Reason Magazine - Topics > Stem Cells

Modern Day Frankensteins

mmoses@duke.edu (Michael Valdez Moses) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In a memorable scene in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) reenter FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. for the first time since The X-Files left the airwaves in 2002. Waiting in a hallway they notice a portrait of George Bush that hangs on the wall. Knowing looks of alarm and disapproval cross their faces as the signature six-note musical theme of the television series is heard for one of the only times in the film (aside from the opening credits), and the camera pans right to reveal a matching portrait of J. Edgar Hoover. In a movie surprisingly free of overt references to current events, this scene is a reminder that The X-Files was a political barometer of the 1990s, a show that purveyed a relentlessly dark and subversive view of government as a vast conspiracy against the American people. Serious fans in need of a post-9/11 fix of anti-government paranoia are likely to find themselves still jonesing after leaving the theatre. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Frank Spotnitz, who co-wrote and co-produced I Want to Believe with director and X-Files creator Chris Carter, confirmed that the two consciously steered clear of the grim political mythology that characterized the TV series.

Yet despite their best intentions, the boys sometimes just can't help themselves. Granted, I Want to Believe does not present the FBI as fully complicit in the axis of evil; the bureau even seems willing to "forgive" Mulder his past misdeeds and welcome him and Scully back into the fold. (At the conclusion of the TV series, Mulder was secretly detained by the government in a Guantanamo-like facility on trumped-up murder charges. Tortured and denied all legal rights, he was convicted by a kangaroo tribunal and sentenced to death before making his escape and going underground. Little wonder that Mulder insists in I Want to Believe that it is not he but the government that needs to be forgiven.)

But as it turns out, the FBI acts like a magnanimous big brother only because it unexpectedly needs Mulder's expertise concerning paranormal phenomena. When flown to Washington in one of the infamous black helicopters that were symbols of government oppression in the old show, Mulder and Scully learn that the FBI is as incompetent, inflexible, cynical, and self-serving as ever.

After an FBI agent is abducted, the bureau opportunistically makes use of Mulder just as it does Father Joseph Crissman (Billy Connolly), a psychic ex-priest and convicted pedophile, whose visions may provide clues to the agent's whereabouts. Unsurprisingly, the bureau fails to earn the trust of either the citizens who assist its efforts or those whom it purportedly serves. In fact, the bureau considers dropping the case when its missing agent turns up dead (its bureaucratic imperative is at an end), even though a civilian is still missing and presumed to have been abducted by the perpetrators. Only the persistence of Mulder (who refers to himself in one scene as a "non-cop") and Scully, acting on their own without government authorization, eventually leads to the apprehension of the two suspects responsible for a series of murders, and, more importantly, to saving the life of a victim. In the end, the FBI predictably discounts Mulder's interest in the paranormal, covers up his contribution to the investigation (along with that of Father Joe, whom the bureau publicly defames as an accomplice to the crimes), and takes full credit for stopping a dangerous foreign conspiracy involving illegal traffic in human organs. The FBI not only fails to save the life of one of its own agents but manages to get a second one killed. With the singular exception of its maverick Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), who acts out of personal loyalty to Mulder and Scully, the FBI does nothing to solve the case; its methods and protocols only retard its satisfactory resolution. Another job well done at J. Edgar's old haunts.

If I Want to Believe portrays the government as incompetent and self-serving, rather than as the TV series had it—malign and conspiratorial—the film nonetheless remains focused on the difficulty in distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys in the contemporary political scene. Far from being haphazard and meandering (as a few critics have suggested) the movie is carefully structured around two parallel stories. The main plot involves two perpetrators, Janke Dacyshyn (Callum Keith Rennie) and Franz Tomczeszyn (Fagin Woodcock), who have serially abducted, murdered, and dismembered several victims. The same-sex pair, who are legally married in the state of Massachusetts, rely on a team of Russian scientists to perform a series of "full-body" transplants that prolong the life (or, more accurately, the head) of Tomczeszyn. The latter, who suffers from cancer as a result of radiation poisoning, manages to extend his life by having his head serially grafted on to the bodies of his victims (mainly young women), who share his AB negative blood type. Tomczeszyn heads a firm that legally deals in the transportation of human organs, but he and his partner also appear to be engaged in the illegal trade of organs harvested from their murder victims. Father Joe, the ex-priest, believes his visions provide him with a psychic link to one or more of the victims abducted by the murderers; but as it turns out, his real spiritual connection is with the perpetrator, Tomszeszyn, one of 37 altar boys whom the convicted pedophile sexually abused in the past.

A second seemingly minor subplot involves Scully's efforts at Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital to save the life of Christian Fearon (Marco Niccoli), a young boy suffering from Sandhoff disease, a fatal degenerative neurological disorder with no known cure. Over the objections of Father Ybarra (Adam Godley), the hospital administrator, and Christian's parents, Scully attempts a radically new "and extremely painful" therapy that draws on the newest breakthroughs in "stem cell research."

Though they may seem unrelated, the two subplots tell the same story: a tale of the Promethean effort to transform, adapt, remake, and preserve human life outside traditionally defined "natural" limits. At its best, the film imaginatively explores the great promise and the tremendous dangers of the brave new world of bio-technology. Dacyshyn and Tomszeszyn are meant to embody practices that violate the "natural order" of things: gay marriage, gender reassignment, trade and transplantation in human organs, stem cell research, vivisection, hybrid speciation, the indefinite prolongation of life. By contrast, Mulder and Scully seem to represent the traditional heterosexual couple who respect the limits of nature and who heroically save an innocent soul from the clutches of what the papers call a "modern day Doctor Frankenstein" at the risk of their own lives. Unlike their dark counterparts, Mulder and Scully do not resort to kidnapping and murdering young women in order to maintain their relationship or prolong their own lives. Nonetheless, Mulder and Scully are more representative of the brave new world than they or we might like to believe. Scully confesses to Father Joe that she and Mulder are not married, though they have lived together for several years. And although they have had a "son" (William), whom they've given up for adoption, they have never been sure if he was conceived through "normal" sexual relations. Fans of the show will recall that William may be a human-alien hybrid created by a conspiratorial syndicate via a sinister combination of genetic engineering and in vitro fertilization.

Moreover, Scully, despite her professed faith in the Catholic Church, eagerly embraces the cutting edge of (presumably embryonic) stem cell research and the most radically experimental forms of medical technology in her attempts to save the life of a dying boy. Were she to take on faith the Church's view that life begins at conception, she would have to concede that her attempts to save the life of her patient depend upon sacrificing the "lives" of those embryos from whom the crucial stem cells have been gathered. In any case, she refuses to allow the hospital to release Christian Fearon to a hospice and insists upon an untried medical procedure with little chance of success—but with the certainty that her patient will suffer agonizing pain.

Suggestively, the advanced stem cell research she relies on for her new surgical procedure appears to have been pioneered by the very same Russian medical team that carries out full-body transplants on Tomszeszyn. Mulder and Scully can, of course, fall back on their long-standing emotional and spiritual connection with each other to win our sympathies, but there's no reason to believe that their homosexual counterparts are any less fanatically devoted to each other—indeed, we witness a tender bed-side scene between the two in which Dacyshyn assures his failing partner that he will live, that he's "going to have a fine strong body again." The two couples thus represent two images of the very same phenomenon: the human endeavor to master nature and prolong human life. The parallels between the two couples thus work to erode the questionable distinction between what is or is not natural, and between those who live according to a natural order and those who challenge its authority.

The pivotal figure that conjoins the two plots is Father Joe. When we first meet the ex-priest, he significantly lights up a cigarette, a gesture that visually connects him with the arch-villain of The X-Files, the Cigarette Smoking Man. (Father Joe's long grey hair and terminal lung cancer are additional links to the Cigarette Smoking Man of the series finale.) The ex-priest is tormented by what he calls "monstrous appetites," desires he never asked for, and which he believes must come from God. In fact, he claims that he only ever wanted to "serve God," and he now seeks divine forgiveness for his sins and reengagement with the Church. In a remarkable scene, he spontaneously bleeds from his eyes after he envisions the body of the young woman tormented by the very person Father Joe abused years before. His painful visions turn out to be the penance he pays for his own "unnatural" desires. Pedophile and priest, psychic and saint, Father Joseph is that quintessentially ambivalent figure in whom the flesh and the spirit, good and evil are thoroughly mixed. And it is he who prophetically tells Scully that she "must not give up," which, she will learn, means she should pursue her Frankensteinian efforts to save the life of her dying patient, Christian Fearon.

At the close of the romantic era in early 19th century Europe, a number of writers and artists who had once been enthusiastic supporters of the French Revolution lost faith in the capacity of mankind to remake the world according to a new ideal of human freedom. The terror of the Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, the endless wars that marked his reign, and the repressive counter-revolutionary period that followed the Congress of Vienna made it difficult for these late Romantics to sustain a faith in liberal ideals or in the possibility of meaningful political reform. Lord Byron, Georg Büchner, and Mary Shelley did not so much turn away from politics as apply the bitter political lessons of their age to the cosmos as a whole. Rather than understand the corrupt ancient regimes of Europe as the source of human unhappiness and servitude, they projected a Gnostic vision of the universe as malignantly organized. In post-9/11 America, Chris Carter's conspiratorial view of government as a plot against the people has, like the visions of the late Romantics, become something of an indictment of the cosmos. The defects of a corrupt and incompetent government would seem to inhere in the nature of things. As Father Joe would have it, it is God (or if you prefer, nature's God) who authorizes those "monstrous" or unnatural desires that set loose evil in the world. And yet, for all the metaphysical darkness that pervades I Want to Believe, the film ends on a hopeful note: Scully takes heed of Father Joe's cryptic message, also sent by the divine powers: "don't give up." However harrowing the possibilities and however monstrous the risks, she's willing to accept the Promethean challenge and ventures forth once more to try and save the life of young Christian.

