Just to clear up any confusion, there were two pieces of legislation on stem-cell research on the House floor yesterday, and both passed. But everyone should be clear on the differences: one is a serious bill to undo Bush’s restrictive policy on potentially life-saving research, the other was offered as political cover for Republicans.
The one that’s getting all the attention is the good one — the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act (H.R. 810), generally known as Castle-DeGette. It would repeal Bush’s restrictions on funding stem-cell research and expand federal money for research into the science. It enjoys broad bi-partisan support in the House and Senate, and has been endorsed by scores of medical, scientific, and patients’ advocacy groups. It’s also the bill the religious right hates and which Bush has threatened to veto.
Then there’s the Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act (H.R. 2520), which also passed yesterday, by a vote of 431 to 1. Unlike Castle-DeGette, this bill, sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), would invest federal funds to research stem cells from umbilical cords, not embryos.
The bill enjoyed overwhelming support yesterday because everyone can agree that there are opportunities for scientific advancement through this research.
Umbilical cord cells, squeezed harmlessly from discarded umbilical cords and frozen for later use, are clearly of great medical value. Since 1988, doctors have transplanted them into thousands of patients whose bone marrow had succumbed to disease or been obliterated by chemotherapy. After being transfused into a patient’s vein, cord cells work their way into the marrow, where they produce a constant supply of fresh blood for the rest of the patient’s life.
Excellent. Countless numbers of people who suffer from blood-related illnesses can and will benefit from this research. Umbilical cord cells, however, are not the same thing as stem-cells, and offer researchers less of what they need.
Indeed, many conservatives argue that embryonic stem-cell research is now unnecessary because of umbilical cord cells and adult stem cells. David Shaywitz, an endocrinologist and stem cell researcher at Harvard, explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday that the right is selling a bill of goods.
To be sure, one of the great successes of modern medicine has been the use of adult blood stem cells to treat patients with leukemia. The trouble is generalizing from this: There are very strong data suggesting that while blood stem cells are good at making new blood cells, they are not able to turn into other types of cells, such as pancreas or brain. The limited data purported to demonstrate the contrary are preliminary, inconclusive, unsubstantiated, or all three. Thus, it seems extremely unlikely that adult blood cells — or blood cells from the umbilical cord — will be therapeutically useful as a source of anything else but blood.
Moreover, while stem cells seem to exist for some cell types in the body — the blood and the intestines, for example — many adult tissues, such as the pancreas, may not have stem cells at all. Thus, relying on adult stem cells to generate replacement insulin-producing cells for patients with diabetes is probably an exercise in futility. […]
[T]here has been a concerted effort to establish adult stem cells as a palatable alternative to embryonic stem cells. In the process, conservatives seem to have left their usual concern for junk science at the laboratory door, citing in their defense preliminary studies and questionable data that they would surely — and appropriately — have ridiculed were it not supporting their current point of view. In fact, there is little credible evidence to suggest adult stem cells have the same therapeutic potential as embryonic stem cells. Conservatives often speak of the need to abide by difficult principle; acknowledging the limitations of adult stem cell research would seem like a good place to start.
It’s one thing for the right to acknowledge what existing research tells us but to insist that we go in a different direction. It’s so much more offensive, however, for conservatives to rely on deceptive rhetoric and junk science because they don’t like what the reality-based community has come up with.