By John Leschak
The Law School and the University’s Cultural Center hosted a two-day conference on embryonic stem cells on March 5 and 6. It was the second conference on biomedical ethics and law held by the Law School.
“We will continue and enhance this interdisciplinary approach when we bring the new medical school to our campus,” said University President Stuart Rabinowitz,
The keynote speaker of the conference was John Gearhart, director of the stem cell program of the Institute of Cell Engineering at John Hopkins’ School of Medicine. Gearhart is considered a pioneer in the field of stem cell research. In 1998, he and his research team at John Hopkins published the first report on the derivation of pluripotent stem cells from the germ cells of the human embryo.
Pluripotent cells have the capacity to form all cell types in the human body and are considered a major starting point for the development of a wide variety of cell-based therapies.
Gearhart showed the audience a video of the regenerative capabilities of stem cell therapies, which showed a rat whose hind legs were intentionally paralyzed by the researchers. The researchers then transplanted motor neurons developed from embryonic stem cells into the rat. In less than a half hour, the rat could use its hind legs again.
Lawrence Goldstein, a professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California in San Diego, gave a lecture explaining the science behind stem cell research. According to Goldstein, pluripotent cells, can be obtained from blastocysts, a collection of cells which forms after a female’s egg has been fertilized by semen, but before a fetus has started to develop. Pluripotent cells are also present in human embryos.
John McNeish, the executive director of Pfizer’s Global Research, discussed the use of stem cells in drug discovery. According to McNeish, stem cells are promising for the development of drugs to treat Alzheimers Disease (AD). AD results when neurons in the brain lose the ability to communicate with each otheis currently incurable because researchers cannot develop neurons from human cell lines, however, stem cells can create neuron cells.
There were several speakers who discussed the ethical dilemmas raised by stem cell research. Hossam Fadel, a Muslim doctor of gynecology, said that the majority of Muslim scholars approved the use of stem cell research, but only when the stem cells were obtained from the extra embryos produced by in-vitro fertilization (IVF). During IVF, usually between 10 to 12 blastocysts are created, and only two or three of those may be implanted into a woman’s womb.
Ronald Cole-Turner, a Protestant minister with the United Church of Christ, agreed with Fadel that using these “supernumerary embryos” for research was permissible. Both also agreed that the creation of embryos solely for stem cell research was unethical.
The problem, they said, is that embryos from IVF are considered the property of the people paying for IVF, and they may choose not to donate them to medical research.
William Hurlbut, a neuroscientist and moral philosopher, discussed a possible technological solution to the moral controversy over stem cell research. Hurlbut, who has served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, discussed Altered Nuclear Transfer (ANT) as an alternative to stem cell research. ANT involves making a genetic alteration to a blastocyst which prevents the blastocyst from developing into an embryo, but preserves its pluripotentiality.
During the question and answer session following his speech, someone asked, “if there was fire in a building, inside of which there was a container of 300 embryos and 1 human child, and you could only save one, which would you save?” Hurlbut said he would pick the child.