Stem-cell research: ‘extreme’ science

“This (human embryo research) is not about the limits of human technology. It is about the limits of human wisdom.”

– Rep. David Wu, D- Ore.

Difficult as it may be to imagine a stem cell research lab as a place where people do much of anything but nap, earthshaking things are happening there in the vast world of cellular genetics too small for the eye to see. They are molecular things more “out there” than para-sailing off skyscrapers and skiing down Mt. Everest. New research in human tissue differentiation has us toddling around in the embryonic domain once walled off in the human womb, and vaulting to the frontiers of our ethics, our laws, and our beliefs.

Stem cell research and its evil cousin human cloning are “extreme” science, the scientific version of extreme sports. We are playing scientific games where there are no real rules and no one knows what is out of bounds, in a stadium where only God and Nature had played before. We have no idea what we are doing, yet we are doing it anyway, which, if one is ever necessary, could be the epitaph of the human race.

Into that arena last week stepped President George W. Bush to announce his decision about federal funding of stem cell research. Moments will probably not get any finer for this president than this decision and his speech about it last Thursday night. For a doctor the moment could be compared to that in which he or she steps onto the chaos surrounding a dying patient, sees death’s hook in the form of some unrecognized ailment, makes the right diagnosis and cuts the patient free with the right treatment to live another day. For the faithful seeking protection of the unborn above the needs of the living, and for the desperate seeking remedies for those slowly dying, it was a partial answer to prayers.

Acting as presidential as any of us might ever have wanted, Bush announced last week that federal funds for stem cell research will only go to research that uses existing stem cell lines. Taxpayer dollars will not be used to support research that requires further destruction of human embryos. He also announced the formation of a federal council on genetic research bioethics whose purpose is to guide debate on the issue, and to provide a forum for it and counsel on it.

Bush did not solve the dilemma of stem cell research, nor did he try to. Rather, he gave structure to the debate and set some limits on where it will surely go at the speed of scientific light. He said, in essence, that stem cell research could not take us to new frontiers without being tethered to a moral home. And that was the easy part for President Bush, and for the rest of us.

The issues being grown along with the stem cells are issues of science too important to be left to scientists, and fundamental issues of religion and God too important to be left to religious fundamentalists. They must be left to all of us, for they are our decisions, ones we have just started to make and which will become more personal as the research advances.

We are all going to need to play this extreme science sport because nothing is going to stem the tide of embryonic stem cell research. It is medicine’s second Holy Grail (the first having been antibiotics), offering as it does the potential to regenerate crucial human tissues destroyed by illness. Stem cell research may bring remedies to the deadly diseases of juvenile diabetes, paralysis caused by spinal cord trauma, dementia and more. Second, and most alarming for those who take the view that life begins at conception, the majority of Americans do not believe that an embryo five days old and consisting of about 150 cells is a human being. Third, and related, the use of those 150-cell embryos derived from in vitro fertilization will seem to many of us to be a small price to pay to prevent the dying of the living from potentially curable diseases. That is particularly true because most embryos being used are extra embryos from in vitro fertilization slated for destruction.

Because the research will proceed, one day many of us will face a decision at least as difficult as the one Bush made. We will have before us remedies derived from embryonic stem cell research that might cure us, or someone we love, of an otherwise incurable, terrible disease. We will then have to choose whether to use that remedy, and by extension, the embryos that provided it. Only at that moment will we discover what we each really think about embryonic stem cell research. We can only hope we do as well as the president did last week.

Erik Steele, D.O., is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.