Wilmut, science advisor to the Genetics Policy Institute of the UN, wrote that cloning is probably useless for treating juvenile diabetes, lupus, and other autoimmune diseases, where the body’s immune system attacks its own cells as though they were foreign and that transfer of immunologically identical cells to a patient is expected to induce the same rejection. So cloning is an irrelevant treatment for conditions publicized by celebrity spokespersons: Parkinson’s (Michael J. Fox), Alzheimer’s (Nancy Reagan), spinal-cord injury (Christopher Reeve), and juvenile diabetes (Mary Tyler Moore). Dr. D.G. McKay, stem-cell researcher at the National Institute for Neurological Diseases and Stroke, termed the prospect of curing with ESCs Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and spinal cord injuries “a fairly tale.” Particularly poignant is the case of the grieving Nancy Reagan who has become a spokesperson for ESCR to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. Dr. Kelly Hollowell has stated, “The fact is ESCR will never provide such a cure…. Alzheimer’s is a whole brain disease…. Alzheimer’s is an unlikely candidate for treatment. Alzheimer’s disease doesn’t affect a subset of cells that could be replaced with targeted ES cells.”
ESCR suffers insurmountable difficulties in obtaining the huge number of human eggs the procedure requires and would be outrageously expensive. A National Academy of Science report estimated that it could cost in the neighborhood of $200,000 to pay for the human eggs to derive a single ESC line. Frozen embryos in IVF clinics, estimated to be about 400,000, would not rescue ESCR. Only 3% of these, or 12,000, are available for research. But even if all were used they could produce about 275 lines of stem cells, not 1,000s or 100,000s needed. In the May issue of Scientific American Robert Lanza and Nadia Rosenthal reported that the actual therapeutic use of ESCs would be hampered by immune-rejection problems that could be overcome only by cell treatments compatible with the immune systems of the patients. “Hundreds of thousands of ES-cell lines might be needed to establish a bank of cells with immune matches for most potential patients.” ESC therapies could require lifelong use of drugs to overcome tissue rejection.
ESCs have in their favor only a theory of greater plasticity (ability to develop into more kinds of cells), which is decaying as adult stem cells (ASCs) are morphing into practically all types of cells. Going against ESCs are ethical concerns and the fact that they are light years behind ASCs in commercial applications. In 2001 there was an announcement that ESCs could be made into blood cells and the publicity that that generated would make one think that science had discovered fire. Adult stem cells (ASCs) derived from patients themselves have been differentiating into blood cells since 1971 with scarcely any publicity. The noted stem cell research pioneer, John Gearhart stated that ESCs in the end will not be used in therapies and that ASCs are “where I see the future now.”
Meanwhile adult stem cells without fanfare in the media look very promising in overcoming diseases. More than 30 anticancer uses for ASCs have been tested on humans with many already in routine therapeutical use.
The area in which ASCs are moving fastest is autoimmune disease in which the body’s protective system turns on itself. Diseases currently being tested for ASC therapies include diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, Evans syndrome, rheumatic disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
French researchers reported that ASCs repair damage in muscle and other tissues. At a 2002 conference they reported that they had performed 69 stem-cell transplants with an 85% disease-free survival rate. ASCs have been injected into damaged hearts and become functional muscle. Four out a group of five Brazilian heart-failure patients no longer needed heart transplants after being treated with their own stem cells. Research has also wrecked the notion that brain tissue cannot regenerate.
Catherine Verfaillie and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota’s Stem Cell Institute have found stem cells in marrow that convert into all three germ layers. Dr. David Hess, a neurologist at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, commenting on this research, said, “They [ASCs] give rise to every cell in the body. She seems to have a subpopulation with basically all the benefits of ESCs and none of the drawbacks.”
ASC studies already have enabled quadriplegic animals to walk. Dennis Turner of California is apparently the first human to be treated with his own brain stem cells for Parkinson’s. The condition which was expected to disable him has instead gone into substantial remission. So if Christopher Reeves wants to walk again present day science should move him to promote ASCR.
Type 1 diabetes has been cured in mice using human spleen cells. Adult islet cells have reversed juvenile diabetes in hundreds of patients in clinical trials in research done in Edmonton, Alberta. Of the 250 patients who have received the newest version of the transplant more than 80% have been free from insulin shots or insulin pumps for more than a year. Researchers in Canada have shown that ASCs from bone marrow can cause pancreatic tissue to repair itself, restoring normal insulin production and reversing the symptoms of diabetes. The research team has reversed diabetes in mice and hopes to move to human trials. Media reports that ESCs provide the best hope for curing diabetes are wildly off the mark.
If ESCs are not curing anyone (and sometimes harming) and ASCs are curing and showing exciting promise of more, why is there a stem cell war? Ideology may have something to do with it. Some may not want embryos to enjoy the status of humanity because that would contradict their stance on abortion. Scientific hubris may be involved since some scientists think that they should be allowed to study anything without moral barriers. The Mengele strain is still strong among them. But more probably it is a matter of money. Not much private money is being devoted to ESCR because investors see the host of problems it has. That makes life difficult for Big Biotech and scientists who have betted their futures and fortunes on ESCR. They may be without jobs. The only other source of funds is the federal government.
Whatever may be the motivation for preferring ESCs which do not cure to ASCs that do there are no grounds for the hoopla and hype to promote ESCs. Especially reprehensible are those who tricked a grieving widow into thinking that ESCs promise a cure for Alzheimer’s. Would it be cruel and unusual punishment to inject them with ESCs?
St. Mary's Church Pastor & Vicar