Michael Valdez Moses is Associate Professor of English at Duke University, author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture, and co-editor of Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939.

Fashion Victim

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:44:00 EDT

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened.

I guess I'll have to wait another year for my living mouse stem cell jacket. Darn it. I heard they were all the rage at Fashion Week.

Via Instapundit

The Rise of Stem Cell Research

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 13:30:00 EST

Democrats in the House of Representatives passed legislation last week that would lift President Bush's restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Bush issued his only veto against the same legislation last year. The legislation would allow federal funding for developing new embryonic stem cell lines derived from donated embryos leftover from fertility treatments.

When Bush first restricted federal funding to embryonic stem lines derived before his nationally televised speech on the subject in 2001, researchers feared that such limits would send a signal that would strongly "chill" research in the field. For example, many researchers worried that Sen. Sam Brownback's (R-Kan.) bill to ban both publicly and privately financed therapeutic cloning research was just the first step toward outlawing all human embryonic stem cell research. But that didn't happen.

Instead, the research restrictions—real and proposed—provoked a strong pushback by researchers and eventually the public. States began big time funding of embryonic stem cell research, e.g., $3 billion in California and $270 million in New Jersey. And the floodgates of private funding opened, showering hundreds of millions on stem cell researchers. It is highly probable that far more embryos have been used for stem cell research than would have been the case had President Bush not imposed his restrictions. How's that for irony!

Although we'll never know for sure, it is also probable that the fear that further limits might be imposed on human embryonic stem cell research intensified the hunt for other sources of stem cells. And the very good news is that these searches have been very successful. Stem cells have been found in fat, testicles, umbilical cord blood and tissue, bone marrow, and, most recently, amniotic fluid. More therapies using adult stem cell should be soon available in the medical marketplace. In fact, stem cell research may be enhanced as states compete to fund the most promising work. Maybe.

Instead of being modeled on drug development, perhaps embryonic stem cell research will follow a development path more like that blazed by researchers in assisted reproduction. Rather than being hampered by a paucity of federal research funding perhaps embryonic stem cell research will flourish just as research on assisted reproduction techniques (ART) has. Arguably in vitro fertilization research has proceeded rapidly because of, not in spite of, essentially no federal funding. So far more than 3 million babies have been born by means of ART. Without intrusive federal oversight and regulation IVF researchers have been able to deploy new techniques such as intracytoplasmic sperm injection, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, and sperm sorting for sex selection very shortly after they have been developed.

Research has stopped in promising areas of ART only when the Feds decide to get involved. For example, New Jersey Institute of Reproductive Medicine and Science researchers pioneered cytoplasmic transfer from donor eggs into the eggs of women that suffered from a defect in their cytoplasm. Revitalized, the eggs were fertilized, inserted into their mothers' wombs, and brought to term. Twenty children were born by means of the procedure, and then the FDA banned it. Cytoplasmic transfer is now available at fertility clinics in other countries. The latest breakthrough is in vitro maturation of eggs. Immature eggs are removed from a woman’s ovaries and matured in a laboratory outside her body. This means that women no longer have to undergo uncomfortable hormone treatments to produce superovulation in order to obtain the number of eggs suitable for IVF procedures.

Meanwhile where federal research funding is most lavish and regulation is most onerous, that is where progress in getting treatments to patients is slowing down. The FDA approved only 18 new drugs in 2006, down from an average of 26 per year over the past six years. As the costs for getting through the regulatory gauntlet go up, pharmaceutical companies are narrowing their product lines and bringing fewer treatments to patients.

It is a truism among academic researchers and many economists that Federal funding is necessary for basic research and that such funding is perpetually inadequate. However, a 2001 study by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development researchers found that in fact that higher spending by industry on R&D correlates nicely with higher economic growth rates. In contrast to the academic truisms about the need for Federal funding, the study found that “business‑performed R&D … drives the positive association between total R&D intensity and output growth.”

The OECD researchers noted that publicly funded defense research actually crowded out private research, “while civilian public research is neutral with respect to business‑performed R&D.” In other words, government funded civilian research didn’t hurt private sector but there wasn’t much evidence that it helped, at least in the short term. The report concluded, “Research and development (R&D) activities undertaken by the business sector seem to have high social returns, while no clear‑cut relationship could be established between non-business-oriented R&D activities and growth.” In other words, economic growth was associated almost entirely with private sector research funding. The OECD report did allow that perhaps publicly funded research might eventually result in long-term technology spillovers, but that contention was hard to evaluate.

As private donors and states continue to shovel tens of millions at stem cell researchers, it may just be that President Bush did embryonic stem cell research a huge favor when he imposed restrictions on federal funding of it.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Get Ready for Veto Number 2 (Embryonic Stem Cell Edition)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 10:56:00 EST

As Congress gets ready to pass legislation overturning the 2001 limits on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, the White House is pledged to veto same (the only time Bush has vetoed anything). While it's likely the Senate has the votes to overrule the veto, it seems that the House doesn't.

From a preemptive White House report that effectively annouces Bush veto:

"The stem cell debate is only the first in what will be an onrushing train of biotechnology challenges in our future. We must establish a constructive precedent here for taking the moral dimensions of these issues seriously," read the report, entitled Advancing Stem Cell Science without Destroying Human Life....
"Without an understanding that life begins at conception, and that an embryo is a nascent human being, there will always be arguments that other uses, takeovers, and make-overs of embryos are justified by potential scientific and medical benefits," the White House report reads.

Full news account here in Scientific American.

Of course, if the White House seriously believes that "all life begins at conception, and that an embryo is a nascent human being," then the question isn't why Bush is limiting federal money, but why he isn't pulling the plug completely. Or for that matter, why he isn't doing something to bring the thousands of frozen embryos sitting on the shelves in American fertility clinics and laboratories to term. Recall how press secretary Tony Snow summarized his boss' opposition to embryonic stem cells: "The simple answer is he thinks murder's wrong."

Could it be that Bush's opposition--and that of many people against embryonic stem cell research--is more symbolic than real? That it is as much a political signaling device as a heartfelt belief? If the creation of embryonic stem cells (and, of course, unused embryos from IVF and other procedures) is akin to murder, how can Bush stand on the sidelines? Given the fact that Bush is willing to fund some stem-cell research, this is not a debate about federal funding in general (my default setting on the feds funding just about anything other than defense and courts is no) but about attitudes toward science, reproductive rights, and other issues in play in the culture wars.

Reason's Ronald Bailey, explained why stem cells aren't babies here.

He explained why researchers don't need the feds here.

Scientists Grow Human Liver in Laboratory

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 07:29:00 EST

...and there was much rejoicing.

British scientists have grown the world's first artificial liver from stem cells in a breakthrough that will one day provide entire organs for transplant.
The technique that created the 'mini-liver', currently the size of a one pence piece, will be developed to create a full-size functioning liver....
The mini organ can be used to test new drugs.... Using lab-grown liver tissue would also reduce the number of animal experiments.
Within five years, pieces of artificial tissue could be used to repair livers damaged by injury, disease, alcohol abuse and paracetamol overdose.
And then, in just 15 years' time, entire liver transplants could take place using organs grown in a lab....
The liver tissue is created from stem cells - blank cells capable of developing into different types of tissue - found in blood from the umbilical cord.

More here.

Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey looked for to artifical livers (with onions, of course) here. And while you're at it, check out his great book, Liberation Biology, which makes "the scientific and moral case for the biotech revolution."

Brownback's Chimerical Attempt to Curb Science

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Last year, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan) introduced the Human Chimera Prohibition Act. The act is cosponsored by his fellow conservatives Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev), Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla) and Sen. Richard Santorum (R-Penn). The aim of the act is to ban various types of research in which human cells and genetic material are mixed with animal cells and genes. Why? Because the act claims, "respect for human dignity and the integrity of the human species may be threatened by chimeras." Violations of the Act would be punishable by fines of $1 million or ten years in prison or both.

In his 2006 State of the Union message, President Bush, somewhat confusedly, urged Congress to pass legislation that would ban "creating human-animal hybrids." Why confusedly? Because interspecific hybrids are produced by mating two individuals from different species such as donkeys and horses to produce mules, but most people understood the President to be coming out against human-animal chimeras and in support of Sen. Brownback's legislation.

Before looking at the Act, what are chimeras anyway? In Greek mythology a chimera was a fire-breathing monster that had the head of lion, body of a goat, and tail of a serpent. In modern biotechnology chimeras are creatures composed of cells from two or more species. An example would be the "geep" that was created in 1984 by fusing goat and sheep embryos.

