Midlands Voices: Judge’s stem-cell ruling charts appropriate course

The writer is president of the Nebraska Coalition for Ethical Research.

The sky is falling — again — in the world of stem-cell research. So say some advocates of embryo-destructive research.

“This decision has just poured sand into the engine of discovery,” said the director of the National Institutes of Health. He was referring to a federal court ruling against the Obama administration’s expansion of federal funding for stem-cell research that relies on destruction of human embryos, which happens when stem cells are harvested from embryos.

Some voices are declaring that “life-saving research” is being shut down.

Actually, the sky is not falling. The sky is blue and the sun is shining on stem-cell research, especially the kind that does not destroy embryos, which has been going on for more than four decades.

There is life-saving research — and treatment — going on in humans with stem cells. It has been accomplished with adult stem cells from non-embryonic sources such as bone marrow and umbilical cord blood. The Associated Press recently produced a story headlined, “Adult stem-cell research far ahead of embryonic.”

Even if that wasn’t true, or even if a crystal ball showed that problems inherent in embryonic stem cells could be overcome and they could join adult stem cells as viable for human use, it would still be wrong to use them.

And it’s against the law to do it with federal tax dollars. That was the point of the federal court ruling.

The case was initiated by researchers who don’t want federal funding directed away from adult stem-cell research. They said President Barack Obama’s policy violates federal law, which prohibits federal funding of “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed.”

President Obama tried to dodge that provision by saying: We’re not funding destruction of human embryos. We’re only funding research with human embryonic stem cells. The destruction of human embryos will be done with non-federal money.

Nonetheless, that policy allows federal money to be spent on research that involves — indeed, requires — destruction of human embryos.

To justify the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s involvement in embryo-destructive research, UNMC administrators use an argument similar to that of the Obama administration: We don’t destroy human embryos. We just use stem cells from human embryos destroyed elsewhere.

Now a federal judge has rejected the intellectual and ethical sham of trying to separate destruction of human embryos from research with their stem cells.

“Embryonic stem-cell research necessarily depends upon the destruction of a human embryo” and “is clearly research in which an embryo is destroyed,” the judge said. He also said the federal prohibition “encompasses all ‘research in which’ an embryo is destroyed, not just the ‘piece of research’ in which the embryo is destroyed.” Therefore, he concluded, it’s illegal to fund human embryonic stem-cell research with federal money.

The judge, Royce Lamberth, is known for resolutely applying the law regardless of political fallout. His ruling could wipe out the compromise brokered by President George W. Bush that allowed federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research with stem cells harvested from human embryos on or before Aug. 9, 2001.

The provision of law at issue, the Dickey-Wicker amendment, was included in budget legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996. It has been included in subsequent annual budget laws. The Lamberth ruling appears to say that Dickey-Wicker prohibits all federal funding of research with human embryonic stem cells, not just the expanded funding authorized by President Obama.

Don’t fall for hysterical claims of damage to stem-cell research. The majority of progress in biomedical research, including research with stem cells, has been made using animal models. For almost 30 years, stem-cell research has moved forward using animal embryonic stem cells, which are ethically acceptable. Such research can continue to be federally funded.

The court decision does not prevent private funding of human embryonic stem-cell research. It simply brings federal funding of stem-cell research in line with federal law by ruling that federal money must be channeled to research that does not use human embryonic stem cells — in other words, to adult stem-cell research, which poses no ethical problem and keeps providing new evidence of dramatic success.

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