US Finalizes Stem Cell Research Guidelines

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Cosmos Magazine, to wit: "The US government unveiled final rules for embryonic stem cell research, laying out ground rules for 'ethically responsible, scientifically worthy' studies eligible for federal funds. The new rules, which go into effect today, follow President Barack Obama's March 9 executive order lifting a ban on embryonic stem cell research, an order that went into effect under his predecessor, George W. Bush. ... The US National Institutes of Health's (NIH) guidelines are slightly less restrictive than those outlined in a draft document released in April in that they allow the use of existing stem cell lines, in addition to new ones derived from IVF procedures. ... The NIH received some 49,000 comments from patient advocacy groups, scientists, medical groups, and other interested parties before issuing the guidelines."

Comments

Existing lines

[JobyOne]

I've never understood the opposition to using existing stem cell lines for research.

Assuming there is a moral problem with destroying embryos, the damage is done. At this point you're pretty much saying "don't eat that cow" when the cow is already dead. Once it's dead you can either eat the cow and have a delicious steak or waste the cow and let it rot.

Same thing with a stem cell. Once the embryo is destroyed you can either waste it...or maybe find ways to cure a zillion diseases. Either way the embryo is still dead.

Re:Existing lines

[NecroPuppy]

The point is that if the bans were there, then the embryos wouldn't be destroyed in the first place.

This, of course, ignores comepletely that most embryos held by fertility clinics (and other sources) are ultimately destroyed anyway.

My view is simple: Why not recycle? If another use can be found for them, great. If not, that's fine too.

Re:Existing lines

[geekoid]

It's because the opposition want to shove there made up religious moral code down everyone's throat. The same reason the want to ban gay marriages, force people to teach lies in school, and make everyone pray to their god.
really no different then any radical religious group. "Do it our way and shut up." pretty much wraps up their whole argument.

Some of these people believe jacking off is the same as killing babies.

The same logic that got a lot of people tortured and burned at the stake.

Re:Existing lines

[Cstryon]

these are the same sort of people who believe that adam and eve rode dinosaurs to church. ignore them.

This isn't always true. I don't condone killing a human, at any stage of life, I am a theist, but I have many atheist friends who feel the same way. So I am against embryonic stem cell research, and it doesn't have to do anything with my religious beliefs. NPR did a story in 2007 about some researchers that got stem cells from skin. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16511934 I am all for that! ;)

Re:Existing lines

[ppanon]

So, tell me then, when do human beings earn the right to not be destroyed and experimented on?

There's a few possible candidate thresholds but, when it comes to destruction, the ones that make the most sense are:

1. "self-sustaining" viability outside the womb (currently around 22 weeks gestation) or
2. significant nervous system complexity (somewhere between 9 to 20 weeks).

Experimentation is a much broader issue with many more possible scenarios and lots of grey areas. That said, I can't see a significant ethical problem with experimentation if you're dealing with individual cells for therapeutic purposes.

As someone else pointed out, there may be significant ethical issues in how you obtained the embryos or eggs due to the risk it poses to the donor. I think some totalitarian state having "farms" with captive unwilling donor women to produce embryos for export to Western hospitals is definitely a scenario we would want to prevent through legislation, and the source tracking as with the current legislation should address that.

To use your example, experimenting with cells from low-division embryos is not significantly different from experimenting with skin or bone marrow cells. You don't have a problem with donating a few skin cells because, with a local anaesthetic, you wouldn't even feel it. On the other hand, if someone endangered your life by ripping 50% or more of your skin off for stem cell material, I expect you would be pretty upset. Conversely, an undifferentiated embryo has no nerve cells to feel, know, or want anything.

Certainly, if successful embryonic stem cell therapies actually get developed, then there will be an issue with supply vs. demand and access criteria. That said even if we don't find an ethically satisfactory technical solution for solving the supply scarcity problem, we've already got a similar issue with a limited supply in the case of organ transplants. Yet there doesn't seem to be a credible broad movement arguing for the cessation of organ transplants.

Re:Existing lines

[ArcherB]

Thank you for a well thought out, fair minded response. However, there are some points I have issue with:

"self-sustaining" viability outside the womb (currently around 22 weeks gestation) or

A newborn is not "self-sustaining". Hell, I know a few 30-year olds that are not "self-sustaining". What about premature babies that require incubation? They are not "self-sustaining". Are they available for experimentation?

Also, embryos in a petri dish can survive outside the womb about as long as newborn.

significant nervous system complexity (somewhere between 9 to 20 weeks).

9 to 20 weeks is a big range. I'm guessing you are setting it so broad because you don't know. I don't either. Let's just say it's 14 weeks, 3.5 days. What about the baby that is 14 weeks, 2 days? Some babies mature at different rates than others. How do you know which babies have a nervous system? What happens in 20 years if we find out that embryos can feel pain without a nervous system? My point is that too many times, we've thought "things" couldn't feel pain or were labeled as not or less-than human with horrific results. We should have learned by now that man is not perfect enough to decide who deserves basic rights or what is human.

