Editorial:

The moral imperative of stem-cell research

Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

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A debate has raged this week between Congress and the president that is of the deepest moral import. It concerns the use of embryonic stem cells for research. Proponents on both sides of the argument are convinced of their righteousness. There appears to be no middle ground.

At issue is whether the federal government should rescind its restrictions on paying for medical research with cells from some of the 400,000 leftover embryos that were produced in fertility clinics but not used. Advocates of lifting federal restrictions on their use say they offer immense potential for cures of debilitating and deadly diseases; the embryos, they say, were destined for the trash in any case.

Those who object to lifting restrictions on the use of the embryos say that exploiting them constitutes taking a human life because it means destroying the embryo. They say no promise those cells can offer would justify such a cost.

On Tuesday, a bipartisan bill to allow federal funding for human embryonic stem-cell research passed the Senate with a healthy margin; the House had already passed the measure last year. Both Maine's senators and representatives supported the measure. President Bush vetoed the legislation Wednesday.

The stem-cell debate is a version of the abortion debate that has suffused and bedeviled American political discourse since the 1980s. It has big implications; already, pundits are saying that some of the fall's congressional and governors' races may hinge on a candidate's position on stem-cell research. Democrats have seized on the issue as a litmus test: "This is the kind of issue that voters use to distinguish members who are beholden to the far right," a Democratic campaign official told the Washington Post.

The issue is not new; it began when researchers at the University of Wisconsin announced in 1998 that they had isolated and kept alive long-term cultures of the cells. It turns out that stem cells from embryos can make virtually innumerable copies of themselves in a laboratory setting; they can also, when chemically signaled, turn into almost any tissue or cell in the body. Their therapeutic use thus becomes virtually limitless; scientists say they hope to one day be able to transplant brain or heart or other cells made from stem cells into patients with damaged or diseased versions of those cells.

After the Wisconsin scientists' announcement, the National Institutes of Health empaneled a group of experts to devise ethical guidelines for the use of stem cells in research. Their guidelines, issued at the end of the Clinton administration, called for awarding federal grants to scientists to study embryonic stem-cell colonies as long as the embryos were developed in a fertility treatment context, were not needed by the people whose eggs and sperm made them and were donated by the couple for research purposes. But when George Bush became president, he changed the rules, limiting federal money to research on stem-cell lines derived from embryos already destroyed by the date of his announcement, Aug. 9, 2001.

Scientists say the restrictions have hamstrung what could have been substantial progress on cures derived from stem cells. They've been forced to raise private money to pay for the kind of basic research normally supported by the federal government; the limited number of lines available for research have proven less than fruitful because of defects that have emerged in them. Resources have been wasted in building duplicate laboratories for research on new lines that have been developed, in order to avoid using federal research money on them. And families with loved ones suffering from diseases that could be helped by embryonic stem-cell research are left wondering: Is it possible that their loved one could be killed by a deadly combination of disease and the political ideology that suppressed a cure?

When President Bush vetoed the legislation Wednesday, he used the language of the anti-abortion movement that has historically supported him. "This bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others. It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect."

We disagree. We can be a decent society and recognize that it is moral to use embryos destined for the trash heap as the source for possible medical cures. The potential exists to save innumerable lives by using embryonic stem cells, and we believe the moral imperative lies in advancing that research, not retarding it.