So what kind of heinous research does Sen. Brownback want to criminalize? The Act would ban:

(A) a human embryo into which a non-human cell, or any component part of a non-human cell, has been introduced;
(B) a human embryo that consists of cells derived from more than one human embryo, fetus, or born individual;
(C) a human egg that has been fertilized by a non-human sperm;
(D) a non-human egg that has been fertilized by a human sperm;
(E) a human egg into which a non-human nucleus has been introduced;
(F) a non-human egg into which a human nucleus has been introduced;
(G) a human egg or a non-human egg that otherwise contains haploid sets of chromosomes from both a human and a non-human life form;
(H) a non-human life form engineered such that human gametes develop within the body of a non-human life form; or
(I) a non-human life form engineered such that it contains a human brain or a brain derived wholly or predominantly from human neural tissues.

Let's consider how any of these proposed procedures might threaten respect for human dignity and the integrity of the human species. The first consideration, of course, is the endless argument over the moral status of very early embryos. If one believes, for whatever reasons or revelations, that an embryo consisting of a 100 or so cells has the same moral status as a 30-year old mother that's the end of the matter for them. No experimenting on human embryos, period. But please note, some of the procedures banned by the Act arguably do not produce human embryos. And in any case, if one doesn't believe that embryos are people, are there still good moral reasons to ban some of the procedures listed in the Human Chimera Prohibition Act?

Let's turn provision A on its head—if it's wrong to introduce animals cells into a human embryo, is it also wrong to introduce human cells into an animal embryo? Well, actually researchers have already been doing something similar to this. For example, University of Nevada-Reno researcher Esmail Zanjani has been injecting sheep fetuses with human stem cells that then incorporate themselves throughout their bodies to produce human liver, heart, and other cells. Some of these chimeric sheep have livers that are composed of 40 percent human cells. The hope is that this may become a way to produce transplantable tissues.

In May, Chinese researchers reported that they had injected human cord blood cells into goat fetuses which were then born with human cells spread throughout their bodies. Evidently, waiting until fetal development has already progressed significantly means that the injected human cells will not proliferate to dominate the tissues and organs of the developing chimeric animals which should allay any moral qualms that people may have. Injecting human cells into fetal animals would probably not fall afoul of the Act.

But what about a banning the creation of "a human embryo that consists of cells derived from more than 1 human embryo, fetus, or born individual." One clumsy interpretation of this language might find that it prohibits normal sexual reproduction because after all today each embryo "consists of cells derived from more than 1 … born individual"—namely eggs and sperm. This language might well also be interpreted as outlawing both reproductive (to produce a baby) and therapeutic cloning (to produce transplant tissues) since cell nuclei could be taken from another embryo, fetus or person and combined with an enucleated egg. In June, Harvard researchers announced that they have begun a program to clone human embryos to create transplant tissues. This provision would also outlaw an assisted reproduction technique in which cytoplasm containing mitochondria from a donor egg is used to rejuvenate another woman's egg so that she can bear healthy children. Children born using this technique carry mitochondrial genomes from the donor which means their genetic heritage derives from three people.

The next two prohibitions forbid creating embryonic chimeras by fertilizing a human egg by a non-human sperm or fertilizing a non-human egg by a human sperm. As far as I know this has only been done once in 1977 with a researcher using human sperm in an attempt to fertilize a gibbon egg. The sperm did penetrate the gibbon egg, but it turns out that human sperm bounces off the eggs of non-hominoid monkeys, making it likely that it wouldn't do much for the eggs of cows or pigs either. Of course, scientists could force the matter by using intracytoplasmic sperm injection.

Normally, prolifers such as Brownback draw their line at protecting human embryos. However, any embryos produced by combining human and animal gametes are not human. So Brownback and his supporters must believe that human eggs and sperm have a special moral status before they combine to produce embryos. As Monty Python once suggested: Is every sperm sacred? Brownback must also be taken aback by the recent finding that human ancestors and the ancestors of chimpanzees practiced interspecific miscegenation a few million years ago.

Presumably one goal of Brownback's ban on mixing human and animal gametes is to prevent the birth of a creature that is in some sense a diminished human being. Since combining human and non-hominoid animal gametes will most likely not result in viable hybrids, banning that practice seems superfluous. I don't think that any Institutional Review Board would approve of an experiment that was designed to create a live hybrid by means of fertilizing human eggs by chimpanzee sperm or vice versa. But if banning such experiments would make Brownback happy, let's do it.

The next two provisions propose to ban cloning experiments. The second of the two provisions would ban experiments that are already ongoing. For instance researchers at Harvard are adding human cell nuclei to enucleated rabbit eggs. They hope to use this cloning technique to produce transplantable tissues. They are using rabbit eggs because they are much more plentiful than human eggs. The first of these two provisions is superfluous because human eggs are so hard to come by that it is unlikely anyone would use them to produce transplantable tissues for rabbits. In any case, such "embryos" would again not be human embryos. In fact, because such embryos could not fully develop into living creatures, they would be very much like the genetically impaired embryos that some members of the President's Council on Bioethics believe could morally be used as sources of stem cells.

The next provision would prohibit the creation of "a human egg or a non-human egg that otherwise contains haploid sets of chromosomes from both a human and a non-human life form." I'm not sure, but perhaps this provision differs from the preceding ones that outlaw human/animal hybrid embryos by forbidding the addition of individual chromosomes derived from animals or humans to human and animal eggs.

The next to last provision bans the creation of "a non-human life form engineered such that human gametes develop within the body of a non-human life form." It could happen that injecting human stem cells into mice fetuses could result in those stem cells migrating to the ovary or testes of those fetuses where they develop into egg and sperm forming cells. One can even imagine mating two such mice so that the embryo they produce would be a human embryo. Given size differences, a mouse could never give birth to a man. On the other hand, one can also imagine the same thing happening between reproductively chimeric cows or sheep. Given safety issues and concerns about the future well-being of any children that might be born of domestic livestock, researchers must be careful to make sure that this kind of mating between chimeric animals does not occur.

That being said, it has already been proposed that this technique might be adapted to help some people who cannot produce gametes overcome their infertility. For instance, a fertility specialist could inject bone marrow stem cells from an infertile person into fetal mice in which those human stem cells are transformed into cells that produce human gametes. Such fully human gametes could be harvested from the chimeric mice and used to produce genetically related children by means of conventional in vitro fertilization.

Brownback's final prohibition would forbid the engineering of a non-human life form such that it contains a human brain or a brain derived wholly or predominantly from human neural tissues. Already, Stanford University researcher Irving Weissman has injected human neurons into mouse fetuses producing mice with brains composed of 1 percent human neurons. Weissman next wants to create a strain of mice with brains made almost entirely of human neurons. Such mice would be invaluable for studying human brain diseases and testing medicines to cure those diseases. Mice with brains composed entirely of human brain cells are unlikely to begin contemplating the meaning of life. Why? Among other reasons, because mouse brains weigh just 0.4 grams compared to around 1500 grams for human brains.

Still one can imagine that adding a substantial number of human neurons to fetal primates might end up producing a creature that could be regarded as a diminished human being. However, concerns of this sort should not be allowed to outlaw experiments like that of Yale researcher Gene Redmond. Redmond is trying to find a cure for Parkinson's disease using experiments in which he injects human brain cells into the brains of green vervet monkeys.

This quick review shows that current experiments using chimeric animals and embryos do not threaten our "respect for human dignity and the integrity of the human species." Ultimately, the Human Chimera Prohibition Act is a misbegotten legislative blunderbuss that would criminalize much valuable research aimed at curing human diseases. We can afford to wait until we hear that a Harvard or Stanford institutional review board has approved an experiment to produce a humanzee before Congress needs to act.

Battle of the Bunsen Burners

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST

Has science become politicized? A better question might be: When has it ever not been? The Roman Catholic Church's prosecution of Galileo is a famous example. Another is the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to ban the pesticide DDT even though an EPA administrative law examiner, after a seven month hearing of scientific evidence, determined that it shouldn't be prohibited.

The problem is that scientific results always have an impact on somebody, usually because they can be turned into newfangled innovations that threaten old technologies. Consequently, lobbyists and activists swarm Capitol Hill yelling about the advantages of their new product and the horrors perpetrated by the old. On a mundane level consider the epic battles between cable and broadcast television, and between recording companies and file swapping utilities like Napster. Do violent video games boost the teen murder rate? Do abortions increase a woman's chance of getting breast cancer? If man-made global warming turns out to be a big problem, emitters of carbon dioxide fear that they will lose out to alternative power sources like wind and solar.

On the medical front, pro-lifers sing the praises of adult stem cells while pouring scorn on embryonic stem cells. They do so because they think that producing embryonic stem cells is the moral equivalent of dismembering infants for parts. Pro-lifers know that their ethical arguments will only sway so many people, so they resort to scientific arguments, claiming that adult stem cells are just as efficacious as embryonic cells in order to convince the rest of us to abandon research they believe is a moral horror. In fact, if they turn out to be right, that would have an impact on federal funding and the direction that thousands of stem cell researchers would drive their work.

And then there is the vexed problem of funding sources. Surveys of studies show that scientific reports sponsored by drug companies generally find the supporting company's drugs to be safe and efficacious, whereas independent studies often do not. Interestingly, studies supported by the $132 billion in federal research and development expenditures rarely occasion such scrutiny. Perhaps that's because they are generally above reproach. But it is also true that most academic research is funded by government agencies and it will not help a scientist's career to bite the federal hand that feeds him and his postdocs. I also suspect that most agency funded research generally finds that what the agency guesses is a problem turns out to be a problem.

