The Embryo's New Clothes

“People need a fairy tale,” said Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, “Maybe that’s unfair, but they need a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.”

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a creative man needed a patron, a rich nobleman who was willing to pay an artist’s upkeep so as to give the artist time to create. Long the backbone of artisans, patronage has only recently become the backbone of technologists. Sadly, in the seventy-odd years since the Manhattan Project spawned the government subsidy boom in technology, biological sciences have generally been a poor step-child.

But biological experts, like everyone else, have house payments to make. The advantage of getting a government subsidy instead of a private subsidy to do your work is obvious: the government is not likely to go bankrupt. Thus, if you want to assure yourself a steady income, the most efficient way to do it is to get on the public dole. And therein lies a fairy tale, deliberately concocted and purposefully promoted.

Like Mom, apple pie and Chevrolet, everyone is for stem cell research. The promise of a disease-free life, lived longer and painlessly is very alluring. What’s not to love? Indeed, since the very first successful bone marrow transplant, stem cells have been used to successfully treat dozens of diseases.

There’s just one problem. There are not one, but two, kinds of stem cells. These two kinds of cells are not interchangeable, either medicinally or morally, but certain people are deliberately confusing the two in order to promote a specific political agenda. I. Richard Garr, president and CEO of Neuralstem Inc., a private company in Gaithersburg, Md., working with adult neural stem cells, points out: "This is a field that has more hype in it than almost anything outside of professional wrestling. The last thing we want to do is take away hope from anyone, but even a higher priority for us is not to give anybody false hope. I think the hype that's out there is not productive."

As you might recall from high school biology, all of us started as a single cell in our mothers’ fallopian tubes, we began as a zygote, a fertilized egg. By the time we reached the uterus, we had grown into embryos. As embryos, we implanted into our mothers’ wombs and eventually grew into the fine, upstanding people we are today. But all the hundreds of different kinds of cells we have in our bodies today came from that first cell and its progeny.

A stem cell is one of those very early cells; it is a cell capable of turning into essentially any type of cell the body needs, depending on the mechanical and hormonal influences it is subject to. There are two kinds of stem cells: embryonic stem cells (ESC) and adult stem cells (ASC).

ESCs come exclusively from embryos. Children are deliberately conceived in artificial conditions, these children are allowed to grow to a specific stage of embryonic development in the laboratory, and they are then torn apart so their cells can be used for experimentation. Notice three things. (1) Embryos are torn apart, not fertilized eggs — zygotes are too immature. (2) This work requires the deaths of thousands of embryonic children. (3) This research is happening right now. It just doesn’t receive government funding. Yet.

Researchers who support abortion like to argue that ESCs are the best thing to use for research. Since they clearly have not differentiated, we can learn more from these kinds of cells and we can adapt them for treatment more easily. Unfortunately for abortion supporters, getting stem cells from embryos has not turned out to be a good idea. Stem cells from embryos don’t know they are no longer part of an embryo. No matter where they are placed in the human body — heart, pancreas, skull — they tend to try to grow into a child. Since having a child growing inside your skull does not usually contribute to improved health, this kind of growth is considered cancerous.

In short, ESCs — unlike the fetal and post-natal varieties — have a tendency to produce tumors after implantation. "We have to find ways to minimize that," says Pamela Gehron Robey, chief of the Craniofacial and Skeletal Diseases Branch of the Division of Intramural Research of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. She doesn’t mention that she is quite willing to kill thousands of embryonic children in order to get what she wants.

ASCs, on the other hand, are found in anyone who has grown past the embryonic stage of development. Umbilical cord blood is the best source because the cord is easily accessible, the newborn immune system is not very advanced and the resulting ASCs tend to be accepted by the recipient’s immune system. But, ASCs have also been obtained from blood, bone marrow, olfactory nerve endings (these are constantly regenerated, so taking them from an adult’s nose has no side effects), skin cells, even fat. That’s right. You can go ahead and eat that Big Mac. Just donate the results to science.

