While the Democratic-controlled House voted 253-174 to expand federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, it fell far short of the 290 votes needed to override a virtually guaranteed presidential veto. A tragedy for victims of everything from Alzheimer's to warts? Not at all. Each year there are stunning breakthroughs with adult stem cells, and 2007 has already brought its first. Adult stem cells cure and treat more than 70 diseases and are involved in almost 1,300 human clinical trials. Scientists also keep discovering that adult stem cells are capable of creating a wider variety of mature cells. Perhaps the most promising of these was announced in the January issue of Nature Biotechnology.
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Human amniotic stem cells after extraction. They don't look like much, but. . . |
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One advantage of embryonic stem cells has been that most types of adult stem cells cannot be multiplied outside of the body for very long, while embryonic ones may replicate in the lab indefinitely. But Atala's new amniotic stem cells grow as fast outside the body as embryonic stem cells (doubling every 36 hours), and he's now been growing the same cell line for two years, with no indication of slowing.
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The amniotic sac, teeming with stem cells that can do everything embryonic stem cells can do and more. (Or less, as in causing cancer . . . ) |
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Yet it's been virtually a state secret that for over five years researchers, beginning with a team headed by physician Catherine Verfaillie of the University of Minnesota Stem Cell Institute, have been reporting numerous types of adult stem cells (she used those from marrow) that in the lab could form mature cells from three germ layers. Experiments around the world have clearly shown that adult stem cells from one germ layer can be converted into those of another in a living human, such as those that have turned adipose tissue stem cells from the mesoderm germ layer into neuronal cells from the ectoderm germ layer. (It also produced bone; cartilage; skeletal; cardiac muscle; and blood cells among others but these are all mesodermal.)
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Dr. Anthony Atala is also the nation's leading scientist in producing replacement body organs made from a patient's own cells. People are now walking around with bladders his team created for them and he's had success in animals with other, more complex, organs. |
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The New York Times refused even to allow people to read between the lines – they simply never reported the news about Atala's work. When a reader complained to the "Public Editor," an online ombudsman, about the omission, the Times responded that its genetics reporter, Nicholas Wade, "looked at the Atala paper last week and deemed it a minor development." Wade said of the paper, "It reports finding 'multipotent' stem cells in amniotic fluid. Multipotent means they can't do as much as bona fide embryonic stem cells (which are called 'pluripotent')." Neither Minger nor Newsweek nor Wade could be more wrong. As Atala told PBS's Online NewsHour, "We have been able to drive the cell to what we call all three germ layers, which basically means all three major classes of tissues available in the body, from which all cells come from." I pointed out in a response to the New York Times posting that merely reading the online abstract of the Atala paper indicated the same. Of course, this is the same paper that told readers in 2004 that there were no cures or treatments with adult stem cells. Not 70 cures or treatments, some dating back half a century – none.
It is neither paranoia nor exaggeration to say that the New York Times is engaged in a stem-cell cover-up. What makes all of this worse is that Atala's work actually is a replication of numerous studies. He's just taken the research further and pulled his cells from amniotic fluid, whereas others have pulled the identical cells from the placenta. Amniotic and placenta stem cells are the same, as Atala himself noted. And as to human trials being "many years away," Newsweek is correct only if "years away" means "years ago." The New England Journal of Medicine carried one paper on a placenta stem cell trial back in 1996 and another paper two years later. There's been one ongoing clinical trial since 2001 to treat sickle cell anemia. The Washington Post's Rick Weiss, who has been accused of boosterism for embryonic stem cell research, tried to find a middle ground, saying that "The new [sic] cells are adding credence to an emerging consensus among experts that the popular distinction between embryonic and 'adult' stem cells – those isolated from adult bone marrow and other organs – is artificial."
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Nicholas Wade kept the Atala story entirely out of the New York Times. It's part of an ongoing effort at the Grey Lady to keep readers in the dark about the wonders of non-embryonic stem cells and the diseases they cure and treat while exaggerating any advance (or non-advance) in the embryonic variety. |
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It is these biological differences that have held embryonic stem cell research back, not a lack of federal funds. As stem-cell researcher Malcolm Alison of the University of London told a British newspaper, the amniotic cells "appear to be at least as malleable as embryonic stem cells but without all the ethical baggage." For all the talk over the morality of using human embryos in medicine, perhaps there's another moral issue at play: Non-embryonic stem cell researchers are already performing miracles, such as growing new heart and liver tissue and treating multiple sclerosis – all in living humans. Yet they struggle to get federal funds for their research. Given the growing number of state initiatives that fund embryonic stem cell, but not non-embryonic stem cell, research and given that overall National Institutes of Health funding increases are unlikely anytime soon, is it truly moral to take away funds from a technology that's been saving lives for half a century in favor of another technology that promises nothing but "promise"?