In a liberal secular society in which traditional sources of authority—the Church and the State—have eroded, science stands the ultimate arbiter of truth. So, both the right and the left loudly seek to claim that scientific findings justify their political goals.

Not surprisingly, when a scientific finding doesn't support their policies or programs, both sides suspect that it has been "politicized." In this case, "politicized" means disagrees with what we good people want. Naturally to prevent politicization, both Republicans and Democrats have sought to legislate scientific objectivity. On the right, the Republicans are proponents of the Federal Data Quality Act of 1999 (FDQA). The FDQA directed the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to "issue guidelines...that provide policy and procedural guidance to federal agencies for ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information (including statistical information) disseminated by federal agencies." Who could be against any of those good and true things?

However, the Bush Administration's OMB issued controversial regulations providing government-wide guidance aimed at enhancing the practice of peer review of government science documents. Democrats and various left-leaning activist groups object that the new OMB peer review process largely excludes scientists who are agency employees from serving as reviewers. Naturally, the Democrats and activists believe that scientists working for the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Food and Drug Administration are objective experts who, not incidentally, will support their programs. Never mind the distorting public choice incentives that pressure even honest agency personnel to find evidence for the existence of the problems that their agency was created to address. So last year Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) submitted the Restore Scientific Integrity to Federal Research and Policymaking Act (RSIFRPA), portions of which aimed to quash the new OMB peer review regulations.

On the other hand, the Democrats can point to evidence that the Bush Administration has censored scientific research and disseminated false information. Consequently, Democrats and their ideological confreres hope that they have put a stop to the Bush Administration's subversion of science with the adoption of some portions of the RSIFRPA, which were incorporated into the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services budget bill last month. The act prohibits federal employees from tampering with or censoring federally funded scientific research or analysis or directing the dissemination of false or misleading information. Again, what person of good will could be against these salutary goals?

What these efforts to legislate scientific objectivity really point up is that science, as the chief arbiter of truth in our society, will remain unavoidably enmeshed in politics. The government official who ordered the ban on DDT despite the scientific evidence for its safety, William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the EPA, brought admirable clarity to the issue. In 1979, Ruckelshaus wrote to Allan Grant, president of American Farm Bureau Federation president, stating, "Decisions by the government involving the use of toxic substances are political with a small 'p.' The ultimate judgment remains political." What was true for the EPA in 1972, is even more true for federal agencies today. The science wars are here to stay.

Who's Afraid of Human Enhancement?

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST

Listen to this debate in MP3 audio here.

On August 25 in Washington, D.C., reason staged a debate about "the promise, perils, and ethics of human biotechnology." Moderated by Editor in Chief Nick Gillespie, the panelists included Ronald Bailey, Reason's science correspondent and author of Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution; Eric Cohen, director of the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Biotechnology and American Democracy Program and editor of the group's journal, The New Atlantis; and Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor for The Washington Post and author of Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies, and What It Means To Be Human. What follows is an edited transcript of the event, which was sponsored by the Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation and the Institute for Humane Studies.

Comments can be sent to letters@reason.com.

Nick Gillespie: Our purpose tonight is to hash out questions and issues revolving around human enhancement based on technologies that include cloning; stem-cell research; processes to increase longevity, intelligence, and physical abilities; and many other procedures at various stages of development. What was once the province of science fiction--human beings augmented to such a degree that they become "post-human"--is rapidly becoming fact. Indeed, one of our panelists tonight will even argue that within the next century death itself may become optional. These are the sorts of developments that fill some with hope and others with horror.

Our panelists tonight will not agree on very much, but on this basic point I suspect they're in complete agreement: Forget all the talk about Social Security solvency, income tax rates, blue states, red states, even the war in Iraq. The most fundamental social and political issue facing the world today--and tomorrow--is the question of human enhancement.

Ron Bailey will be kicking off our discussion by giving us a quick overview of his feelings about human enhancement.

Ron Bailey: If I could have given my new book a proper 19th-century descriptive title, it might have been Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, or Why You Should Relax and Enjoy the Brave New World of Immortality, Stem Cells, and Designer Babies.

Of course, I'm not talking about Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which portrays a society of regimented clones in a world run by top-down controllers, the motto of which is "community, identity, and stability." In fact, the biotech revolution I anticipate is the exact opposite of Huxley's Brave New World. Let me illustrate by painting you a short vision of what the biotech revolution could bring by the end of this century.

By 2100 the typical American may attend a family reunion in which five generations are playing together. The great-great-great-grandma is 150 years old, and she will be as vital as she was when she was 30 and as vital as her 30-year-old great-great-grandson, with whom she's playing touch football. After the game, she'll enjoy a plate of salad greens filled with not only a full day's worth of nutrients but the medicines she needs to repair the damage to her aging cells. She'll be able to chat about the academic discipline--maybe economics--that she studied in the 1980s with as much acuity and depth of knowledge and memory as her 50-year-old great-granddaughter who is now studying the same thing.

No one in her extended family will have ever caught a cold. They will be immune from birth to the shocks that human flesh has long been heir to: diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's disease. Her granddaughter, who recently suffered an unfortunate transport accident, will be sporting new versions of the arm and lung that got damaged in the wreck, and she'll be playing in that game of touch football with the same skill and energy as anyone else in the family. Infectious diseases that terrified us at the beginning of the 21st century, such as HIV-AIDS and the avian flu, will be horrific historical curiosities for the family to chat about over their plates of super-fat farm-raised salmon, which will be as tasty and nutritious as any fish any human has ever eaten: "Grandma, what was it like when people got colds?" Though few of them will actually think much about it, surrounding them will be a world that is greener and cleaner, one more abundant in natural vegetation and with less of an obvious human footprint than the one we live in now.

Not only will this family enjoy all these benefits, but nearly everyone they work with, socialize with, and meet with will enjoy them as well. It will be a remarkably peaceful and pleasant world. Beyond their health and their wealth, they'll be able to control things such as anti-social tendencies and crippling depression. And they'll manage these problems by individual choice, through new biotech pharmaceuticals and personalized genetic treatments.

This idyllic scenario is more than realistic given the reasonably expected breakthroughs and extensions of our knowledge of human, plant, and animal biology and the mastery of the techniques known collectively as biotechnology. We'll be able to manipulate those biologies to meet human needs and desires.

What is astonishing to me is that an extraordinary transideological coalition of left-wing and right-wing bioconservatives has come together to oppose many of the technological advancements that could make that vision real for the whole of humanity. This coalition of biotech opponents consists of some of our leading intellectuals and policy makers. On the left stand bioethicists such as Daniel Callahan, who founded The Hastings Center, arguably the world's first bioethics think tank; George Annas from Boston University; longtime left-wing activists such as Jeremy Rifkin; and environmentalists such as Bill McKibben. On the right stand Leon Kass, [formerly] the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, and his fellow council members Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer, and also people such as William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard.

Both sides of this coalition abhor efforts to dramatically extend healthy human life spans by decades and even centuries. Both sides oppose creating stem cells derived from cloned embryos that would serve as perfect transplants to replace damaged, diseased, or worn-out body parts, livers, and nerves. Both sides want to outlaw the efforts of parents to use genetic testing and in vitro fertilization [IVF] and new pharmaceuticals to enhance their children's immune systems, athletic abilities, and intellectual capacities. Both sides of this bioconservative coalition would ban the use of genetically enhanced crops and animals to produce more abundant and more nutritious foods. Astonishingly, they are against heaven. Why? Because they wrongly fear that biotech progress will lead to hell.

In Liberation Biology, I thoroughly examine the whole range of bioconservative objections to the biotech revolution. I look forward to addressing them in more detail in the question-and-answer period, but let me note here that the benefits of biotechnology are well-known. The cure of diseases and disabilities for millions of sufferers, the production of more nutritious food with less damage to the natural environment, the enhancement of human physical and intellectual capacities, the retarding of the onset of the ravages of old age--all of these can be easily foreseen.

It is the alleged dangers of biotechnology that are vague, ill-defined, and wholly speculative. While Joel Garreau wonderfully chronicles some of the far-out visions of technological transcendence in Radical Evolution, my desires are more modest. All I want to do is dramatically boost people's physical and intellectual capacities, restore the natural environment, and make death optional.

Nick Gillespie: Thank you, Ron. Although I've got to say you've given the opposite side a powerful argument with your vision of a family picnic, especially if you've ever met my cousins. Next up is Eric Cohen.

Eric Cohen: Thanks very much. As a magazine editor, I want to start by simply complimenting Ron's title. I spend a lot of time trying to think of clever titles, which sometimes are the only things people remember about the nice article you publish, and Liberation Biology is a very smart title. It's a play, if I understand it correctly, on liberation theology, which is a whole collection of interesting, silly, weird ideas having to do generally with heaven and hell. Ron's title is clever on a couple of levels.

