Will New Ways of Creating Stem Cells Dodge the Objections?

It's almost enough to make one yearn for the days when we knew little about human embryos. Now, thanks to the science of embryology, the possibilities for creating, slicing, and manipulating embryos are hard to keep track of. First there was in vitro fertilization. Soon it became possible to mix eggs and sperm to create embryos by the thousands. They could be sorted, graded, implanted, or frozen. If a man's sperm couldn't make it into an egg on its own, it could be sucked up into a needle and injected into the egg. After a few divisions but prior to implantation, a cell or two could be plucked from an embryo and analyzed for genetic defects--or to determine if it was compatible with an older sister or brother, so that if and when it became an infant the umbilical cord blood could be transplanted into that sibling to treat disease. Then we learned that scientists could take a five-day-old embryo--at that stage a hollow sphere with a collection of roughly a hundred cells stuck to an inside surface--break it open, spread out those hundred or so cells, and, with luck and skill on their side, create what are now called embryonic stem (ES) cell lines. Some embryos, it seems, are worth more busted up than whole. That, at least, is the opinion of scientists who create or work with embryonic stem cells. For people who believe a human embryo is a full, morally significant human being, taking apart a living embryo is murder--not tantamount to or like murder--but murder itself, and cold-blooded, intentional, utilitarian murder at that. For them, no promise of resulting good, no relief of human suffering from new therapies, could possibly justify the unjustifiable. So it's now no surprise that proposals for creating ES or ES-like cells without creating or destroying embryos have been floated. Two of them were taken up recently by the President's Council on Bioethics. One idea requires genetically manipulating a nucleus from a somatic cell before transferring it into an egg whose own nucleus has been removed. This is cloning, but with a twist: one or more genes necessary for orderly development would have been inactivated so that while all the types of tissues found in the human body could still form, they would do so in a haphazard, unorganized way. Proponents of the idea argue that with the developmental program missing an essential part, there is no embryo, and therefore nothing is wrong with cutting it apart to make stem cells. The concept is hardly novel. Scientists working at a biotech company with a penchant for grabbing headlines, ACT, applied for a patent on it in 2002. No one is sure it would work or that the cell lines derived would be fully functioning stem cells, but even if the technical problems were solved, ethical objections would persist. Consider this scathing critique, offered to Science magazine, of the proposal floated before the President's Council: "I think this is an abuse of cloning technology ... It will be a sad day when scientists use genetic manipulation to deliberately create crippled embryos to please the Church." The source? Another scientist working at ACT. A spokesman for the National Council of Catholic Bishops suggests that the Church might not be all that pleased anyway: "A short-lived embryo is still an embryo." The other idea taken up by the President's Council relies on an analogy with brain death and organ transplantation: If scientists could reliably determine that an embryo is not viable, couldn't we take stem cells from it, just as we recover organs and tissues from newly-dead cadavers? Some difficulties are obvious: How do you know when an embryo is not viable? Also, there is likely to be a tradeoff between how certain you are that the embryo is not viable and the usefulness of the cells you can then take from the embryo. And to top if off, you may still fail to satisfy defenders of embryos such as a spokesman at the National Catholic Bioethics Center quoted in Science. …