NCBC: Today's stem-cell news "highly promising"

As soon as I heard the news that scientists may have found a way around embryo destruction by reprogramming human skin cells to act as stem cells, I thought, "What does Father Tad Pacholczyk think of this?" Father Tad, as regular Herald readers know, writes the awesome "Making Sense About Bioethics" column that appears in our second issue each month.

Well, the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, of which Father Tad is director of education, released this statement today. While we're not to get too excited about this yet -- as much testing on this method still needs to be done -- this is still, as the NCBC says, "highly promising":

The highly promising strategy of reprogramming human somatic cells, presented in recent papers by the research teams of Dr. Shinya Yamanaka and Dr. James Thomson, represents a significant breakthrough in attempts to obtain pluripotent stem cells, and affects the ethical discussion around stem cells in a very positive way. The studies confirm that human skin cells (fibroblasts) can be used to make pluripotent stem cells sharing essentially all the features of human embryonic stem cells. The technique involves the introduction of 4 genes into the skin cells, thereby "reprogramming" them to a less specialized (pluripotent) state.

The National Catholic Bioethics Center has been exploring and promoting the use of alternative methods of deriving pluripotent stem cells for several years, and the methods outlined in these papers fully conform to what we have hoped to see for some time.

Such strategies should continue to be pursued and strongly promoted, as they should help to steer the entire field of stem cell research in a more explicitly ethical direction by circumventing the moral quagmire associated with destroying human embryos. These strategies also circumvent a second series of moral objections by providing a method for obtaining patient-matched stem cells without cloning human embryos or using women's eggs. Reprogramming also appears to be technically simpler and more straightforward than these other approaches involving embryos.

In response to these developments, Dr. Ian Wilmut, the researcher responsible for cloning Dolly, has decided not to pursue a license to clone human embryos, which he was awarded just two years ago in Britain, but to pursue reprogramming strategies instead. His change of position flowed largely from practical considerations, but he reportedly acknowledged that the reprogramming approach is also "easier to accept socially."

Persistence in seeking creative scientific breakthroughs and actively pursuing alternative approaches can help resolve serious ethical problems and allow us to maintain the ethical integrity of science while achieving important scientific and medical ends. The National Catholic Bioethics Center strongly supports and encourages such morally acceptable alternative approaches to obtaining pluripotent stem cells, in the realization that it is never necessary for laboratory researchers to cross fundamental moral lines in order for science and medicine to make real and enduring advances.

Doonesbury and blastocysts

Last Sunday's Doonesbury focused on embryonic stem-cell research (click on the image for a larger version). In the comic, cartoonist Gary Trudeau makes a common claim that "blastocysts" are different than embryos and therefore are not subject to the same moral and ethical criteria as embryos. I posed this question to Father Tad Pacholczyk, who writes the "Making Sense of Bioethics" column that runs each month in the Herald. Father Tad is a fantastic source both as a theologian and scientiest, as he has earned a doctorate in neuroscience from Yale University, four undergraduate degrees -- in molecular and cellular biology, chemistry, biochemistry and philosophy --and two degrees in advanced theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He responded to my question:

The key point is that a blastocyst is an embryo. The two mean the same thing. The blastocyst is an embryo that is about a week old.

This is the old "semantic obfuscation" technique - grab a synonym that no one is familiar with, and use it for your own purposes, implying that there is some shade of difference between the terms that magically makes your own argument suddenly right when it was wrong before...

In an article on americancatholic.org, Thomas Shannon also gives a good explanation of the dilemma that Trudeau highlights and the Catholic Church's stance on it.

On the basis of the argument that the blastocyst is not yet an individual, some would argue that while the blastocyst is a living organism, possessing the human genetic code, such an organism is indeed valuable, but its value is not yet that accorded to a person.

Therefore some would conclude that killing the human blastocyst is not murder because there is as yet no personal subject to experience that wrong. Such a killing is a disvalue, to be sure, but a disvalue that might be offset by other positive values, such as health. The conclusion that some would draw, then, is that at least a case can be made for the use of human embryos in stem-cell research.

Once again, the Church does not endorse this view. The specific reason for the rejection of this position is the affirmation that fertilization, the time when egg and sperm merge and form a new genotype, is considered to be the biological beginning of the new human life. Together with this affirmation is the correlative presumption that this is the time of the infusion of the soul. Although there is no official doctrine on this position, the attitude of the Church is that moral priority should be given to this position.

Father Tad has touched on this debate in an earlier column, and my hope is that he will touch on this again in a future column to clarify for us better the controversey specifically over blastocysts. BTW, all of his columns are available at our Web site. The 2007 columns are in our Gospel of Life page and his earlier columns can be accessed here (or by clicking on the "archive" link near the search box and entering "Tad"). These are great resources for addressing common criticisms of Catholic Church teaching on hot bioethical topics such as stem-cell research. Spread the word!

NOTE: This post was updated with Father Tad's quotes at 10:40 a.m. July 25.