The Stem Cell

Zach Hall is former president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Susan Solomon is CEO of the New York Stem Cell Foundation. A version of this essay appeared 30 November in the Huffington Post. Find TSC opinion and information on the recent stem cell discoveries here, here, and here.

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By Susan Solomon and Zach Hall, Ph.D.

Nothing would give the millions of people afflicted with heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and spinal cord injuries a greater thrill than to be able to rejoice that the debates around stem cell research are finally over, and “the Holy Grail has been achieved,” as Charles Krauthammer put it in an astonishing piece in the Washington Post. Krauthammer said that last week’s announcements means that George Bush was right, that we have now found a way to create “a magical stem cell that can become bone or brain or heart or liver” without using human embryos.

It is not true. It is not even close to true. The new “induced pluripotentiary stem cells” (IPS for short) will be powerful tools for scientists studying the mechanisms of human diseases in their laboratories, and there is no doubt that this is an important scientific event. But these cells cannot be used to treat human patients in the clinic, because they were created using genes and retroviruses that can cause cancer in humans. Moreover, even if safe ways of producing these new IPS cells are found, no one yet knows the extent to which they will behave like true human embryonic stem cells. To suggest, as Krauthammer and others have, that we now have no need to work with stem cells created from embryos is to say that we can put aside the research that remains the most promising and important. It is a conclusion based on political, not scientific, considerations.

It is crucial to our ultimate success to allow wide access to all of the stem cell lines that have already been created from embryos as well as to continue to create new lines for comparative and other purposes, including the research that can only be done with human embryonic stem cells. To gain the most benefit from the new discoveries, it is urgent — as urgent as it was before these announcements — that the current federal restrictions be lifted. For many kinds of research, there is still no substitute for actual human embryonic stem cells, and these new discoveries simply don’t change that fact.

The greatest loss of all would be if these exciting new discoveries were allowed to create the false belief that the kind of research opposed by the Bush administration — research involving actual human embryonic stem cells rescued from frozen embryos that would otherwise have been discarded — was no longer necessary. If it becomes even harder to fund human embryonic stem cell research in light of these new discoveries, they will, ironically, end up being as much a roadblock to scientific progress as an advance, which is something the researchers behind them never wanted to see happen.

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa once said that science is like looking for a treasure behind closed doors that can only be opened by experiment. Since we don’t know which door conceals the treasure, it is important to open as many as possible. “It is like you have got 10 doors that are closed and you do not know behind which door may lie the answer. If you [only] look behind one door, you have got a 10-percent chance of finding that answer,” he has said.

If only science were just a matter of opening a single door. Doing all we can to further human embryonic stem cell research will advance the search for cures of the major diseases of our time, and it should still be the number one priority for researchers, as well as for the private funders who today are the only sources of support for this vital scientific work. It is far too soon to call “Game Over” in the stem cell debates.

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