April 23, 2002, 8:45 a.m.
Spinning Stem Cells
A damning reporting pattern.
By Wesley J. Smith
he pattern in the media reportage about stem cells is growing very wearisome. When a research advance occurs with embryonic stem cells, the media usually give the story the brass-band treatment. However, when researchers announce even greater success using adult stem cells, the media reportage is generally about as intense and excited as a stifled yawn.
As a consequence, many people in this country continue to believe that embryonic stem cells offer the greatest promise for developing new medical treatments using the body's cells — known as regenerative medicine — while in actuality, adult and alternative sources of stem cells have demonstrated much brighter prospects. This misperception has societal consequences, distorting the political debate over human cloning and embryonic-stem-cell research (ESCR) and perhaps even affecting levels of public and private research funding of embryonic and adult stem-cell therapies.
This media pattern was again in evidence in the reporting of two very important research breakthroughs announced within the last two weeks. Unless you made a point of looking for these stories — as I do in my work — you might have missed them. Patients with Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis received significant medical benefit using experimental adult-stem-cell regenerative medical protocols. These are benefits that supporters of embryonic-stem-cell treatments have yet to produce widely in animal experiments. Yet adult stem cells are now beginning to ameliorate suffering in human beings.
Celebrity Parkinson's disease victims such as Michael J. Fox and Michael Kinsley regularly tout ESCR as the best hope for a cure of their disease. Indeed, the Washington Post recently published a Kinsley rant on the subject in which the editor and former Crossfire co-host denounced opponents of human cloning as interfering with his hope for a cure. Yet as loudly as Fox and Kinsley promote ESCR in the media or before legislative committees, both have remained strangely silent about the most remarkable Parkinson's stem-cell experiment yet attempted: one in which researchers treated Parkinson's with the patient's own adult stem cells.
Here's the story, in case you missed it: A man in his mid-50s had been diagnosed with Parkinson's at age 49. The disease grew progressively, leading to tremors and rigidity in the patient's right arm. Traditional drug therapy did not help.
Stem cells were harvested from the patient's brain using a routine brain biopsy procedure. They were cultured and expanded to several million cells. About 20 percent of these matured into dopamine-secreting neurons. In March 1999, the cells were injected into the patient's brain.
Three months after the procedure, the man's motor skills had improved by 37 percent and there was an increase in dopamine production of 55.6 percent. One year after the procedure, the patient's overall Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale had improved by 83 percent — this at a time when he was not taking any other Parkinson's medication!
That is an astonishing, remarkable success, one that you would have thought would set off blazing headlines and lead stories on the nightly news. Had the treatment been achieved with embryonic stem cells, undoubtedly the newspapers would have screamed loudly enough to be heard. Unfortunately, reportage about the Parkinson's success story was strangely muted. True, the Washington Post ran an inside-the-paper story and there were some wire service reports. But the all-important New York Times — the one news outlet that drives television and cable news — did not report on it at all. Nor did a search of the Los Angeles Times website yield any stories about the experiment.
More...
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"A small number of Parkinson's disease patients, like actor Michael J. Fox, first develop symptoms at a much younger age...It usually takes 12-14 years before a patient declines to the stage where drugs afford only limited benefit....Spain, where researchers working with monkeys extracted cells from a site near the carotid artery in the neck and transplanted them into the monkey's own brain, where they produced the key neuro-chemical dopamine at 35 times the rate of fetal cells. This raises the possibility of a Parkinson's patient being able to be his own donor, utilizing a group of cells with potentially far greater efficacy...
Parkinson's disease expert Dr. Mark Guttman of the University of Toronto points out that up to 3% of brain cells in a person's gray matter may actually be a form of neural-based stem cell. A pool of these cells can be extracted from brain tissue removed from humans for a variety of therapeutic reasons, then cultured, stored, and eventually encouraged to mature into dopamine-producing cells, suitable for transplant. -- "Media Sugarcoats Fetal Tissue Transplant Failure", Paul Ranalli, M.D.