Stem-cell research surges ahead of lawmakers

In what many are calling a breakthrough, an international team of scientists for the first time has produced human embryonic stem cells genetically matched to specific people diagnosed with diseases. They hope the advance will one day lead to growing replacement tissue to treat specific maladies.

The technique, which involves cloning, will find its most immediate use as a powerful research tool, scientists say. An enormous amount of work remains to be done to determine if embryonic stem cells can be used to treat injuries or illnesses.

While the announcement is being hailed as a major breakthrough, it also will heighten the ethical tension over how far and how fast the science community should be allowed to go in cloning for research and therapeutic purposes.

Still, the importance of the results can't be underestimated, notes Konrad Hochedlinger, a stem-cell scientist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.

"This is a proof of principle for therapeutic cloning," he says, referring to the process of implanting a patient's genetic "blueprint" in a donor's egg to produce patient-specific stem cells for the purpose of finding a cure.

The latest results are likely to recharge and broaden the political and social debate in the US over the ethics of cloning and embryonic stem-cell research. The country is still at odds over whether human cloning should be permitted for research purposes. Moreover, extracting embryonic stem cells destroys the primitive embryos that produce them.

Thus the ethics of using embryonic stem cells for any purpose pits people who are convinced that human life begins at the moment of conception against those who disagree and see moral worth in exploring human embryonic stem cells' potential for understanding human development and the development and treatment of diseases.

Beyond the "should we, shouldn't we" argument, however, lie emerging issues. The new results highlight the need for clear standards regarding ethical treatment of women who donate eggs for the procedure, a need to find common ground on ethical research standards across borders, and a need to be clear with donors and research subjects that an enormous gulf remains between basic science and any potential future therapies.

These issues are likely to echo under the Capitol dome next week. The US House of Representatives is expected to vote on a bipartisan measure that would allow federally funded researchers to use discarded embryos from fertility clinics to develop new stem-cell lines. The bill, which some analysts say is likely to pass, would reverse President Bush's decision in May 2001 to ban this source of stem cells. His decision limited federally funded scientists in the US to a small number of preexisting stem-cell lines for research - a number researchers argue is far too small to yield meaningful advances. The ban has prompted universities and states such as California to set up funding approaches for human embryonic stem-cell research independent of the federal government to allow scientists a freer hand at selecting source material for their work.

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