Now, stem cells are really only useful for one thing: replacing dead or dying cells that can no longer do their job. As noted above, ASCs have have been used for decades to treat disease. Leukemias, immune system and other blood disorders, cancers, auto-immune diseases: the list is nearly 100 illnesses long , with more on the way. As you can see, adult stem cells work very well and they work right now. There are no moral issues involved with ASCs, absolutely no one is trying to stop ASC research and thousands of people have benefited from ASC therapy.

What about ESCs? Well, as noted above, obtaining ESCs involves killing children. Just as we shouldn’t (even if we can) kill people and snatch their heart, lungs and kidneys in order to solve the organ transplant shortage, so we shouldn’t (even if we can) kill children in order to snatch their embryonic stem cells. To make matters worse, there is absolutely no evidence ESCs work. Though ESC “therapy” has been tried dozens of times, no one has ever been successfully treated with embryonic stem cells. No one. Typically, ESCs make people more sick or kill them. Less often, they simply have no effect.

So, we have ASCs — a morally acceptable, medicinally useful stem cell therapy available right now, and we have ESCs — a morally illicit, medicinally useless stem cell therapy that is not likely to ever work. So, which do you think people want funded? The second, of course. People like Nancy Reagan and Michael J. Fox think embryonic stem cell research is useful for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease because, like the communists that Ronald Reagan fought, embryonic stem cell researchers deliberately misrepresent the facts in order to drum up public support. The researchers need to feed at the public trough because private enterprise refuses to fund them. The ESC approach doesn’t work. Private enterprise does not stay in business by funding failure.

On June 10th’s World News Tonight, Ned Potter and Dr. Michael Shelanski, Alzheimer’s researcher, Columbia University, hinted at the chicanery:

Potter: “Stem cells, which are found in human embryos, may be able to replace almost any damaged cell in the body. But with Alzheimer’s it’s not the cell that need to be replaced.”

Shelanski: “The early changes of Alzheimer’s disease are a loss of the connections between nerve cells without death of the nerve cells themselves.”

Remember, stem cells, whether ASC or ESC, can only replace dead or damaged cells. They can’t fix living cells that don’t communicate well.

Why aren’t these embryonic stem cell researchers being exposed as frauds? Because they are tearing apart human embryos, and that reduces respect for children in the womb. Journalists like Tom Shales, William Safire, Tom Brokaw, Sandra Hughes, Barbara Walters, the crew of Good Morning America, the president of the Alzheimer’s Association, and a couple dozen Congressmen all push for more embryonic stem cell research either because they don’t understand the issues or because they actively support legal abortion and recognize that the more our society takes a utilitarian view of very small humans, the less likely we are to end the slaughter of them. Scientific research is being prostituted for political ends. The embryo has no clothes.

Steve Kellmeyer is a nationally known author and lecturer, specializing in apologetics and catechetics. His new books Sex and the Sacred City: Meditations on the Theology of the Body and Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code are now available on-line and by phone through Bridegroom Press as are his other books, audio recordings and teaching tools. If you would like to comment on his columns or other writings, please visit www.skellmeyer.blogspot.com .

You used the phrase, "mass of undifferentiated cells." That is a false assertion on the face of it. here's why: by the time fetal stem cells are found alive inside the placental organ being built (and that is true even in petri dish embryos), the newly conceived organism has already begun differentiation (it started way back in the morula 'age'), to produce stem cells that make the placenta and stem cells that make the fetus. The target of embryonic harvesters is the fetal body at his or her earliest age in their lifetime. Stem cell differentiation begins before implantation, as the new LIFE tasks some stem cells to make the placenta and other stem cells to make the fetal body. it is the specific fetal body stem cells the researchers want to rip from the ORGANISM at the embryo age.

"The unpleasant truth is that ESCs probably can, and thus probably will, be used to create successful treatments for certain ailments. You can't hang your hat on the failures to date, because the first success makes your argument moot."

We are talking about SCIENCE here, not speculation. One does not base public policy on speculation, which is what the ESC proponents are asking for. The MORAL agrument against ESC is un-questioned, but by NOT pointing out the fact that ESC has thus far FAILED all SCIENTIFIC tests to date, we are leaving the field open to the proponents to make speculation-based arguments. Propaganda HAS to be answered, or "preception becomes reality".

