NEWS STORY: Presidential Council Told New Methods Could Bridge Stem Cell Ethical Divide

c. 2004 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ A Stanford University biology professor and two Columbia University physicians told a presidential advisory council Friday (Dec. 3) that new approaches could resolve the thorny ethical problems swirling around embryonic stem cell research. Several members of the President’s Council on Bioethics reacted with enthusiasm, but some conservative religious […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ A Stanford University biology professor and two Columbia University physicians told a presidential advisory council Friday (Dec. 3) that new approaches could resolve the thorny ethical problems swirling around embryonic stem cell research.

Several members of the President’s Council on Bioethics reacted with enthusiasm, but some conservative religious groups remain skeptical.


Stanford professor William Hurlbut, a member of the advisory council, made one of the proposals. He suggested an unproven scientific technique that would enable stem cell research to go forward without creating or destroying human embryos.

Hurlbut said he is convinced the scientific community must come up with such solutions to bridge the ethical divide holding up research that has the potential to cure diseases and save lives.

“A purely political solution,” he said, “will leave our country bitterly divided, eroding the social support and sense of noble purpose that is essential for the public funding of biomedical science.”

Donald W. Landry and Howard A. Zucker of Columbia University made a joint proposal to the council, a high-profile advisory board that doesn’t make policy but influences the White House and Congress, which control federal funding of stem cell research.

Several members of the 18-member council _ made up of scientists, lawyers, doctors, theologians and others _ said the proposals show promise to bridge what has been a scientific, ethical and political divide. President Bush’s policy has been to forbid government funding of research on new embryonic stem cells. He has permitted funding of researchers using stem cell lines in existence before 2001.

Council Chairman Leon Kass, who emphasized he was speaking for himself and not the entire council, said both of the proposals were “extremely interesting and very creative” and “absolutely worth not only our (the council’s) consideration but much more public consideration.”

Hurlbut’s theory has been a hot topic among bioethicists for weeks, since the Boston Globe published an article exploring it in detail. Among Hurlbut’s supporters has been San Francisco Archbishop William Levada, an influential thinker in the Catholic Church, which has strongly opposed stem cell research on grounds that human lives, in the form of embryos, are sacrificed.


Levada said the proposal “offers hope that there may be a solution” to the controversy.

Other religious thinkers are less than enthusiastic.

Ted Peters of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences based in Berkeley, Calif., said this hardly ends the “moral warfare” in the stem cell debate. In fact, he said, it may open a Pandora’s Box of new ethical problems.

Hurlbut wants to develop an entity that would produce cells that would act like embryonic stem cells, but which would not, he says, become a human embryo. Through a cloning technique called “altered nuclear transfer,” the genetic structure (the genome) of a human egg would be altered, so that it would not, Hurlbut says, become a fully developed embryo.

This procedure would take out the gene that would allow a placenta to form. Without a placenta, this mass would not become an embryo, Hurlbut argues.

In an interview with Religion News Service, Hurlbut said he is making his proposal to “bridge the discord in the debate on stem cell research.” In the past, Hurlbut himself has opposed embryonic stem cell research.

Hurlbut said technology exists to test his theory, but that many animal experiments should be conducted first.


In “The Journal of Clinical Investigation,” Landry and Zucker, Columbia medical professors, make a different argument.

They say that “a reality of human embryonic life” is that many of the embryos die (become non-viable) within a few days of fertilization. Landry and Zucker argue that these embryos are “organismically dead” and should be viewed in the same way as people who are considered to be “brain dead.”

Just as some organs, such as hearts, can be healthy (and used in organ transplants) after a person is considered to be “brain dead,” Landry and Zucker say, extracted stem cells from embryos should be viewed in the same ethical framework.

Some religious ethicists aren’t buying the argument, including the Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education for the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.

“You can’t say an embryo is dead just because its cells have stopped dividing,” he said.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Hurlbut’s proposal raises questions about what it means to be a human being, says Carrie Gordon Earll, senior policy analyst for bioethics at Colorado-based Focus on the Family, a politically conservative religious organization.


“If you turn off a gene on human matter, are you experimenting on something that could be a human being?” she asked.

Everyone is anxious for ways to move stem cell research toward therapies, said C. Ben Mitchell, professor of bioethics and contemporary culture at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Ill. The proposals may in some way do this, he says, but it will take time for nuances to be explored.

MO/RB END RNS

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!