One, it signals that he's breaking from [the concept of heaven and hell]. He's breaking from this whole [religious] mythology, which I suspect in his mind hasn't delivered very much. He's leading us toward the age of flag football with your grandmother and farm-fresh salmon, but he's also signaling that he wants to try to answer some of the same human longings that theology or religion has long answered. So it's an interesting title on that level. I think it's also interesting in [raising the question of] what is it the liberty to do? What is the liberation he's talking about?

It's liberation from all kinds of horrible things in human life--sudden illness, dying children, people who have more ambition than talent, people who have more ideas than time, people who simply don't want to die and want to be a lot more like gods than most human beings are. It's also liberty to do various things, and this brings us to the subject of tonight's panel, which is the question of enhancement.

It seems to me that if you take the word enhancement at face value, there simply can't be anything wrong with it, right? Enhancement means to make things better, so then [all the things Ron talks about are] great. But the question is whether the things that seem like enhancements really are enhancements. The disquiet that some people have with the biotech revolution is [due to our] worry that in trying to make life better in ways we recognize, we're going to make it worse in ways we can't even imagine. That's the set of problems we face.

I should say most biotech is great. I hope the stocks go up. I hope they cure various diseases or at least develop better treatments for them, but some of the more ambitious and more interesting areas of biotechnology give some of us disquiet.

There are two sides to the disquiet. One has to do with the means that we're going to use to supposedly enhance ourselves and the other has to do with the ends. The conventional worry about enhancement has to do with the quality [of improvements] that the rich are going [to be able to afford]. The wealthy are going to become gene rich and the poor are going to become gene poor, and this is going to worsen the inequalities of life. I'm enough of a free market person to believe that if something works in wealthy societies, eventually most people are going to be able to afford it.

The worries about means are a little different though. Here the stem cell debate is paradigmatic. Everybody wants to cure these horrible diseases. It's an end that all sides of the stem cell debate share.

The issue is, should we be destroying human embryos to do it? I think you can make a pretty rigorous, rational, and scientific case that embryos are early human lives and that to use them as mere things would make us a lesser society. The worry here is not about the end we're pursuing but about the means that are used to pursue it.

And let me spend some time asking about those ends. What is it that we're trying to enhance? What are the goals here? I think you can break down four different ways of trying to enhance ourselves--and here I follow the definitive discussion in a report by the President's Council on Bioethics called Beyond Therapy. The four ways are superior performance in the various activities of life, better children, long lives or even ageless lives, and happiness. Those are four basic aspirations that are not new, though biotechnology might give us some new ways to pursue them.

If you think it through, there are reasons to at least wonder whether the biotechnologies we're talking about are really going to answer these human longings in any serious way. Obviously everybody's all worked up these days about performance-enhancing drugs in sports, and as Joel tells me, the existing drugs are child's play compared to what's coming. But we have to ask ourselves, is the athlete on steroids a better athlete, a better human athlete? Or has he become more an animal bred for the race? And we might create all kinds of drugs that boost the capacity to, say, remember SAT words. But is that really going to make people smarter, or is it going to narrow their minds in a certain way and make them less able to make the kinds of connections that are essential to real human intelligence and real human wisdom?

The same with the desire for better children. I question whether we would ever be able to design a better child. Can we really make a better musician than Mozart or make a better playwright than Shakespeare? We may be able to make everybody in our wildest dreams as talented as those people, though I doubt it. But there's a deeper issue, which has to do with the nature of the family. It seems to me that parenthood is about not only� trying to make your children better but having a welcoming and embracing attitude toward the child that's given to you to raise and given to you to love. I wonder whether embracing full force a kind of designer attitude is really going to make us better parents and better families.

The same with the desire for longevity. There's the worry that we may simply extend debility. It may be that we're going to simply have Alzheimer's disease for 35 years instead of for 10 in the future. I'm not sure that's necessarily progress. In a deeper sense, if we really believed or lived as if we were going to live forever, would we really have the urgency and the aspiration and the ambition to do the things that we do in life? Most of the portraits of immortality that we've seen, or at least many of them, present a less appealing picture than grandma playing flag football. I'm not sure how appealing that is either.

Nick Gillespie: Especially if you're not a Kennedy, right?

Eric Cohen: Right. And let me end with the quintessential aspiration: Everybody wants to be happy. On this much, at least, the ancients and the moderns sort of agreed, although they had different notions of happiness. Will the various interventions in our minds and bodies make us happier? I'm no expert on the future, so we'll have to wait and see, but I think there are real reasons to doubt this. There are reasons to doubt whether our new powers will really make us happy in a genuine human sense. If there were really a pill that simulated love or simulated success or simulated the feeling of playing a great symphony or hitting a great home run, is that really what we aspire to? Simply the simulation? And is there a danger that all these drugs that are supposed to make us happy might just make us more anxious because we're on all these drugs? Everybody's on Prozac, everybody puts a little bit in their coffee, but in fact life still has its hardships and people are still genuinely frustrated and trying to muddle through like most of us do. I wonder whether we'll really be genuinely happy when all the biotech companies promise us happiness in a pill.

These are hard questions. The future's unpredictable, but I think there are at least serious reasons to wonder whether we'll genuinely make ourselves better in all the ways that we hope to by turning to biotech.

Nick Gillespie: Thank you, Eric. I can testify from personal experience, I've already had pills that have made me think I'm as talented as Mozart, but they were not from established pharmaceutical outlets, or FDA-regulated, and I miss them. Joel?

Joel Garreau: Thanks. Eric's journal has made a great impact on me. I'm a paid subscriber to The New Atlantis, that's how much I admire his journal. And I've been so dazzled by Ron's work that I've stolen it every chance I've had.

Having been a child of the 1960s, I never anticipated that the most interesting drugs available today [would be] legal and available through prescription. That's the part that really blows my mind. The argument that I make in Radical Evolution is that we are at a turning point in history, and there's nothing [that is going to hold that back]. For hundreds of thousands of years, our technologies have been aimed outward at modifying our environment in the fashion of fire, clothes, cities, agriculture, space travel. But now, they are increasingly turned inward at modifying our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny, and possibly our souls. It's not just biotech. It's what I call the GRIN technologies--genetics, robotics, information, and nanotechnology. They are all following a curve of exponential change that is known in the computer industry as Moore's Law. You get regular doublings in capacity every few months.

A doubling is an amazing thing. It means that every few months, every new step is as tall as all of the previous steps combined. The 30 doublings we've had in computer technology since 1959 is an increase of over 400,000 times. We're seeing similar curves in these other technologies, and the significance of this is that it's not going away and it's not science fiction and it's not 100 years from now. It's on our watch, and we have to decide what we're going to do about it in terms of the future of human nature.

This conversation usually gets held in the hall of the technological elite, and the reason I've been typing as fast as I can is that it's time for the conversation to break out into the mainstream. Only in some kind of a bottom-up way are we going to address these issues. I'm not a big fan of top-down hierarchies, just as a practical matter. And the stuff coming online is going to blow our minds.

For example, I spent the better part of a year at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the stuff that's in their labs is quite remarkable. Up in Boston, there's a human, Matthew Nagel, who was the first to send an e-mail with his thoughts last summer. He can control a robotic arm with his thoughts. Within three years, these memory drugs that are meant to banish the boomers' "senior moments" are going to be coming on market.

The question that the Educational Testing Service is asking is, what happens if in the very near future you can buy your kids an extra couple of hundred points on their SATs? Think of what parents do now to get their kids into college. Then think of what's happening as these possibilities come online. We're talking about thousands of incremental advances. It's not like we're going to wake up some day and face some big decision. It's one step at a time. How do we handle these advances? And as Ron said, this is really scrambling our politics. Think of how many people love the idea of stem cells who are equally opposed to genetically modified organisms. The distinctions we have now between the left and the right were an Industrial Age reality that is increasingly not part of our future.

It's between the heaven and the hell scenarios that you see the big differences, the optimists vs. the pessimists. On the optimist side, you have the market libertarians and the military right next to some environmentalists and disabled people and even feminists who relish the thought of procreating without men. Then there are the people who fear this: the President's Council on Bioethics hard up against Greenpeace and people who are against the World Bank and Christians who don't believe in Darwin and the Boston Women's Health Collective (which published the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves). And Prince Charles. Those are pretty damned strange bedfellows.

The thing about the heaven and the hell scenarios is they basically agree. The heaven scenario says all of these changes are increasing exponentially, and we're going to conquer all the evils of mankind, and it goes straight up and that's terrific. The people who look at the hell scenario also buy this curve of exponential change. But they ask, what happens if this gets into the hands of bumblers or madmen? Their optimistic version of the hell scenario is that we extinguish only the human species in 25 years; the pessimistic version is that we lose all the life on earth. The heaven and hell scenarios are both technodeterminist futures that say technology is moving forward and there's not much we can do about it. Hang on tight. The end. Great summer blockbuster movie, dynamite special effects, not a lot of plot.

The third scenario that I sketch out in Radical Evolution is the "prevail" scenario. That's entirely different territory. Prevail [scenarists] don't believe that human history is likely to follow any smooth curves. It's more likely to have hiccups and loops and reverses and belches, as history has in the past. In the prevail scenario, the measure of progress is not how many transistors you can get to talk to each other but how many unpredictable and imaginative humans you can get to talk to each other. The measure of success in prevail is co-evolution. It's child's play to note that if our challenges go up in a curve and if our responses stay flat, we're toast. Stick a fork in us right now. We're done.

