STEM CELL SCIENCE AND STEM CELL MORALITY
Is it 'wither' or 'whether' or not?
ADELAIDE: 3rd October -- They did not appear on the same platform, but they are both Australians with an informed point of view and have both spoken out publically recently on the importance of, and issues in stem cell science: Dr. Stephen Livesey, recently appointed Chief Scientific Officer of the National Stem Cell Centre, and Dr. Norman Ford SDB, Director of the Caroline Chisholm Centre for Health Ethics. Both, in their own way, are 'paving the way for the next ten years of research' - title of the recent Conference of top scientists and ethicists in the field held in Adelaide in the last week of September, and at which Dr. Ford spoke.
Livesey: (The Age, Melbourne, Sept 23rd): Stem cell technology is phenomenal. It has the potential to address many of the most significant human diseases...a whole range of chronic and life-threatening conditions...We're concentrating on four core areas: using embryonic and adult stem cells to develop programs for cell and gene therapies; combining stem cells and tissue matrix products to repair diseased or damaged tissue; and researching the area of immune responses to stem cell therapies.
Ford: (from his address to the above-named Conference): Many in the community would be supportive of using pluripotent embryonic stem cells in regenerative medicine if this could be achieved without the serious moral problem of destroying human embryos to obtain these precious cells. Therapies based on using adult stem cells or stem cells from umbilical cord blood would be ethical but most adult stem cells are not pluripotent i.e. are generally unable to contribute to most cell lines in the body following transplantation.....one possible solution may be to look to migrating primordial germ cells in a 5-9 weeks post fertilisation deceased human fetus following a miscarriage in a hospital. An even better way would be to remove them ethically from an ectopic embryo/fetus.
Ford quotes the statistic of 1/50 pregnancies being ectopic in the USA. He goes on to discuss the sensitivities of this issue as far as parents are concerned, but stresses that the existence and loss of such fetuses in itself presents no ethical dilemma. He concludes by urging that funding which is readily available for stem cell research be directed especially to examining this proposal and confirming the usefulness and benefits of cells thus derived.
And just how much funding is available? Livesey has the answer to that: "Sixty million sounds like a lot of money, but in terms of similar businesses in the US it is not unusual to spend $600 million".
