Wired: Unhappy With New Stem Cell Source? Then Stop Having Sex

From Wired Blog Network:

Unhappy With New Stem Cell Source? Then Stop Having Sex
By Brandon Keim January 28, 2008 | 12:52:02 PM

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/disapprove-of-n.html

Scientists have produced embryonic stem cells from embryos that would otherwise be thrown away.

The findings, published yesterday in Nature Biotechnology by researchers from Children's Hospital Boston, raise hopes -- again -- of an ethically acceptable source for the potentially miraculous, highly controversial cells.

If the latest cells don't satisfy critics, says a prominent bioethicist, the critics might want to stop having sex.

Embryonic stem cells, or ESCs, have the power to become any other type of cell. They might someday be used to replace diseased or failing tissue. But the best source for ESCs is week-old human embryos. The embryos are destroyed during harvesting, drawing charges of murder from religiously conservative critics. President Bush has limited federal funding for ESC research, and the controversy has slowed ESC progress in the United States.

The last several months have produced a few alternatives to old-fashioned ESCs. Researchers in Japan and the United States made ESC-equivalents from adult skin cells; another group figured out how to get ESCs without harming embryos more than they already are by a common gene-screening technique. However, neither ESC source is ready for prime time: so-called reprogrammed cells aren't medically viable, and the harm caused by blastomere biopsy still provokes ethical objection. Old-fashioned ESC sources are still best; the controversy continues.

Enter the Children's Hospital Boston researchers, who showed that "flawed" embryos, hundreds of thousands of which are produced every year by in-vitro fertilization clinics, can be used to generate embryonic stem cells. The embryos, too genetically defective to be implanted in a woman, are usually discarded; they were previously considered too defective to make ESCs. Since the embryos can't ever become people, and are headed for the incinerator anyways, how could it be wrong to destroy them in research?

I put this question to University of Pennsylvana bioethics professor Arthur Caplan. Said Caplan,

I think it makes eminent good sense. Clinics are constantly putting aside embryos that don't look right or are developing incorrectly. Occasionally those embryos are used in training embryologists. So it seems to me not to be a big moral step to say, "Why not use them for research purposes?"

Some would say they're still disabled -- so they're not persons, but disabled persons. That's a bogus metaphor. They're not disabled, they're inabled. They lack potential. They can't become anything in terms of human growth. Their programming is so seriously wrong that they're not believed capable of becoming a fetus. I think the position that a severely abnormal embryo headed for destruction might not be used in research just doesn't take seriously the moral need for doing some research. It's turning a moral position that might be defensible -- non-destruction -- into a moral fetish.

There's no way you can avoid creating malprogrammed embryos. Nature does it. It's going to happen in the clinic, too. So to object, you're going to have to move toward a position that says, "No sexual activity for fear that we might make malformed embryos naturally." Again, I think it's an incoherent position. In nature, many eggs and many embryos don't work. Of human eggs, about 5 percent work properly. In nature, I believe around 20 percent of embryos work properly. You have tremendous loss of both eggs and embryos. Reprodction is a very difficult thing to make work properly by sexual relations. It fails far more often than it works. If you're going to fetishize the embryos, you're going to say, "I can't have sexual relations because I have to preserve every embryo."

That likely won't prove a popular position, though it would certainly settle the whole stem cell debate in a few generations. (Insert your riff on the Shakers here.)

However, Caplan cautioned that "the very things that make these embryos unavailable for making babies might turn out to disqualifying in terms of whether they can make useful stem cells." The Nature Biotechnology study was an excellent proof of principle, but we still need to see if the cells work.