But if you get a situation where you can have our responses accelerating as fast as our challenges by bringing humans together in an imaginative way, then you might have a shot. Think of the problems that were facing humanity during the Dark Ages--endless difficulties. Then comes the printing press. All of a sudden you can start collecting and transferring and sharing ideas in a way that had never been possible before. The range of solutions that occurred was beyond the imagination of any one human being or any one country. Global trade, the Enlightenment, the rise of democracy, the rise of science itself.

I'm guardedly hopeful that maybe we're in a period of co-evolution like that now, [where all sorts of new ways of thinking and dealing with things are possible]. Think of 9/11. The fourth airplane never made it to its target. Why? Because the Air Force was quick on the trigger? Uh, no. Because the White House was so smart? Uh, no. What happened was that a bunch of ordinary people like us, empowered by mobile phone technology, figured out, diagnosed, and cured their society's ills in under an hour--and at incredible expense to themselves. That's, I think, an example of co-evolution, and it's a reason why I'm guardedly optimistic about the future.

Nick Gillespie: I'll ask each panelist a question before throwing things open to the audience. Ron, tell me one biotechnological development that you actually fear or find troubling.

Ronald Bailey: The possibility of evil people using or creating terrible pathogens and bioterrorism. I'm not at all sure that the current responses that we are trying to develop are going to be successful. The response of our government in developing its new biosecurity system seems geared to shutting down our public knowledge of things, to increasing secrecy. The best way to protect ourselves is to massively support security technologies and hope that they develop so that the defenses that work are widely understood.

Nick Gillespie: Make everything public on some level?

Ronald Bailey: Yes, basically.

Nick Gillespie: Eric, you talk a lot about how "we" have to make decisions about things. That raises what's called the Tonto question: Caught in an ambush, the Lone Ranger turns to his sidekick and says, "Looks like we're surrounded by Indians." And Tonto replies, "Who's we, kemo sabe?" At what level should these decisions be made? I agree these decisions should not be left to "the scientists," but what about the individual's right to choose?

Eric Cohen: A lot of these questions are moral questions and public questions and democratic questions. They're about the kind of society we're going to live in. I think the moral questions presented by the means are easier to deal with in a democratic way. We can have a debate about whether you should kill embryos in order to do research, and we can have an argument about whether we should set limits. I think that's a perfectly legitimate public thing to do. Right now, there are no limits on embryo research. There's not unlimited funding for it, but there are no limits on it at all. Any research scientist in the country can do it.

When you get to the issue of ends, it's a lot more complicated, precisely because these technologies are mixed up with some very desirable things. But in many cases, the means of using them are problematic. There's nothing wrong with developing a pill that you can take to supposedly improve your memory. The question is whether that's actually a good human thing to do. Various people are trying to think about whether you could build a regulatory agency, a kind of hyped-up FDA that dealt with more than just safety issues and dealt with some of the broader issues.

I'm skeptical of the regulatory agency approach. But when it comes to blunt means questions--Should we be engineering children by weeding out the unfit? Should we be using embryos in research?--I think those are questions where there should be a "we." As a society, we should make some collective judgments about the kind of people we want to be.

When you get to some of the more subtle uses of biotech, especially in the enhancement area, then you have smaller levels of "we." Sports teams or leagues are going to set rules about what kinds of drugs are going to be legal in the future. I think these are cultural questions and individual questions. I'm not looking to ban these various drugs. I'm just questioning the wisdom of using many of them and whether they'll actually deliver us the goods we think they will.

Nick Gillespie: Joel, the subtitle of your book mentions "human nature." What is it, and how do we know we're changing it?

Joel Garreau: One of the definitions of human nature that I like the best is that a human is the creature that steals fire from the gods every chance he gets. Or she gets. That's one of the reasons why I don't think these changes are going to go away no matter what country tries to impose some kind of regulatory scheme. This is not just a U.S. question. The superpowers in this regard include India, China, South Korea, and Japan, places that have entirely different ethical and moral takes on what it means to be human than the Judeo-Christian and Western traditions do.

In terms of knowing whether we have transcended human nature, I propose the Shakespeare test. Shakespeare knew quite a bit about human nature and he wrote elegantly about it. If you have found somebody who has become so enhanced as to make you wonder whether she's still human, I propose the mental experiment of popping her into your hypothetical time machine and dialing her back to 1605. Present her to Shakespeare and ask him, "What do you think? Is she one of yours? Do you recognize her as human?" I think it would be interesting, for example, if you showed Shakespeare the movie Apollo 13. Once he got past the fact that this was nonfiction and these guys were headed to the moon, he wouldn't have any problem with these guys at all. They're just adventurers who are trying to make it home, like the Greeks of 3,000 years ago.

If you show him the people of the various Star Trek series, I don't think he'd have much trouble identifying all of those people as human, although he might stop and scratch his head a little bit about Lt. Comdr. Data [an android]. The guys with the crabs on their foreheads I don't think he'd have any trouble with, but Data, I'd really like to know what kind of take Shakespeare would have on him.

Nick Gillespie: Let's open it up to the audience.

Questioner 1: This is a question for Eric. I agree that we can't know all the effects and impacts of complex changes of the sorts that we're contemplating here. Neither can Ron. The only test we can use to figure out which of you is right has to be the empirical test. Have something of a free market. Probably some people are going to die at 75 or 80. Some people are going to choose to live to be 150 or 200, and then they're going to look back and say, "Gosh, I wish I'd died at 75." Eric wins.

But if you raise the fear of the future being unpredictable but you don't have any kind of empirical testing of it, you can really stop all progress. You can make that argument against progress in any field that we've ever had progress in, whether it's the use of fossil fuels or computing technology or antibiotics.

Eric Cohen: I think there are some basic principles that allow us to be a decent society. Equality is one. We don't treat other people, even weak, disabled, and vulnerable people, as means to our ends. I think that's a better way to live. If you think that principle through, you can set certain kinds of limits on certain technologies. It may be that if we destroyed as many embryos as we wanted to that we would cure 10 diseases. But I think we can come together and say we wouldn't be a better civilization or society if we did that. It's perfectly legitimate to argue for limits on that sort of thing.

We can say the same about some other technologies, especially those dealing with the beginning of life. Think of pre-implantation genetic screening, where you produce 10 embryos, subject them to all kinds of genetic tests, choose the ones that you think are healthy and promising, and discard the ones that aren't. I think we can set limits on those kinds of things.

I'm not sure that's the right way to govern some of the more subtle self-enhancement technologies. If Ron Bailey, in the privacy of his own home, wants to experiment with memory-enhancing drugs, all the power to him. Maybe he'll write 30 books, and they'll all be great, but I'm frankly very skeptical. I think it's a very superficial and simplistic understanding of human excellence and human intelligence that clings or looks longingly at some of these drugs and believes that they're going to make us smarter and better.

At the end of the day the ways that matter most in being good have to do with character anyway. That's an old-fashioned thing, but I think the people that we most admire are generally people not only of ability but people of character. There's no pill that's going to make us better in that way.

Nick Gillespie: Eric, you raise the question of equality and the ways technology might undercut that. During the past 500 years or so, comprising what's considered the modern era, it seems clear that we've increased human enhancement technologies and the treatment of people as equals. More people have political rights than in the past. There's a greater distribution of goods and opportunities across global society now compared to 50, let alone 500, years ago. If we look at the historical record, it's fair to conclude that technology has not only allowed humans to enhance and augment themselves but has also helped them become more equal.

Eric Cohen: In many ways, technology and progress have served the end of equality. I'm in a kind of weird position, right? I'm arguing both for equality and for excellence in a certain sense. On the one hand, I'm worried that these drugs, to put it bluntly, are going to make us sort of pathetic. I mean, yes, we might hit 900 home runs a season, but frankly some of these athletes are sort of pathetic. They're kind of dependent on their drugs, and they all deny it. [Baltimore Orioles slugger] Rafael Palmeiro wouldn't want to be seen shooting his steroids up in the batter's box because he knows that people would think he's less of an athlete. He's less excellent. He's more like the horses we breed.

Nick Gillespie: Would his wife be upset to learn that he's taking Viagra?

Eric Cohen: I don't know. I'll leave that to them.

Nick Gillespie: Palmeiro is a paid spokesman for Viagra, and he's married. That's why I mentioned it. Does taking Viagra--an enhancement drug--make his marital bed less real, less meaningful?

Eric Cohen: Let me bracket the Viagra question for a minute. There's a worry about these enhancements actually undermining the very excellence that they claim to serve. At the same time, I think there are genuine issues with equality. Yes, equality is much better. From the standpoint of equality, it's a heck of a lot better to live today than it was to live 300 years ago in British society. We are more equal, for the most part, but we also treat people in radically unequal ways, both at the beginning of life and at the end of life. And that's another kind of equality that I think has been compromised. If you take that principle seriously and if you take basic biology seriously, then embryos are embryonic human lives, and we're now talking about using them in research. We already abort children with Down syndrome. Those are ways we're saying these people are not good enough. We're not going to welcome them in our society. We're going to eliminate them, and so from that perspective equality has been hurt. Technology has created a mind-set that has made us more inegalitarian even as it's served the cause of equality. I think both things are happening at once.

