Before Bush pats himself on the back over stem cells…

November 21, 2007

Yesterday’s announced breakthrough on stem-cell research is obviously good news for medicine, public health, and scientific advancements. Scientists from the United States and Japan have successfully been able to reprogram skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells. If the promise of these results is true, experts can move forward on embryonic stem-cell research without embryos, thus ending the political and philosophical debate.

The Bush White House, which has stood in the laboratory door for seven years, suddenly feels justified.

It has been more than six years since President Bush, in the first major televised address of his presidency, drew a stark moral line against the destruction of human embryos in medical research.

Since then, he has steadfastly maintained that scientists would come up with an alternative method of developing embryonic stem cells, one that did not involve killing embryos.

Critics were skeptical. But now that scientists in Japan and Wisconsin have apparently achieved what Mr. Bush envisioned, the White House is saying, “I told you so.”

Indeed, presidential aides were so proud of themselves yesterday, they insisted that Bush drove the breakthrough experiments by claiming some ambiguous moral standard.

“This is very much in accord with the president’s vision from the get-go,” said Karl Zinsmeister, a Bush domestic policy adviser. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the president’s drawing of lines on cloning and embryo use was a positive factor in making this come to fruition.”

Look, we should all be really pleased by yesterday’s news, and the scientific advancements offer hope for life-saving medical research. But for the White House to suggest that Bush deserves some kind of credit for the progress is nonsense.

In fact, the opposite is true.

One of the researchers involved in yesterday’s reports said the Bush restrictions may have slowed discovery of the new method, since scientists first had to study embryonic cells to find out how to accomplish the same thing without embryos.

“My feeling is that the political controversy set the field back four or five years,” said James Thomson, who led a team at the University of Wisconsin and who discovered human embryonic stem cells in 1998.

Taking the political argument to the next step, meanwhile, shows that the single happiest people in the country yesterday were Republican presidential candidates, none of whom wanted to explain their opposition to life-saving research that the overwhelming majority of Americans support. Now, it looks like the issue has been taken off the table for the 2008 presidential race, leading to a massive GOP exhale.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that scientists sill want some short-term research on actual embryonic stem-cells, because the research on the new method needs to be tested against the existing model. In this sense, there may still be some fighting left to do.

Something else that needs to be considered before all of the back patting is this from the WebMD article

There is a catch. To reprogram the adult cells into what they call “induced pluripotent cells,” both research teams had to use retroviruses as vectors to carry new genes into the cell nucleus. Once there, the retroviruses become part of the cell’s genetic code. These retroviruses could cause deadly mutations or cancers in patients treated with the newly created stem cells.

“It is important to understand, however, that before the cells can be used in the clinic, additional work is required to avoid vectors that integrate into the genome, potentially introducing mutations at the insertion site,” warn Yu and colleagues, in one of the two reports simultaneously announcing the results.

  • Well, I guess even the possibilities for finding success are so few and far between that the administration will latch onto just about anything.

    Here are a few more they might be able to use in the days ahead:

    Up to her elbows in a pumpkin cheesecake recipe, Anne realized she did not have enough cream cheese. Ransacking her refrigerator, she discovered a container of ricotta cheese. After straining the excess liquid out of the cheese, she proceeded with the recipe and the cheesecake was an astounding success. This is typical of the innovative thinking inspired by the Bush administration’s outside-the-box approaches to problem-solving.

    On their way to Anne’s house on Thanksgiving, her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend were confronted with a road closure. Calmly and coolly, they reversed course and plotted a new route, arriving in plenty of time to eat their share of appetizers before dinner. When informed of this astounding turn of events, Bush smirked, and informed the press that this was in large part due to the administration’s commitment to steering traffic to roads and bridges that are not falling apart, because their commitment to the safety and security of all Americans is second to none.

    I know you all will have similar suggestions for the WH – success is everywhere!

  • He can spin this to look as though he ‘predicted’ or ’caused’ the discovery.
    The President is acting out a cold reading and taking spurious credit for things with which he is not involved.

    Unfortunately, like praying for rain in Georgia, the rubes will buy the line and give credit to the fool whose knees hit the floor first.

  • One of the researchers involved in yesterday’s reports said the Bush restrictions may have slowed discovery of the new method, since scientists first had to study embryonic cells to find out how to accomplish the same thing without embryos.

    Not to mention the obvious waste of all the time and research dollars on essentially a will-always-be-imperfect work around to the political controversy. We could have been advancing the state of the art in far more useful ways over this time.

    All Bush really caused was an extra drag on research here has only caused a massive movement of high-tech money and talent to more tolerant countries, the effects of which will feel for many years in education and our Bio-tech industries.

  • The fact that they had to use retroviruses to do this is more than just a “catch”. They are basically performing a genetic manipulation on the cells and inserting foreign DNA. This is what has traditionally been referred to as “gene therapy”. One of the major stumbling block for gene therapy approaches to human disease has been this problem of retroviral integration. Most gene therapy approaches use retroviruses to deliver the “correct” gene into the cell. In animal models (and perhaps in some unfortunate human trials), blood cancers have resulted from such treatments. This is because the retrovirus gets inserts itself into the chromosome of the cell randomly. This random insertion can dysregulate the adjacent genes. If the genes in question are involved in controling cell division or development, cancer results. This is not a small problem, it has impeded the entire (previously considered very promising) field of gene therapy for a decade.
    I think it is scientifically interesting that they were able to figure out what genes to put back into a specialized cell to get it to behave in a stem-like manner. However, the clinical relevance of this is not great at this point. If this retroviral thing were not a huge problem, we would be seeing all kinds of new and amazing treatments for genetic diseases (cystic fibrosis and sickle cell to name two) and cancer. Unfortunately, retroviruses still a big problem.

  • Since this astounding success is all due to the “visionary” we have in the WH, then maybe he would be willing to volunteer his own children for the next phase of the experimentation process: Clinical Human Trials. He certainly wouldn’t mind having one of his daughters morph into a bipedal pile of globulous goo, while the other demonstrates the acquired biological propensity to give birth to children resembling lobotomized prairie dogs. And if Mr. BuSh is willing to make such a sacrifice for the good of the Republic, Humanity, and the furtherance of Bu$hylvanian Reactionary Apocalyptic Christendom (BRAC), then one might expect every last one of his subordinants, supporters, and oratorical defenders to step right up, undergo the same clinical trials themselves, and likewise subject their offspring to equal applications of this new, miraculous procedure….

  • As others have noted, while this is a scientific advancement, it is not a cure and is very far from implementation. It will also probably be much more expensive to facilitate than embryonically derived stem cells leading to cures that will be out of the financial reach of people or will drive up health care costs even more.

    Funny how the most anti-science leader since the guys that put Galileo in jail takes credit for an advancement that scientists wrought.

  • The only “Vision” Bush had regarding limiting stem cell research was the vision of getting right wing votes. He never gave the research another thought beyond how it would get him votes. Such a small petty man without a conscience has no visions other than his own self interests.

    Time to fill the coffers again…that’s his shallow vision.

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