To use your example, experimenting with cells from low-division embryos is not significantly different from experimenting with skin or bone marrow cells.

Right. Under a microscope, they are pretty much the same thing. The difference is the donor and what damage it does to the donor. You mentioned skin and bone marrow. I have both. If I want to donate tissue or take part in a scientific experiment, I am free to do so (and I have). If you can find an embryo that will consent to experimentation, then I guess that's OK too. But even with parental consent, I don't feel that parents have the right to give permission to anyone to kill a child for the purpose of experimentation. And would it even be legal for me to volunteer for an experiment when the end result is certain death? It certainly wouldn't be legal to hold such an experiment.

The other point is that donating a few cells won't kill me. Embryos are destroyed in the process of harvesting cells. If you could harvest stem cells while not killing the embryo, then I wouldn't really have a problem with it, provided you have the parent's permission.

Certainly, if successful embryonic stem cell therapies actually get developed, then there will be an issue with supply vs. demand and access criteria.

So far, all the therapies that have been developed have come from adult derived stem cells. There will be no shortage of those as they can be taken directly from the patient.

And, it's nothing like an organ donor. Even as you mentioned before, it's no big deal giving a cheek swab or skin sample. Giving up a liver is nothing like giving a blood, marrow, or skin sample. Something about organs make them a requirement to life. Skin samples? Not so much.

Re:Existing lines

[Omestes]

Jumping in here...

A bit of background, I am an atheist, and I am against abortion (except in the cases where the mother could die). I am not against stem-cell research though, because the cells were already extracted, and would be destroyed if otherwise not used. If every cluster was brought to term (an absurdity), then I would be against stem-cell research as well.

The reason I stated I am an atheist is to make it perfectly clear that I don't have an idea of sin, or "ensoulment" involved here, basically this is ethical and not a moral judgment. I bring up my opposition to abortion, because these are related issues, and I am for stem-cell research for the same reasons I am against abortion, and have the same caveats to my support as I do my opposition.

I also agree with the person above you; the "humanity" of an embryo is determined by its neurological properties. Without a brain, or a nervous system above a certain threshold of complexity, you cannot be considered to be human, much less sencient. The caveat here is potential, an embryo may be a person someday, and this must be weighed as well. In the case of abortion, the odds of fulfilling this potential is rather high left to its own devices, wherein the case of stem-cells the odds of reaching the point of being human is completely nill. The cells that we use for research will NEVER turn into people left to their own devices, and thus their potential is much much lower than an organic (in utero) cell mass.

We must weigh the potential here. Being a human is obviously the most important, but we must also balance this with the utility to science, and the well-being of humanity as a whole.

The caveat here is that I will not inflict these opinions on anyone, this should be the choice of the parent or donor. I say this because I am pretty sure I don't know any better than any other person, much less the people effected by these decisions. While being against abortion, I still am pro-choice, as I am towards stem-cells.

If you have a brain-dead dependent, you, granted power of eternity, can pull the plug. This should be no different for undeveloped cell masses in deep freeze. The donor should choose the fate. Not a bunch of self-righteous asses such as me and you (or really anyone else).

Re:Existing lines

[ppanon]

You basically got it all right. I deliberately put "self-sustaining" in quotes as an acknowledgement that premature babies, while developing independently of maternal placental support, may still need significant technological support (usually due to poorly developed lungs). I left the time range for nervous system complexity open for both reasons: an uncertainty in the actual appropriate level of nervous system complexity (insufficient data - we'll have a better idea after we develop Artificial Consciousness), as well as possible individual developmental variations (although the first criteria dominates the current error range).

And yeah, while consideration of the impact on donors is one of many important ethical considerations, the most important phrase in that whole post regarding the ethics of embryonic stem cell research is: an undifferentiated embryo has no nerve cells to feel, know, or want anything. If the belief that an embryo has a soul helps someone get to sleep at night in case they should die before they wake, then that's fine. But they can keep their unsubstantiated beliefs to themselves and out of medical/scientific ethics discussions. There are a lot of good reasons for keeping a strong ethical leash on human medical research, but that's not one of them.

Re:Existing lines

[HungryHobo]

I'm all for stem cell research but the "human DNA is only slightly different from animal DNA so why not treat them the same" argument leads to HumanMcNuggets and HumanBurgers

How many lives have been lost?

[QuantumG]

During the 6 years that this has been banned how much research into life saving treatments has been delayed? How many living, breathing, people have been denied these treatments? How many more will die over the next 10 years that could have been saved?

And all to placate the extreme pro-life fringe, who count fertilized embryos (that would be destroyed anyway) as sacred, and the ignorant who continually refer to "aborted fetuses" whenever the subject comes up.

For shame.

Re:How many lives have been lost?

[CrimsonAvenger]

During the 6 years that this has been banned how much research into life saving treatments has been delayed?

Probably none at all. It's not like the "ban" prevented research, it just prevented Federal funding for research. And it didn't even really prevent that, as long as you were willing to abide by Federal rules.

