Wasted Stem Cells

With this week’s death of “Superman” star Christopher Reeve, the potential benefits of stem cell research are again in the news. Mr. Reeve, who was paralyzed in a horse riding accident nine years ago, was an advocate for pushing the boundaries of medical research, including using stem cells to cure diseases and to help the body recover from trauma.

Biomedical scientists, including some at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, foresee a plentiful supply of human embryos for stem cell research if current funding restrictions are relaxed. They say that many thousands of the embryos now are being either wasted or deliberately destroyed, so that their use should be utterly uncontroversial. The Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry has raised the issue by pledging to end President Bush’s ban on federal funding for most stem cell research.

One of the Jackson Lab researchers, David E. Harrison, in a recent letter to the editor of the NEWS, said that in the normal course of things many couples waste human blastocysts, the tiny balls of cells that arise from a fertilized egg and can become a fetus if they successfully implant in the uterus. However, implantation often fails, preventing pregnancy. When that happens, the blastocysts are wasted. Those blastocysts are, of course, not available for research.

Fertility clinics, however, can be an abundant source. In vitro fertilization – the mating of sperm and ovum in a glass dish – has become so popular that 107,000 couples attempted it in 2001. These resulted in about 30,000 successful pregnancies and more than 40,000 children (including lots of twins), according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Each attempt involves five to 10 fertilized eggs with some appreciable fraction ending up surplus.

Present practice in the United States is to hold the frozen embryos until the couple have as many children as they want, or they give up, or the woman passes the reproductive age. In the absence of federal regulation, clinics set their own rules as to how long to save the frozen embryos. When the time comes, with a couple’s consent, they simply destroy the embryos. Their use in research would probably require approval of the donors. In Britain, they are destroyed after five years by government regulation.

Ken Paigen, the longtime director of the Jackson Lab and now a senior researcher there, estimates that there must be several million surplus embryos in freezers in the United States by now. “Using even a few hundred or a thousand of these with donors’ permission would be a breakthrough.” He puts the matter this way: “Once they are no longer needed, tens or even hundreds of thousands of human embryos are destroyed every year in in vitro fertilization clinics, but by order of the president we can’t use our NIH [National Institutes of Health] support to use them for stem cell research, even when the donors want us to. This is pure hypocrisy, blocking efforts that have the potential to alleviate great human suffering. Any parent with a diabetic child, any adult with a parent suffering from Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease should be in revolt.”

The issue looks clear-cut. The em-bryonic cells are now being wasted, and no one objects. They could and should be used, to help conquer many diseases and to make the United States once more competitive in this vital field of research.