10/19/2005

Alternative Embryonic Stem Cell Procedures Miss the Mark say CMA Doctors

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 /Christian Wire Service/ -- The Christian Medical Association (www.cmda.org), the nation's largest association of faith-based physicians, today critiqued two recently reported developments in embryonic stem cell research that are purportedly designed to allay ethical concerns over treatment of human life. Both methods were reported in the October 17 online edition of Nature.

While applauding the search for ethical alternatives, the association's leaders say the procedures do not circumvent the moral dilemmas of destroying living human beings or exposing them to harm.

One procedure involves programming an embryo genetically so that it cannot successfully implant and develop in the uterus to become a baby.

CMA Executive Director Dr. David Stevens said, "Just because scientists have created a genetic time bomb in the embryo does not change its essential human nature. If a scientist removed most of the intestines of a newborn baby, that action would cause the baby to die later. That wouldn’t give them the right to kill the child in order to transplant its organs."

Another procedure involves removing a cell from an eight-cell embryo, then developing that removed cell in order to harvest embryonic stem cells.

Dr. Stevens noted, "The cell taken from the embryo to start an embryonic stem cell line, a separated blastomere, is actually a totipotent cell that can develop into a complete organism--a human baby. This process is essentially artificial identical twinning.

"Embryologists have long recognized that these early developing human cells called blastomeres have a regulative nature--a strong tendency for the system to be restored to wholeness. And in fact, the developmental capacity of separated blastomeres has been confirmed in animals, including in primates.

"So to emphasize that the original embryo is not killed is actually to employ a scientific sleight of hand. Researchers using this process may not destroy the first embryo, but they do destroy the second one.

"This method of research exposes the surviving human being to potential risk. Even if the surviving embryo is implanted in a womb, no one knows the long-term effect of preimplantation genetic diagnosis on children born after being subjected to the procedure. How many of us, if we could somehow be given the ability to guide our own embryonic development, would permit researchers to take out one of our first eight cells?"

Dr. Stevens added, "We applaud studies using animals to figure out ethical ways to obtain embryonic stem cells apart from the creation and destruction of human embryos. So far, however, no one appears to have accomplished this feat. Meanwhile, the good news is that adult stem cells are already providing real cures for real patients."

CMA Associate Executive Director Dr. Gene Rudd added, “While it is reasonable to fund basic science research in hopes of future benefit, that research should not compromise our ethical principles, and it should not be funded to the exclusion of more promising cures. Clinical trials and treatments using adult stem cells currently provide verifiable progress in treating the very diseases that embryonic stem cell researchers boast that they may cure in 10 years. Why should desperately ill people suffering from Parkinson's, paraplegia, diabetes and massive heart attacks have to wait for embryonic stem cell research to somehow try to catch up with adult stem cell research?"