Editorial

No breakthrough

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Isn’t the Catholic Church ever satisfied? Why wouldn’t it be overjoyed with the announcement that the biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) had found a way to make embryonic stem cells with a technique that doesn’t harm embryos from which the cells were derived? Didn’t this satisfy the Church’s objection to embryonic stem-cell research—that it kills the embryos?

It is indeed true that the Church and others who value human life object to embryonic stem-cell research because it kills the embryos. But it turned out that ACT didn’t actually do what it claimed to do. All the embryos used in that technique were destroyed.

In late August, ACT’s announcement and an interview on PBS with the company’s chief executive officer on the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” coincided with a major article in the British magazine Nature. Naturally, newspapers in England and the United States picked up the story because it appeared to be a major breakthrough.

The technique described in the article consisted of the removal of a single cell from a human eight-cell embryo called a blastomere. The articles and interviews all gave the impression that the embryos survived. William Caldwell, ACT’s chief executive officer, in fact, said quite specifically, “In this case, we do not destroy the embryo.”

Another ACT executive, Robert Lanza, vice president of research and scientific development, was emphatic. “For most rational people,” he said, “this removes the last rational objection for opposing this research.”

But, as The Criterion reported in its Sept. 1 issue, the embryos did not survive. Our article quoted Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, who said, “It turned out that it was all a sham, and they actually did destroy all the embryos.”

Doerflinger discovered not only that the original claim was a sham, but photographs used with the article were misleading. They purported to show an embryo before and after a cell was removed, but the pictures were not of the same embryo.

Nature magazine belatedly sent out a couple of press releases saying that its original statement was partially in error, and that the embryos used to produce the stem cells did not survive the process. The statement said, “We feel it necessary to explain that this paper demonstrates that human embryonic stem cells can be grown from single cells, but that the embryos that were used for these experiments did not remain intact.” There was no mention of the discrepancy with the photos.

That statement, though, as far as we noticed, didn’t receive nearly the publicity that the original news story did. Many people read or heard about the successful experiment, but didn’t read or hear about Nature’s follow-up correction.

One person for sure who didn’t see the correction was New York Daily News columnist Lenore Skenazy, who wrote a column that the paper headlined “Anti-stem Zealots Are All Out of Ammo.” She said that the objections of stem-cell research opponents could no longer be sustained because a method had been discovered that “does not kill the embryo the way the older method of harvesting stem cells did.”

Just to be clear, the Church is not an opponent of stem-cell research, only that which kills human embryos. But it is convinced that much more good can be done in a shorter amount of time if the emphasis is on adult stem-cell research rather than on embryos.

In his thorough book about stem-cell research, The Stem Cell Divide, Michael Bellomo writes that medical progress has so far come only from the use of adult stem cells. He lists 73 diseases that are currently being treated with adult stem cells. As for embryonic stem cells, he says that the number of persons who have benefited from them is exactly zero.

As we have pointed out before, stem cells collected from blood in umbilical cords and placentas after birth are now being used to fight more than 70 types of genetic illnesses.

Bellomo, in his book, says that the entire family may benefit from banking cord blood for unforeseen medical problems.

We would like to see federal funding for cord blood banks and for research using other adult stem cells.

— John F. Fink