But this article has explained to me why the ESC grant-seekers are seeking government grants. The article exposes their underlying motivation and is a useful addition to the argument contra, although not essential, as you point out.

OTOH, the article also notes that there are non-government-funded ESC efforts also underway, both here and abroad, which tells me that there's more to this than a bit of fraud. Kellmeyer's opinion about motivations is probably wrong The researchers involved are probably not "frauds," in the sense that they're sucking at the government teat for something they know to be unworkable. More likely, their motivation is to have steady money available for something they think they can make work.

In fact, the more I re-read Kellmeyer's article, the less I like it. He appears to be untruthful in some very important areas -- falsely accusing researchers (most of whom are earnest, even if morally on the wrong side); and undoubtedly misrepresenting the scientific case as well. Such slimy antics have the unfortunate side effect of making the underlying (and correct) point seem slimy as well.

Any appeal to utilitarian aspects of the debate is dangerour because it moves the terms of the debate onto their ground, rather than ours, which is the principle that killing for spare parts is intrinsically and universally unaccepable.

You are right.

But OTOH, one reaches reflexively for the pragmatic argument against ESC to counter the hype.

The pro-abortion media, in cahoots with the amoral 'research' industry, are successfully misleading the public into believing that enormous therapeutic successes using ESC are 'just around the corner' -- if only that mean evil Bush would lift his narrow-minded restrictions.

Some of us believe the public needs that facts on ESC -- namely that not only have implantations to date had disastrous and irreversible results, but that contrary to the loud claims being made, ESC will probably never hold promise for curing or ameliorating Alaheimer's, Parkinson's, etc.

Kellmeyer's opinion about motivations is probably wrong The researchers involved are probably not "frauds," in the sense that they're sucking at the government teat for something they know to be unworkable. More likely, their motivation is to have steady money available for something they think they can make work.

That makes sense. I don't know enough about the science to make a judgement. But I don't have much sympathy for these scientists since they're either unethical or self-deluded.

The researchers involved are probably not "frauds"

Don't you think this devastating statement by a "stem cell researcher," quoted by Kellmeyer, does more than merely hint at "fraud" ?

“People need a fairy tale,” said Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, “Maybe that’s unfair, but they need a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.”

I hardly think that researcher is "earnest." If you have quotes from other ESC researchers that shows their "earnestness," I'd like to see them.

As to whether Kellmeyer is "undoubtedly misrepresenting the scientific case," please provide your evidence for that.

I suggest you first read the links in post #25, the second of which is a recent article published in the Washington Post -- a publication certainly not "biased" to the right.

We are talking about SCIENCE here, not speculation. One does not base public policy on speculation, which is what the ESC proponents are asking for.

Not true. Public policy -- at least in the funding of scientific research -- is based entirely on (informed) speculation. Informed speculation says "this might work, if you gave us time and money to work on it." We generally frown on the use of government money to tell us things we already knew.

In the case of ESCs, there's a faid chance that sufficient time and money would produce results (we already know that ESCs can create an entire human, after all). Certainly there are plenty of reputable scientists who've made a case for there being a reasonable chance of success.

The MORAL agrument against ESC is un-questioned, but by NOT pointing out the fact that ESC has thus far FAILED all SCIENTIFIC tests to date

First off, the MORAL argument against ESC is not un-questioned. If it were, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. The problem is that there are powerful interests who have rejected the moral argument entirely. If you look closely, you'll see that the MORAL argument is the only thing standing between ESC research and federal money, and that argument is beginning to crumble.

As for it having failed all scientific tests to date, I'd say that's a gross over-simplification. The scientists can no doubt point to a wide variety of basic advances necessary to achieve a workable ESC treatment. If they're getting "closer," then the "always fails" argument doesn't work.

Propaganda HAS to be answered, or "perception becomes reality".

You're right. And that counts for propaganda on our side, too. Kellmeyer's article looks like propaganda to me, and I think he's being dishonest. It does not help to mislead the people on your own side.

