Framing Alert
July 9th, 2007 at 9:11 am
This just made its way to our inbox, but it seems as though Texas Alliance for Life is trying to claim funding of adult stem cell research this session as a “huge victory” for the anti-abortion movement. From an email blast and now up on their website: “The thousands of calls and letters from pro-life Texans asking for adult stem cell funding made a decisive difference,” said Joe Pojman, Ph.D., TAL’s executive director.
There’s obviously nothing wrong with advocating further research on adult stem cells, but claiming this position as sole property of the anti-abortion movement is disingenuous. The above quote was introduced by a paragraph saying that the bill “signed into law by pro-life Governor Rick Perry a few days ago, has $10 million for pro-life activities.” As if people who supports embryonic stem cell research would do anything but applaud what Texas passed.
What’s worse, though, is the implication that research into adult cells and cord blood cells somehow replaces embryonic research. For instance, on the site TAL offers visitors a template for a letter thanking Texas’ Republican leadership for funding the research. Part of that letter states, “No one has ever been cured of any disease using embryonic stem cells. The FDA has not even approved the use of embryonic stem cells in any therapies.” Another litany of misleading “facts” about embryonic cells accompanies the letter.
Adult stem cells and umbilical stem cells may serve the great function of curing some blood diseases and cancer, but they’re not a stand-in for embryonic cells. Just ask the National Institutes of Health:
Studies of human embryonic stem cells may yield information about the complex events that occur during human development. A primary goal of this work is to identify how undifferentiated stem cells become differentiated. Scientists know that turning genes on and off is central to this process. Some of the most serious medical conditions, such as cancer and birth defects, are due to abnormal cell division and differentiation. A better understanding of the genetic and molecular controls of these processes may yield information about how such diseases arise and suggest new strategies for therapy.
In other words, that’s very different from what any amount of cord blood can provide.
Now, if this all sounds familiar, it’s because it comes up often. Consider this exchange from a 2005 debate on dueling federal stem cell bills. Rick Weiss in The Washington Post wrote, “The pairing of the votes [on the bills] raises a scientific question: Are stem cells from umbilical cords reasonable substitutes for embryonic stem cells, which can give rise to all of the body’s 200 or so cell types, including nerve, liver, skin, bone, heart muscle and the pancreas, the organ that goes awry in diabetes?”
The Columbia Journalism Review responds, “The answer to that question is no.”
Back to Weiss: “Opponents of embryonic stem cell research have strongly implied the answer is yes.”
Round and round…
July 10th, 2007 at 1:27 am
Well, Rick Weiss is behind the times. We’ve treated diabetes in new onset juvenile diabetes with cord blood, spinal cord injuries with nasal olfactory stem cells, and have grown liver tissue, kidney cells and lung cells from umbilical cord cells. There are the mesenchymal cells that can probably do just as much.
But, what you ought to know is that just last week, we learned that we’d been looking at the wrong group of cells in mouse embryos, all along. The stem cells from the implantation stage embryos grow faster and more reliably. The choice, now, is whether to finish the basic science in animals or go try to get human stem cells at the implantation stage and see whether we’ve been wrong there, too.
What’s next, late embryonic and fetal stem cells? Oh, wait, that’s being done already.
It’s rare for a metabolic desease to present in embryonic cells - diabetes doesn’t, cancer doesn’t, and Alzheimer’s surely doesn’t.
In the long run, what is needed is a source of adult stem cells - or some sources of various lines of adult stem cells. The embryonic stem cells are not a reliable sourc - except in the right “niche,” or with genetic engineering involving insertion of virus particles into the cell.
Besides, where are you going to get the eggs?
July 30th, 2007 at 1:09 am
Alzheimer…
Alzheimer…