Get Up-to-Date on National Stem Cell Debate

This month’s headlines seem to suggest that half the country has an opinion on stem cells and stem cell research. President Bush allows work to go ahead on some existing cells but forbids the harvesting of new ones. The medical community supports the research. Many religious group are opposed. But what are stem cells, exactly? What research is being done? What are the moral reservations?

The University of Wisconsin provides good, readable answers online to the first two questions, at https://www.news.wisc.edu/packages/stemcells. A leader in stem cell research, the university holds a patent on many cell lines (which has some researchers worried about access). Among other things, the site provides an illustration showing exactly where stem cells come from and why they’re so valuable: They can be transformed into any of some 200 specialized cells, from skin to liver tissue. The site makes it clear that the most direct application of the cells is in testing drugs. If you can grow a sample of pure breast-tissue cells, for instance, it’s much easier to test the effect of potential drugs on the breast. Actually growing or repairing diseased organs with stem-cell injections is years off, the site explains, because doctors don’t yet understand how the body instructs stem cells to become specialized tissue.

For a much more thorough, and more technical, discussion of the research, there’s the National Institutes of Health. Its report at https://www.nih.gov/news/stemcell/scireport.htm can be tough going in places, but it’s worth it, if you’re interested in one particular area of stem cell research. The chapter on diabetes, for example, takes the reader from the development of the pancreas, the progression of the disease, the difficulties in current treatments, and then how stem cells can help resolve them. There are color illustrations throughout.

Neither of these sites fully explores the ethical resistance to stem cell research, however. For that, Do No Harm: The Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics is a good start. Sponsored by a group of doctors and others opposed to the research, the site (https://www.stemcellresearch.org) argues that experiments on stem cells are legally questionable and morally wrong, because they lead to the destruction of viable embryos. The site includes a list of statements, including one from the United Methodist Church, pointing out that stem cells taken from adults may offer just as much promise to heal disease as those taken from embryos. As evidence for this, the site offers only blurbs from news stories and clippings from research articles. There’s no thorough scientific assessment of the relative merits of adult versus embryo cells, explaining how the choice of one over the other would affect the direction of research, or which diseases get treated first. There’s not enough to form a strong opinion one way or the other, at least based on the scientific merits.