Questioner 2: I've got two questions, one for Joel and one for Eric. Joel, you've noted that Asian people have an entirely different way of looking at what it is to be a human being than people in the West do. Can you elaborate on that? Eric, isn't it OK if we just sort of relax and let people live a little longer and make some mistakes?

Joel Garreau: I'm not an expert on Hindu philosophy or Confucianism, but I am interested in the facts on the ground in a lot of these cultures. The Chinese have made no secret of the fact that they want to be dominant in the 2008 Olympics. At the University of Pennsylvania Lee Sweeney has been creating genetically altered Schwarzenegger mice. You ought to see his mice. They've got haunches like steers, and their necks are bigger than their heads, and there isn't a day that goes by that he doesn't get a call from an athlete or a coach who is begging him to use them as a human equivalent of this. Lee thinks that the 2004 Olympics were the last ones without genetically engineered humans.

An awful lot of the scientists in India have applauded the restrictions on stem cells in this country because they see our [relatively restrictive government policies] as an opportunity to make the great leap forward past the West in these technologies.

This is not some science fiction future. These are decisions that are happening now. That's why I'm so glad that Eric [and others] are asking the questions they are, because they're really good questions. I'm not crazy about some of the answers, but I'm glad they're asking the questions. I'm also glad that the Europeans are trying this business of using governments to control genetically modified organisms. I doubt that it's going to work on a basic practical level, but I like to see humans taking different approaches [to biotechnology] because we've got a long way to go and a short time to get there.

Eric Cohen: If we all relax, we'd have no panel discussions and get all worked up, and then what would we do in Washington? I'm not sure I have an objection to the pursuit of longevity taken in itself. I'm not sure I'm convinced that it's a great idea either, but I think there we'll just have to kind of wait and see. I would just note anecdotally that a lot of the people I know who are obsessed with longevity are also people who don't have children. One way of thinking about the future is to obsessively try to live longer and think about how we can [improve] the world that we want to inhabit. The other way to think about the future is to think about the world we're going to pass down to those who follow us. I wonder who the real futurists are--the Catholics who have 10 kids and oppose embryo research, or the libertarians who have no kids and live to 110 and then get hit by a car?

And there are ethical questions involved here that mean we can't simply relax. Should we be using nascent human life as a tool to develop therapies [that will let us live longer]?

Ronald Bailey: I've suggested to my wife that we'll have children when we're younger. In any case, with regard to treasuring every embryo, nature certainly doesn't do that; 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos, as far as we know, are not implanted and never become people or babies or anything else. In fact, the results of IVF are better than those of nature.

Questioner 3: In terms of consenting to genetic treatments, do embryos--or children, for that matter--have the ability to give their consent?

Ronald Bailey: I want to remind everybody in the audience that you did not give consent to be born. In fact, you did not give consent to be born with any of the genes that you have. So any embryos that parents decide to modify stand in exactly the same relation that all previous embryos have stood in.

If you think about what people are apt to do, this isn't really an issue. Would you want the person-to-be to be smarter? Well, yeah, that'd be good. Forty IQ points would be good too. Would they like to have a good immune system? Yeah, they'd like that. What about athletic ability? Yeah, OK. I think you can presume consent for most of the things that parents are going to do for their children because they're not going to try to make them worse. They're going to try to make them better.�

Soundbite: Unscientific Methods

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST

In The Republican War on Science (Basic Books), Chris Mooney, Seed's Washington correspondent, examines what happens when the scientific search for truth collides with politics--especially GOP politics. From stem cells to missile defense to evolution, the book chronicles the manipulation of research for partisan ends. Assistant Editor Julian Sanchez spoke with Mooney in October.

Q: Why not just write about the political war on science?

A: I do talk about some abuses of science on the left, and I could have talked about more. However, Republicans are running everything right now. I also think there's something inherent in the Republican Party that makes it more prone to this sort of thing: It has constituencies--the religious right, the fossil fuel industry--that demand statements on science that are out of whack with what we know. Democrats have no constituency that compels them to deny something as fundamental as evolution, and while there are misuses among, say, extreme environmental groups, the Democratic Party tends to cater to more mainline groups where I don't think the abuses are as serious.

Q: Is it fair to lump people who raise questions about global warming in with creationists?

A: Well, they're different issues, but I've linked them together for a number of reasons. The most central is that the strategy for attacking the science and getting Republican politicians to go along is very similar. In both cases you have a scientific position that's been rigorously investigated and broadly accepted, and you have a war against that position that's coming not generally from the mainstream scientific community but from think tanks set up outside of it. So I see them as closely parallel in terms of the method by which special interests are attacking science they don't like.

The question of how bad global warming is going to be is definitely a real debate. The question of whether global warming is happening and is caused by humans--not a real debate.

Q: What's the latest outrage?

A: Right around when the book came out, we had a whistle-blower actually leave the Food and Drug Administration over Plan B emergency contraception. The FDA had two advisory committees that voted 23 to 4 that Plan B, the "morning after pill," should be approved for over-the-counter availability. The FDA's expert staff agreed. What did the agency do? Not listen to its scientific advisers, but rather cherry-pick a dubious rationale for why more data were allegedly needed for one specific age group. It really calls into question whether we can trust the FDA to make decisions based on safety and efficacy.

Eggs and Ethics

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST

Woo-Suk Hwang, the South Korean stem cell pioneer resigned yesterday as head of the World Stem Cell Hub collaboration. The reason for his resignation is that Hwang's lab used eggs donated by two of his junior research scientists. In addition, Hwang discovered that other eggs used in the research were not donated, but had been purchased by another collaborator. In 2004, Hwang achieved the breakthrough of creating the first cloned human embryos and deriving stem cells from them. This advance is a step toward the day when researchers can create transplantable cells and tissues that would be perfectly matched to patients suffering from illnesses such as diabetes, Parkinson's disease and heart attacks. When Hwang's research was published in the scientific journal Nature, he claimed that the 242 eggs he used were voluntarily donated.

This scandal could derail the creation of the World Stem Cell Hub that was announced just last month. The goal of the Hub is to produce and distribute to researchers all over the world lines of stem cells derived from cloned human embryos. Many researchers believe that cloned stem cell lines derived from genetic material from patients with various diseases will shed light on how those diseases begin and will lead eventually to treatments.

This scandal provoked the old Watergate question: What did Hwang know and when did he know it? Regarding the purchased eggs, Sung Il Roh of the Mizmedi Hospital in Seoul, who collaborated with Hwang, admitted that he bought the eggs used in the cloning research from 20 women. Roh says that Hwang did not know that he had paid for the eggs. Roh paid each woman about $1,500 for their eggs.

What about the eggs "donated" by junior researchers in Hwang's lab? At a news conference yesterday, Hwang said that the young researchers volunteered to give him their eggs a couple of times and that he had turned them down. Hwang claims that it was only earlier this year that he found out that the women had gone ahead and donated their eggs using pseudonyms. Hwang says that he denied that they had donated eggs when asked about it by Nature because he wanted to protect the privacy of the women.

However, South Korea's Health Ministry issued a report yesterday that said an investigation of Dr Hwang had found that while the eggs had come from women scientists, there was "nothing legally or ethically wrong in the donation of ova by the researchers." In January 2005, South Korea outlawed commerce in human eggs, but all of the research under consideration here took place before that law was enacted.

For the moment let's set aside the issue of the eggs from the junior scientists. What's wrong with paying women for their eggs? The usual argument trotted out by bioethicists is that poor women will be "coerced" by the lure of filthy lucre to risk fertility treatments that boost their egg production.

To obtain eggs, women take hormones that cause their ovaries to superovulate, often producing more than dozen eggs at a time. The eggs are harvested by sucking them out of the ovaries with needles inserted through the women's vaginal walls. The hormone treatments produce some unpleasant side effects and perhaps 1 in 100 women experience ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, a dangerous condition in which their ovaries swell up with fluid that must be drained at a clinic.

It is only right that women should be compensated for taking these risks. And in the United States it is perfectly legal to buy human eggs. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) guidelines suggest that payments for eggs be limited to $5,000. Meanwhile, the National Academies of Science issued its own set of guidelines for human embryonic stem cell research earlier this year. The NAS eschews any payments to women for their eggs above reimbursing them for their expenses, declaring that "no cash or in kind payments should be provided for donating oocytes for research purposes."

The ASRM guidelines set the $5,000 limit on the grounds that "the higher the payment, the greater the possibility that women will discount risks." A better way of thinking about paying more for eggs is that women will decide that the risks are worth the benefits that they get from higher payments. On the one hand, ASRM guidelines manage to condescend to women—the poor dears can't be trusted to make intelligent decisions about their own bodies—while on the other hand benefitting the bottom lines of reproductive clinics by trying to keep the price of eggs low. In any case, some clinics ignore the guidelines and pay $15,000 or more for a cycle of superovulation.

Paying for eggs is not illegal in the United States and the case that it is ethically wrong is far from clear. But what about the "donations" from Hwang's junior scientists? In this case, it appears now that the egg donations were sincerely voluntary—perhaps done out of an excess of research enthusiasm on the part of Hwang's young collaborators. Apparently, Hwang did not solicit nor knowingly accept egg donations from those researchers. Unfortunately, by breaking the rules, the young researchers have put in jeopardy the work they wanted to support.

