There Must Be A Cure For Tunnel Vision

Rick Weiss did a terrific job of gathering a variety of views on new embryonic stem cell techniques on Monday in Mice Stem Cells Made Without Harm To Embryos, but the story, along with today's International Stem Cell Initiative Planned, continues the paper's fascination with embryonic research that is, pardon the expression, embryonic.

Adult stem cell technology has at least three distinct qualities: It's used in many therapies and human trials today; it doesn't require the destruction of human life; and it's hardly ever covered by the Washington Post.

Kudos first, from Weiss's story on the experiments with mice:

Two teams of scientists provided the first definitive evidence yesterday that embryonic stem cells can be grown in laboratory dishes without harming healthy embryos, an advance that some scientists and philosophers believe could make the medically promising field more politically and ethically acceptable....

If the new approaches were to work with human cells, as many scientists suspect, they could help defuse a moral maelstrom that has raged since human embryonic stem cells were discovered seven years ago. But the new techniques raise ethical issues of their own, leaving their ultimate value uncertain for now...

One question is whether such procedures create a new human being, doomed for harvest as a source for the cells.

"This establishes the scientific feasibility of the idea that you can obtain fully functional embryonic stem cells from an entity that is not a natural, normal embryo," said William B. Hurlbut, a Stanford University professor and member of President Bush's Council on Bioethics.

But few scientists, ethicists or others, it turns out, are convinced that the new methods transcend the problems inherent in traditional stem cell approaches. Many say the new work only reveals how intractable the problem remains and how unlikely it is that science will resolve what is essentially a matter of spiritual belief.

That is because one of the new methods still subjects a human embryo to a small added risk, and, even more controversially, the other approach involves deliberately creating an embryo with a disabled version of a gene that is crucial to normal development....

Although some people condone experiments on such gene-altered embryos because they have no potential to grow into babies, others see the work as the purposeful creation of fatally hobbled beings to use as research subjects.

"The concern is that an embryo is being generated that is doomed to die very soon," said Markus Grompe, a geneticist who runs the stem cell program at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

"Nobody should be speaking too quickly here on either side," said Robert P. George, a Princeton professor of jurisprudence and a member of Bush's bioethics council. "The way to find out is to do the careful studies to figure out exactly what you've got here. It's not a spiritual question. We're not looking for a soul. The question is, 'Does it have the [biological basis] for self-construction and self-organization, or is it a fundamentally disordered growth?' "

Within the frame of the story, there's no question that we can find out what various authorities believe about the techniques. But I am still puzzled over the lack of interest in stories like this one on adult stem-cell trials to treat human vascular disease, this one on a four-year study just launched to test the ability of adult stem cells to treat heart disorders, or this one on a commercial agreement to store and market placental stem cells that, among other things, have been shown to cure diabetes in animals. All of those developments came to light within the last week or so. I haven't seen any of them in the Post. One week, okay, but every week? We're not talking about some rare burst of activitiy on the human/umbilical/placental stem-cell front; this stuff happens all the time.

All those links, by the way, are from Stem Cell Reaserch Progress Blog, run by Anne Leonard. (I found it via washingonpost.com's Technorati blogger links). It looks like a terrific resource, regardless of your position on the issue.