LIFE DIGEST: Bush policy may be seen as turning point in stem cell research, columnist says; pro-life students win

LIFE DIGEST: Bush policy may be seen as turning point in stem cell research, columnist says; pro-life students win

Jan 22, 2007
By Tom Strode
Baptist Press

WASHINGTON (BP)--A federal government official recently criticized President Bush’s restrictive policy on funding destructive embryonic stem cell research, but a physician-turned-columnist said the chief executive’s rule may be viewed one day as a decision that led to the most significant breakthrough for such experimentation.

Story Landis of the National Institutes of Health told a Senate committee Jan. 19 the president’s stem cell policy has caused researchers to miss “out on possible breakthroughs,” Reuters News Service reported.

Since August 2001, Bush has barred federal funds for research that requires the destruction of embryos. His policy permits grants for experiments on embryonic stem cell lines already in existence when his rule was announced.

Despite legislative action in its last session, Congress was unable to achieve a two-thirds majority to override Bush’s veto.

There is a “compelling need to pursue both embryonic and non-embryonic stem cell research,” said Landis, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “Science works best when scientists can pursue all avenues of research. If the cure for Parkinson’s disease or juvenile diabetes lay behind one of four doors, wouldn’t you want the option to open all four doors at once instead of one door?”

Charles Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist with a medical degree, said in a Jan. 12 commentary Bush may deserve the gratitude of future generations for his stand.

They “may nonetheless thank Bush for standing athwart history, if only for a few years,” wrote Krauthammer, who favors liberalizing the president’s policy. “It gave technology enough time to catch up and rescue us from the moral dilemmas of embryo destruction.”

The recent discovery of versatile stem cells in amniotic fluid may make all the difference in such research, said Krauthammer, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Stem cells in amniotic fluid not only are uncontroversial, because they do not require a donor’s destruction, but they are vast and may prove more useful than embryonic cells, he said. Embryonic stem cell research has been plagued by the development of tumors in laboratory animals.

“If it is proved that these are the Goldilocks of stem cells, history will record the amniotic breakthrough as the turning point in the evolution of stem cell research from a narrow, difficult, delicate and morally dubious enterprise into an uncontroversial one with raw material produced unproblematically every day,” Krauthammer wrote.

“It will have turned out that Bush’s unpopular policy held the line, however arbitrary and temporary, against the wanton trampling of the human embryo just long enough for a morally neutral alternative to emerge,” he wrote. “And it did force the country to at least ponder the moral cost of turning one potential human being into replacement parts for another.”

Pro-life advocates consider the embryo, which is normally less than a week old when it is destroyed for the harvesting of stem cells, to be a human being, not a “potential human being.”

The Senate is expected to vote in February on a bill to liberalize Bush’s stem cell funding rule. On Jan. 11, the House of Representatives voted 253-174 for a measure to provide funds for research using stem cells extracted from embryos stored at in vitro fertilization clinics.

The House vote was a gain from its last effort but still well short of that needed to override a veto. A veto override would require 290 votes to succeed if all House members vote. In July 2006, the House voted 235-193 in an unsuccessful effort to overturn Bush’s only veto so far.
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