Democrats like to denounce the “Republican War on Science”, but anyone who looks beyond the single issue of embryonic stem cell research quickly sees that they, not the GOP, are the naysayers on space exploration, biotechnology and pharmaceutical research, among other areas. Today it became clearer that even their infatuation with stem cells reflects nothing more than short-term political calculation.
President Bush accompanied his veto of the latest bill to relax restrictions on the destruction of embryos for research purposes with an executive order directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish, within 90 days, a program for pluripotent stem cell research, including provisions for evaluating grant proposals.
The Democratic Congressional response was, as Ramesh Ponnuru points out, to misrepresent what the executive order provides:
The Democrats’ response begins: “Fact: Most scientists agree: adult stem cells do not have the same potential as embryonic stem cells.” It continues in that vein.
But Bush wasn’t talking about adult stem cells. People who want to knock the potential of adult stem cell research say that adult stem cells aren’t pluripotent – that they don’t have the mutability of embryonic stem cells. But [the White House’s favored legislative proposal, introduced by Senator Norm Coleman] specifically concerns pluripotent stem cells, not adult stem cells.
In fact, the Senate has passed a bill “to appropriate new dollars for the emerging ethical pluripotent stem cell techniques”. But a majority of Democratic Senators voted “nay”, and the Democratic House leadership has refused to bring the measure to a vote.
The idea of obtaining pluripotent stem cells from sources other than cloned embryos is no pipe dream.
Only a few days ago an article in the leading journal Nature brought amazing news. A Japanese team at Kyoto University has discovered how to reprogram skin cells so that they “dedifferentiate” into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell. From this they can be morphed, theoretically, into any cell in the body, a property called pluripotency. It could be the Holy Grail of stem cell science: a technique that is both feasible and unambiguously ethical.
“Neither eggs nor embryos are necessary. I’ve never worked with either,” says ShinyaYamanaka. . . . .
This is mainstream research, not an eccentric theory from a Romanian naturopathy journal. Yamanaka’s work has been confirmed by two other teams affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles – both of them headed by ardent supporters of embryonic stem cell research.
They say that the reprogrammed cells meet all the tests of pluripotent cells – they form colonies, propagate continuously and form cancerous growths called teratomas, as well as producing chimaeras. “It’s unbelievable, just amazing,” says Hans Schöler, a German stem cell expert. “For me, it's like Dolly. It’s that type of an accomplishment.” [Michael Cook, “Will a Disruptive Technology Mothball Therapeutic Cloning?”]
Leaving aside the ethics of creating human organisms in order to kill them in the course of experimentation, a technique that starts with skin cells has the obvious advantage of cutting out one step from the process, the extremely difficult task of creating an embryo. Yet the ostensibly pro-science Democrats haven’t bothered to inform themselves about work like Dr. Yamanaka’s and so far scoff at funding it.
If they don’t soon change their minds, it will be hard to avoid the inference that their interest in stem cell research lasts only so long as it can be used to score points against pro-lifers. When it loses that virtue, it goes back to being just another product of “Big Pharma”, of no interest to the progressive-reactionary mind.
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