Ultimately, Hwang's ethical offense is not using purchased eggs for his research. Hwang's real scientific crime is that he lied about it. Science depends absolutely on truth-telling by researchers. The real tragedy would be if Hwang's lies end up undermining the research he has worked so hard to advance.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Stem Cells Sell

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

The National Institutes of Health spent $24.3 million dollars on human embryonic stem-cell research last year. Critics of President Bush's policy of limiting federal funding to only those stem-cell lines derived before August 2001 worry that this amount—relative to NIH's annual $30 billion budget—is not enough. Persuaded of the importance of this research, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in May to lift President Bush's funding restrictions. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist announced this summer that he supported that legislation. The Senate is poised to vote on the issue later this fall.

But do stem-cell researchers really need the feds? Already there is nearly $4 billion in private and state monies committed to stem-cell research over the next decade, with another three-quarters of a billion dollars under active consideration.

Setting aside commercial efforts like those of the California biotech company Geron, consider a few examples of private funding for academic stem-cell research. The Starr Foundation is providing $50 million over three years for human embryonic stem-cell research at three New York City medical institutions, including the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center. Weill Cornell Medical College, also in New York City, has established the Ansary Center for Stem Cell Therapeutics with a $15 million grant from philanthropists Shahla and Hushang Ansary.

In California, UCLA has established an Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine with $20 million in funding over the next five years. Stanford University created the Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine, with a goal of $120 million in funding. An anonymous donor gave Johns Hopkins University a $58.5 million gift to launch an Institute for Cell Engineering. The University of Minnesota has set up a Stem Cell Institute with a $15 million capital grant. A grateful patient pledged $25 million over the next 10 years to finance stem-cell research at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.

States are also pouring money into stem-cell research. Last November, California voters passed a $3 billion initiative to create a California Institute of Regenerative Medicine that aims to fund stem-cell research at $300 million annually for the next 10 years. New Jersey has allocated $150 million to construct a new stem-cell research center. Connecticut passed legislation authorizing $100 million in spending on both adult and embryonic stem-cell research over the next 10 years. Illinois's governor, Rod Blagojevich, moved $10 million of state public health research funding to establish a new stem-cell research institute called the Illinois Regenerative Medicine Institute.

On the drawing boards, a bill proposing to use $10 million from the state's tobacco settlement proceeds for stem-cell research has already been introduced in North Carolina. The Texas House of Representatives approved a measure to sell $41.1 million in bonds for a stem-cell research facility at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. There's a bond measure pending in the Pennsylvania State House. Meanwhile legislation has been introduced in the New York State Assembly to create the New York State Institute for Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine with annual funding of $100 million.

One real question is whether stem-cell researchers even need the Feds. Here is another: Is it possible that President Bush's restrictions on federal funding have generated more funding for this research than would have otherwise been available?

This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Stem Cell Therapies Next Year?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Opponents of human embryonic stem cell research make much of the fact that,in the words of New Atlantis editor Eric Cohen,"there has not been a single human trial of an embryonic stem cell therapy." That may be about to change. Last night, at its annual gala dinner, the Alliance for Aging Research, a Washington, DC-based biomedical research lobbying group, honored Woo Suk Hwang with its "Indispensable Person in Health Care" award.

Woo Suk Hwang is the leader of the Korean research team at Seoul National University that produced the first cloned human embryos in 2004. That success was followed by Hwang's derivation and establishment of 11 different stem cell lines from embryos cloned using cells from specific patients earlier this year. The team also succeeded in creating the first cloned dog.

In accepting the award, Hwang said that his research could ameliorate the health problems that accompany aging, such as failing memories, muscle wasting, cancers, and immune system declines. With stem cell therapies "these might become conditions of the past," declared Hwang. He added that cloned stem cell lines from patients who suffer from chronic debilitating diseases will help researchers identify what goes wrong and point toward cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes. Hwang noted that with cloned stem cells we would be "treating our bodies with our own perfectly matched cells," thus avoiding the problem of immune rejection that bedevils conventional organ and tissue transplants.

Speaking afterwards, Hwang's American collaborator, Gerald Schatten from the University of Pittsburgh, agreed that cloning lines of diseased stem cells instead of relying on animal research could "vastly accelerate" research on many diseases. However, Schatten noted that creating such cloned human stem cell lines in his home state of Pennsylvania is a felony. "It's amazing, said Schatten, "that we criminalize this work. Imagine if instead of one lab in Korea there were a dozen, or even a hundred labs, fighting to make sure we all live longer and healthier lives."

Before his presentation, I talked briefly with Hwang and asked him when we might see therapies derived from human embryonic stem cells. Hwang smiled and told me that he expected to start transplanting cells derived from cloned stem cells into patients by the end of next year. He expects that the first patients will be a person with a spinal cord injury and another with Parkinson's disease. He will treat them with cloned cells that will be perfectly matched to those specific patients. Of course, lots can go wrong with the early development of biomedical treatments, and Hwang might be a tad overoptimistic. However, considering his results so far, Hwang may actually succeed in using human embryonic stem cells as a treatment. "I promise that our medical researchers are working non-stop," concluded Hwang.

So saying there has not been a single trial of an embryonic stem cell therapy may be a lot like saying in 1902 that "heavier than air flight is impossible." It's true until it's not.

Mutant Stem Cells Flee Time's Winged Chariot

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EDT

New research shows that human embryonic stem cells acquire mutations and other genetic changes over time as they grow and divide, according to a new study in Nature Genetics. Opponents of human embryonic stem cell research have seized on this finding and are already arguing that it calls the whole embryonic stem cell research project into question. "The discovery is another bonus for adult stem cell research, touted as a more ethical and more effective alternative. Such cells come from non-controversial sources like umbilical cord blood and bone marrow rather than by destroying days-old unborn children," declares a report from LifeNews.com. But is that so?

Human embryonic stem cells have the ability to transform themselves into all the tissues of the human body. They are derived from three to five day old blastocysts of around 150 cells or so and grown in tissue culture. The hope is that these cells can some day be used as transplants to repair and rejuvenate damaged and diseased organs and tissues, e.g., curing diabetes, spinal cord injuries, and damaged heart muscle.

However, it turns out that many current stem cell lines may have expiration dates. An international team of scientists headed by Aravinda Chakravarti at Johns Hopkins University, using a series of highly sensitive genetic and molecular tests, checked nine of the available 22 federally approved human embryonic stem cell lines and found that older batches of cells experienced changes that look a lot like the transformations that scientists see in cancer cells.

As stem cell colonies grow, researchers divide them and put the divided colonies into different Petri dishes. Each such division is called a "passage." Typically, some cells in a line will continue to be grown while others will be frozen for later use. The team of researchers matched early passage stem cell lines (ones that had undergone only a few divisions before being frozen) with cells from the same lines that undergone more passages. For example, some stem cells might have undergone ten divisions, whereas later stem cells might have been passaged fifty times.

Dan Arking, one of the researchers at Johns Hopkins University, offers one interpretation of what may be happening. As researchers divide growing stem cell colonies, they could be selecting for those cells that have experienced changes that promote their ability to proliferate, giving themselves a growth advantage over more quiescent cells. An alternative explanation, according to Chakravarti, might be that current tissue culture methods are introducing pervasive genetic changes that promote growth in nearly all of the cells simultaneously.

Of course, cells that grow uncontrollably in the body are cancerous. In fact, the Chakravarti research team found that 90 percent of the later passage stem cell lines had developed changes that amplify the effect of cancer-causing genes or disable genes that normally suppress the development of cancer. Some later passage lines also had duplicated large segments of DNA, and some were missing whole chromosomes.

Embryonic stem cell opponents are right that adult stem cells have been used successfully to treat some diseases and repair some tissues. However, Arking points out that adult stem cell lines grown in tissue culture are likely to suffer as much and perhaps even more from mutations and the other genetic changes that embryonic stem cells are subject to. Arking remains a firm booster of embryonic stem cell research, declaring, "I have no doubt that human embryonic stem cells will revolutionize how we do therapy some day." .

One worry for stem cell researchers who are constrained by federal funding is that the supply of early passage stem cells from federally approved lines will be depleted. "We don't know what stocks of frozen early passage cells suppliers have, which means that they might run out of them," said Arking. And even if the federally approved lines are never used for therapies, mutated late passage cells would be undesirable because they could distort research results. "The science tells us that stem cells go bad in tissue culture and if researchers want to use them for research or therapy, they will need a continual supply of early passage stem cells," concluded Arking. The good news is that many new embryonic stem cell lines have been created around the world and are available to privately funded researchers.

Michael West, president of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester Massachusetts, does not see the new finding as a show stopper. According to West, these kinds of genetic changes have been seen in mouse embryonic cells for years and are no big deal. He believes that the new Johns Hopkins research will become a part of a standard quality control regimen that identifies and isolates genetically normal stem cells that can be safely used in therapies.

The Johns Hopkins research confirmed that early passage stem cells look good, showing no evidence that they suffer from possibly deleterious genetic changes. If their research holds up, it would mean, according to Arking, that "we don't send out cell lines beyond a certain number of passages." Stem cell lines, like any other drugs, will have expiration dates. This is not the death knell of embryonic stem research as some opponents might fondly hope, it's just another problem to be solved.