Free Nothing Is Impossible by Christopher Reeve Page A

Bush for permitting any embryonic stem cell research, even using embryos that had already been destroyed. Conservatives generally agreed that Bush had given scientists plenty to work with andwere reluctantly amenable, as long as there would be no more government-sanctioned destruction of “life.” The consensus among both Democratic and Republican moderates was that the president had opened a door; the question was, had he opened it too much or not far enough? Many scientists were far more skeptical, especially when additional details emerged: the great majority of the lines either were owned by foreign countries such as India, Australia, and Singapore, or had already been patented by pharmaceuticals and biotechs. They questioned what it would cost to obtain approved cell lines and were concerned that the lines would have no therapeutic value. Most of them had been created by combining human cells with mouse feeder cells. The contamination by cells from another species might prevent FDA approval for clinical trials. Dr. Oswald Steward, director of the Reeve Irvine Research Center at the University of California at Irvine, was the first American scientist to obtain one of the lines in a show of good faith. His laboratory signed a contract with Geron, Inc., a pharmaceutical company based in Menlo Park, California. The line was given to Dr. Steward and his team of forty-three researchers dedicated to spinal cord repair, with the understanding that Geron would retain the rights to the commercialization of any FDA-approved technology that emergedfrom the Irvine lab. The first experiments were conducted in February 2002: paralyzed rats in the acute phase of injury were injected with the human stem cells. They all survived, but the extent of their recovery is being kept secret pending publication in a scientific journal. The next experiments were performed in April using the same technique on rats that had been injured for three or four months, in order to simulate the chronic phase of injury in humans. Those results were also withheld from the media pending peer-reviewed publication.
    My reaction to the president’s decision on August 9 was that he had created a research project—something to keep scientists busy for a while without causing too much controversy—instead of creating a therapeutic project that would lead to human trials as quickly as possible. Many scientists and disease groups hope that, given his overwhelming popularity, he will decide it is politically safe to revisit the issue.
    But because the current policy means that laboratories will not receive government funding to harvest excess embryos (which would have been allowed under the Clinton guidelines), scientists have had to find other ways to make progress. The most promising development is
somatic cell nuclear transfer
, also known as nucleustransplantation or therapeutic cloning. This is therapeutic technology that does not require the destruction of a fertilized embryo that could be implanted in a womb and become a human being. Instead, scientists remove the nucleus from an unfertilized egg and replace it with the patient’s DNA. Within a few days, stem cells that will probably not face rejection by the patient’s immune system can be extracted and multiplied indefinitely. Given that we have always understood “life” to be the creation of a union of male and female, I can understand the moral dilemma of destroying fertilized embryos for research. But to insist that an unfertilized egg—which is actually just a cluster of cells—should have the same standing and be entitled to the same protections as a human being is beyond my comprehension.
    In August 2001 the House of Representatives banned both therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning (which produced Dolly the sheep) by a one-hundred-vote margin. Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) introduced a Senate version of the bill that would not only ban all cloning, but actually criminalize it. Thus a