July 12, 2005
Kass Flunks His Own Yuck Test
If President Bush needs more evidence that his arbitrary limit on stem cell research has lost mainstream support, he got it over the past week. Parade Magazine, the AARP Bulletin and the latest National Geographic to hit the stands all ran major stories praising the promise of this emerging medical technology. A survey published in Parade showed 59 percent of Americans now back federal support of stem cell research.
Yet right-to-life organizations continue to seek protection for embryos at in vitro fertilization clinics, which, once they are no longer needed by the prospective parents because they’ve gotten pregnant, are discarded as medical waste. Instead of having them donated to science, the right-to-lifers would presumably keep them on ice forever.
The absurdity of the right-to-life position was highlighted at a Senate subcommittee hearing today. Senators Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) are sponsoring legislation in the Senate that would remove the Bush administration’s limitations on the National Institutes of Health. A similar bill passed the House last month.
The Bush restrictions, instituted in 2001 to please the right-to-life crowd, limit federally-funded stem cell research to the 22 viable lines that had been created before that date. Not only are those lines inadequate because many have been contaminated by mouse genetic material, but scientists now say that limiting them to just those lines will not allow them to develop new lines that genetically match their patients, which is one of the major therapeutic benefits of this still unfolding field. It also won’t allow them to study the evolution of cells taken from people with genetic diseases, which promises to be a major research tool produced by stem cell research.
With a vote expected any day, Specter called today’s hearing to allow proponents of alternative methods of developing stem cells to have their say. These methods, which were highlighted in a January report by the President’s Council on Bioethics, range from extracting single stem cells from the frozen embryo in a way that won’t damage the zygote to deprogramming adult cells to become stem cells.
Writing in today’s Washington Post, Leon Kass, the chairman of the President’s Council and a fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, put his faith in one particular method called altered nuclear transfer. The current preferred method for developing embryonic stem cells involves taking the genetic material from an adult’s skin cell and infusing it into a fertilized embryo that has been denuded of its own genetic material. After zapping it with electricity and allowing it to divide several times, scientists harvest the embryonic stem cells, which have the ability to grow into any part of the body.
Scientists who are experimenting with altered nuclear transfer remove one of the genes from the adult DNA before they put it into the egg. The missing gene makes the embryo incapable of developing beyond the stem cell stage. William Hurlbut, a bioethicist from Stanford and a Kass ally on the President’s Council, told Specter and Harkin that this is a “less morally unacceptable” approach to developing stem cells for research. The resulting spawn wouldn’t, he said, “have the moral status of a human embryo.”
The two senators were openly contemptuous of his – and by extension the President’s – logic. The bioethicists would forbid removing stem cells from healthy embryos, but allow scientists to bioengineer a defective embryo and then remove its stem cells. Is something that has been bioengineered to be defective the best material for research? And if the right-to-lifers insist that life begins when the sperm and egg meet, won’t they also say that this defective zygote has the same rights as frozen, normal embryos?
Indeed, most people would probably say that this bioengineered product flunks Kass’s famous “yuck” test for determining the moral acceptability of modern biotechnology techniques. “What is this Frankenstein thing we’re creating if we take a gene out?” Harkin asked. “What is it?”