Obama lifts limits on stem-cell research

What happened

President Barack Obama this week removed limits on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, opening the door to scientific exploration of therapies that advocates say could revolutionize medicine and critics condemn as immoral “Frankenscience.” By allowing federal funding of new stem-cell lines, Obama hopes to spur development of therapies for a wide range of diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as spinal cord injuries. He directed the National Institutes of Health to produce new guidelines for research within 120 days.

Obama’s executive order reverses a 2001 order by former President George W. Bush, which had limited federal funds to research on a small number of pre-existing embryonic cell lines. Obama also promised to “guarantee scientific integrity” in federal policymaking, and took a swipe at his predecessor by vowing to “make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.” Stem cells can morph into any type of cell in the body, and researchers hope that they can eventually be developed into treatments in which diseased tissues—including heart, liver, and nerve—can be replaced.

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What the editorials said

The winners here are millions of people who may benefit from stem-cell research—as well as science itself, said The Philadelphia Inquirer. During the Bush presidency, science was subjugated “to serve political goals.” Scientists say new stem-cell lines are healthier than the handful of lines created prior to 2001, with greater potential for cures than the old ones had. And given that there are some 600,000 human embryos in storage nationwide—all of which “would be destroyed eventually”—it would be a “lost opportunity for the rest of humankind” to withhold them from potentially lifesaving research.

Obama has failed an important “moral test,” said National Review Online. He “put no rules or boundaries of any kind” on stem-cell research and failed to show “any moral qualm about the destruction of human embryos—whether left over from fertility treatments or created especially for experimentation.” Recent advances using adult stem cells indicate that we have alternatives to embryonic cells. Unfortunately, Obama ignored that evidence and “clumsily forced a choice between the promise of progress and the respect for life.”

What the columnists said

It was Bush who failed the moral test, by starving potentially lifesaving research of federal funds, said Arthur Caplan in MSNBC.com. The people who know best—scientists and doctors—are nearly unanimous in the belief that embryonic stem cells have enormous promise. We should free researchers to pursue all lines of inquiry, which one day may bring relief to millions of “sick and severely disabled” people.

We’ve heard this hype for years, said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post, yet adult stem cells actually hold more promise. In a major breakthrough in 2007, scientists discovered how to make normal skin cells revert to their stem-cell state. These adult stem cells, many scientists say, may turn out to be preferable to embryonic ones, which can cause tumors or be rejected by a patient’s immune system. So if science can create stem cells without creating and killing embryos, why use taxpayer funds to support research that’s so “ethically charged”?

Even as someone who doesn’t consider embryos to be full human beings, said William Saletan in Slate.com, I find that question to be worth asking. Creating and destroying embryos to save the sick may seem like a simple ethical matter to those who worship science. But embryos are unquestionably “the beginnings of people,” and as science proceeds headlong down the road of creating and harvesting human cells and human parts, we’d better keep asking inconvenient moral questions—or risk losing our humanity.

What next?

Obama left most of the policy details to the NIH, which says it will consult with other science groups, such as the National Academy of Sciences, in devising rules. Among the outstanding questions is whether scientists will be allowed to use federal funds to create embryos for the express purpose of harvesting stem cells. “There are a lot of people on the left and the right sides of the political spectrum who are opposed to that—to create a life to destroy it,” said Ronald Green, a bioethicist at Dartmouth College. “This is a really explosive issue.”