BLOCKQUOTE>How many living, breathing, people have been denied these treatments?

Zero. Latest guesstimates I've seen say it'll be 20 years minimum before any of these treatments get all the way through clinical trials to general use. So none of them would be ready for use today, even if we'd started six years back.

How many more will die over the next 10 years that could have been saved?

Zero. See above. If we'd started six years ago, best guess says we'd have no usable treatments for another 14 years.

Again, note that President Bush's "ban" wasn't actually a ban. It wasn't even a ban on Federal funding (for that, we have to drop back to Clinton's Presidency, when no Federal funding for stem cell research was available at all).

Was Bush's "ban" a good thing? I doubt it, myself, but it's arguable.

Would we be better off if it had not been done? No, since absent his "ban", we'd have been operating under the old rules (which WAS a ban).

Would we have these miracle cures available now? No. Clinical trials take much longer, especially when we're dealing with "treatments" that might give us novel new cancers.

Would they be available soon? It'll be a bloody miracle if I live that long, but then I'm an old guy with cancer.

Would they be available SOONER? Probably. Probably not soon enough to do anything for me, even assuming they'd fix what I have.

Re:NEVER WAS BANNED!

[darkmeridian]

Your entire post is misleading. President Bush was the first President who had to make a decision regarding stem cells. He limited federal funds to existing adult stem cells because of misplaced moral considerations. The embryos would have been destroyed by the fertility labs anyway, but when signing the bill, Bush was flanked by children conceived from embryos. There was no scientific reason to limit the federal funding. It's not even clear the moral justification was that great, either.

After Bush crippled competing research, it's no wonder that adult stem cells are ahead in the race. Imagine what would have happened if stem cell research was not limited out of political considerations.

Re:Bad Summary

[jo_ham]

It was effectively a ban, since if you ran any privately funded stem cell research in the same labs as any work (even with nothing to do with stem cells), the federal funding would be withdrawn for that research.

Re:NEVER WAS BANNED!

[jo_ham]

FALSE.

Adult stem cells are useful, but ultimately nowhere near as effective as embryonic lines. The science of this is well understood. The site you linked to there is a shill site that isn't really science, and is just designed to muddy the waters and try to convince people without a science background that what they say is "fact" when really it's just cloaking the agenda it's trying to push (that killing embryos is wrong).

Bush *effectively* banned stem cell research by attaching some really petty, nasty limitations of federal money to *any* research (not just stem cells, not just biology even) in an institution that went ahead and found private funding for research on new cell lines. Even if they did this research with no federal money, all of the federal money for *all other programmes* would be removed because of it.

So, the choice was funding the research privately and doing without any federal money *for any scientific research whatsoever*, or not doing it. Or setting up an entirely new lab just for the stem cell work (very expensive and silly).

Re:NEVER WAS BANNED!

[CannonballHead]

1. I don't know why you insist on calling his moral considerations "misplaced." He stood on them. He said he would. Good for him. I'm glad he was honest enough with himself to actually say when he thought a human was, in fact, a human life.
2. You appear to be suggesting that the U.S. is the only place that really good research can happen. As far as I know, many countries have allowed embryonic stem cell research and not a whole lot has come out of the research in terms of medicinal uses. Either all other countries stink at research, or there is some truth in the idea that embryonic stem cell research isn't all that it is hyped to be.

Yes, hype. That is what I call promises of very great gain with no real evidence of said great gain. It's marketing, advertising, and hype. Do embryonic stem cells have medical potential? I don't know. I don't think many people know, if any. I do know there have been cases of stem cells (offhand, not sure if they are all adult or not) being rejected by the host. If that's a major issue, then embryonic stem cells wouldn't have much use outside of trying to heal the embryo they were taking from.

Short summary: it seems like adult stem cells are ahead in the race and have a significant advantage, medically: you can get them from the patient, you don't have to worry about someone else's stem cells being rejected by the host.

Re:Let's be accurate here.

[ring-eldest]

A "ban on federal funding for X, Y, and Z" is effectively a ban on X, Y, and Z.

Take abstinence only sex-education for example. I'm not sure what the current situation is, but for a long time schools either taught abstinence only sex ed (no instruction about condom use. No mention of birth control at all, unless it paints the users as morally bankrupt) or they had to stop taking certain funds from the state and federal government. There aren't too many school boards that will vote to turn down money... Even if it hurts the kids.

If you control the purse strings, you control the outcome. Are you surprised people see this as a ban?

Re:Let's be accurate here.

[argStyopa]

...nor did Bush's executive order have any impact on funding for such research in any other country, yet THEY haven't produced any of the purported and inevitable 'miracle' cures in the meanwhile....

So either:
- the assertion that embryonic stem cells were critical to medical breakthroughs and that the lack of Federal funding has caused people to die from otherwise treatable conditions was just politically-motivated hyperbolic bullshit, or
- every other country in the world is incompetent in the field of stem cell research, and unless US researchers using government dollars are able to find the use for stem cells, nobody will.

Go ahead, pick one.