Some stories you read online are essentially written in snippets. Since thoughts are not developed and/or are compacted, when it comes to our issue, the story comes across as both very helpful and very unhelpful.
Timesonline.com offered such an intriguing piece on Monday.
Certainly, we like the headline: "Cloning benefits oversold, says stem-cell scientist." We like it even more since the scientist mentioned is none other than one of the leading lights in the field of stem cell research, Professor Austin Smith.
Just this week Smith became director of the just- opened Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research in Cambridge. It's very helpful that Professor Smith not only highlights that "Cloning research 'clearly upsets the general public,''" but also that "it has limited potential for treating disease and adds little to scientific understanding of human biology."
Additionally, Smith's comment that there is "less controversy" and more likelihood of success when adult stem cells are used, is also welcomed. But Smith also put in a good word for "research with ordinary stem cells taken from surplus IVF embryos" as well, which is counterproductive in the extreme.
There is a distinct irony here. Over the last couple of years there has been a wave of commentary from cloning proponents, pointing out all the inadequacies of "surplus" embryos taken from IVF clinics. At the same time Smith is telling proponents that stem cells from cloned human embryos are highly unlikely to work, he is steering them to one source they're about to permanently jettison--so-called "spare" embryos.
There was a second unhelpful observation from Professor Smith. According to Timesonline.com, Smith "was also critical of efforts to devise new ways of collecting ES cells without destroying human embryos, which some scientists have promoted as 'more ethical' sources of the tissue."
Why? Because "These eye-catching experiments actually play into the hands of embryo-rights groups who will always object to ES [embryonic stem] cell research, by suggesting that scientists are uncomfortable with the ethics of existing techniques."
There is a second irony. Last summer a team led by Smith, then at the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Stem Cell Research, published a fascinating paper in the prestigious journal "Nature."
If the successes experienced with mice work in humans--reprogramming adult stem cells to give them the characteristics of an embryonic stem cell--the entire stem cell controversy could be sidestepped. "The ultimate goal would be to use a patient's own cells as the starting material for a new kind of regenerative medicine," according to an article that appeared last June in the San Francisco Chronicle.
"The study used mouse cells to investigate the critical role of one gene in the process by which a stem cell, when fused to a more specialized adult stem cell found in the brain, reprograms the brain cell into a primitive state," the Chronicle continued.
In theory, a patient's own skin cells could be used to customize other lines of cells which have been destroyed by the onslaught of Parkinson's or ruined by a spinal cord injury.
But that same hopeful Chronicle article concluded with this quote: "Scientists insisted it will take human embryonic stem cells -- and the destruction of some embryos -- in virtually any scenario despite the long-term promise of alternative strategies."
This is, of course, what they always say. The good news is that the circle of acceptable alternatives continues to widen almost monthly.
Source: National Right to Life Committee
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