The false assertions that can be raised by the pro-dehumanization people must be dealt with in public forums. [The particular one raised here also applies to the abortion rhetoric, and the answer has weight based on the same lack of education of the people.] The assertion oft used that the embryo is an 'undifferentiated glob of cells' must be dealt with, to expose the false nature of the assertion (not that our FR friend meant to assert such). That's why I offer the manuscript linked in post #6 ... Americans will continue to talk past each other, unless the biological facts are understood. Citing one's faith in rejecting ESC research is admirable, but until those of faith can refute the false biological assertions, too many Americans will pass on the debate and the evil of cannibalizing fetal aged beings at their earliest manifestation will become an at first tacitly accepted methodology, then be embraced for the utilitarian applications ... and it does appear that cloning will be an integral part of future fetal stem cell applications. [I would really like it if we pro-life folks would use 'fetal stem cells' when referring to embryonic stem cell research, since it is precisely the stem cells tasked with builduing the fetal self that are the target of the research cannibals. BTW, I use the term 'cannibalism' because it is first, factual, and second, hopefully, behavior the American people will still reject, if we've not descended too far down the slippery funnel already!]

Don't you think this devastating statement by a "stem cell researcher," quoted by Kellmeyer, does more than merely hint at "fraud"?

Kellmeyer misrepresents, and you seem to have missed, the proper context for the quote. McKay is not saying that the science itself is a "fairy tale." He thinks the science is valid and workable. What he's really saying is that the people with the money need something that will convince them to send money: the "fairy tale" in question is the description of some of the possible results of the research.

"Informed speculation says "this might work, if you gave us time and money to work on it." We generally frown on the use of government money to tell us things we already knew."

"In the case of ESCs, there's a faid chance that sufficient time and money would produce results (we already know that ESCs can create an entire human, after all)."

Thus far, the DATA says is does not, despite multiple trials and mega-dollars spent. This MUST be pointed out whenever they raise up the "it might cure XXXXX" issue.

"Kellmeyer's article looks like propaganda to me, and I think he's being dishonest. It does not help to mislead the people on your own side."

And I say again---SHOW ME WHERE HE HAS DONE SO. Everything in the article is correct and true to the best of my knowledge of the subject..

The same could be said of any number of other inventions which we now take for granted. How many thousands of trials did Edison make, before he finally invented a practical light bulb?

Men died in the developement of the technologies that allow us to leave the Earth and enter orbit in space as well. The difference was that these men knew that they could die from hanging onto the very edge of developing technology.

The difference is that unborn children can't make the personal decision to sacrifice themselves on the altar of medical technology. The difference is between a pile of broken lightbulbs and broken babies.

The difference is between a pile of broken lightbulbs and broken babies.

For you and me, that is indeed the difference. Problem is, the folks on the other side of the argument obviously think otherwise. That's one of the points I'm trying to make.

You're basically assuming that the other side shares your moral viewpoint on the matter, when in fact they do not. You've got to be clear on the grounds of the debate.

"the other side" are the people who believe morality is subjective, so there is no possibility of EVER winning a moral debate with them.

Just as there are a relatively few of us on this side of the debate, there are also relatively few who hold hard positions on the other side of the debate.

The only debate available is for the moral attention of those who do not have a strong position for or against the use of ESCs (they haven't really done much thinking about it), but who are strongly attracted by the pragmatic applications of the research.

In that sense, this issue is no different from the abortion debate. When asked to decide whether specific abortion procedures should be allowed, most people say "no." It's only when they are asked to decide on an undefined "right to choose" that a majority of people think abortion is OK.

What that tells me is that people are capable of doing the moral calculus if forced to do so, but aren't really willing to do it on their own. What has to change -- in the case of abortion, and in the case of ESC research -- is the tendency for people to avoid the moral questions.

When you reduce it to a matter of pragmatic "it will work" or "it won't work" arguments, our position collapses. All they have to do is wave the "life-saving treatment" flag, and we're left trying to say "but it won't work." We always lose those arguments.

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