Finally, in the same 2005 article from the HFEA, one of the regulators, Suzi Leather spoke out to scientists, saying “There is a need for continued engagement between scientists and the public”. She stressed that there is a fine line between the support and opposition, and that it was not unconditional; the figures could shift. And in order to keep the majority of the public in favour of the research, scientists must keep the public informed and confident that they are doing their job appropriately, because lack of communication could cause a breakdown in support.
Law And Politics
When there is any discussion about stem cell research and politics, the one example that immediately springs to mind is Bush and Obama.
In 2006, 5 years after his election, ex-President George Bush vetoed a bill that would have allowed more federal funding put into embryonic stem cell research. This law didn’t completely halt stem cell research however, as Scientists were allowed to experiment with the 21 lines of embryonic stem cells already established and government funding still covered adult stem cell research. This veto made scientists furious with Bush, as additional funding would’ve pushed them closer to their ‘miracle cures’. Bush single-handedly put America lagging behind in the stem cell race, falling far behind countries like Britain and China who were already experimenting on embryos.
Being a strong Republican and Methodist, it is unsurprising why he denied more funding into embryonic stem cell research. His personal beliefs were that of pro-life, and religiously supported the ‘sanctity f life’. Because of this, it can be argued that Bush vetoed the bill simply for personal beliefs, since both House and Senate supported the bill by a wide majority and most of the public was also in support. According to The Economist, Bush stated stem cell research was immoral and unethical because it “would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others”.
However, when President Barack Obama was elected one of his first presidential acts was to lift the veto Bush placed on federal funding into embryonic stem cell research. This marked a huge moment in American stem cell research history, and put America back into the front lines of stem cell research. It was not much of a surprise either, as Obama had stated during his election campaign he would be lifting the ban.
Opinion polls showed a majority in support of lifting the ban, although many religious conservatives and The Family Research Council were none too happy, slamming the new bill saying it allowed scientists to make up their own guidelines for the research. Obama responded by subtly reminding them of his own faith, saying “I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering”.
As for the UK, The Human Fertilization and Embryology act ensures experimentation on a human embryo is only carried out if one of the following conditions is met:
- To promote advances in the treatment of infertility
- To increase knowledge about the causes of congenital disease
- To increase knowledge about the causes of miscarriages
- To develop more effective techniques of contraception
- To develop methods for detecting the presence of gene or chromosome abnormalities
- To increase knowledge about the development of embryos
- To increase knowledge about serious disease and treat these diseases
Any research carried out on embryos must have approval from the HFEA. Embryo’s are only allowed to be used before they are 14 days old.
Religion
In the endless struggle for embryonic stem cell research to be accepted, religion and religious influence has played one of the biggest parts in this struggle. Multiple religious groups and leaders continue to slam those who support and encourage experimentation on human embryos and pressure government authorities.
The Catholic Church has many arguments which they think rebuke all the scientific claims made about stem cell research. They say the process from embryo to child is a process, not a set of steps so you cannot pinpoint where the child becomes conscious, can feel pain, counts as a human being etc. They believe life starts at conception, so aborting the embryo for research purposes is murder. They often compare the act of destroying the embryo for research to that of euthanasia (consensual, assisted suicide). Pope John Paul II slated America’s ‘free, equal and fair’ society by saying “A free and virtuous society, which America aspires to be, must reject practices that devalue and violate human life at any stage from conception until natural death.". In other words, in order for America to be ‘free and virtuous’ they must not lawfully encourage the destruction of human embryos for medical research.
The Christian side on embryonic stem cell research is based upon, more or less, the same underlying principals; Life begins at conception and destroying an embryo is murder. They state an embryo has the right to life, and should have other rights just like humans, like protection from abuse. That fertilized egg could have been a life, and if it had been left to nature, would have become a foetus, then a baby, child, adult and so on. The bible clearly states that human life begins before birth and God is involved in the life prior to birth.
There is a big question surrounding stem cell research, and that is when does life begin? When can you call those cells a life, a human being? Well Christians believe a soul is present before the baby is born, making it a ‘life’. Therefore, it is immoral to destroy it for the benefit of others.
Another argument used by supporters of stem cell research is that embryos are not ‘persons’. Christians respond to this argument by asking who has the right to determine who’s a person and who isn’t? In their eyes, it’s God who decides. They say this would make the embryo a non-person human, and question whether a creature like this can exist. They go on to say that if you remove an embryo from personhood, you’d have to do the same to people in comas, Alzheimer sufferers and mentally defective people because they lack the personality traits which make them a ‘person’.
The sanctity of life is a religious idea closely linked to Christianity. It is the belief life is precious and should be valued. Christians believe the destruction of an embryo for stem cell research is violating the sanctity of life, since life starts at conception. It also breaks the Sixth Commandment, which states “Thou shalt not murder”. In addition, the Bible encourages us to look after each other; ‘We are to love our neighbours as ourselves’ and ‘Jesus taught that a stranger in trouble was our neighbour’. Here the implication is that the stranger in trouble is an embryo being used for research purposes.
Morality And Ethics
Although everything in this project is basically about the morality and ethics of stem cell research, there are some very specific ethical and moral issues. One of the most well-known ethical debates is the ‘moral status of a human embryo’.
After Obama was elected and reversed the veto on embryonic stem cell research, allowing more government funding to be put into embryonic stem cell research, there was much outcry from the opposition. But one pro-life group went to the extreme. They compared Obama ‘enslaving’ embryo’s by freezing them to that of the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust. They have been pressuring judges to act and even filed a lawsuit saying Obama is "treating human embryos, and, thus, human beings as property" that "may be donated for use and destruction in federally-funded [research] without the consent of and against the will of the embryos themselves". They believed embryo’s should have the same human rights as everyone else and be protected against abuse.
Anthony Ozimic, political secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, writes in The New Statesman about how all humans have the capacity to have opinions, feelings and rationality. Embryos count as undeveloped humans, but humans nonetheless and therefore have the capacity to express these feelings, but not the ability to exercise those feelings. He argues no person has the right to deem other people of lower moral status, or whole groups eg. Embryos. Because, after all, we were all embryo’s once. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to life” and “everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”. Ozimic compares the demoralization of embryos to that of other people demoralizing groups such as ethnic minorities, which is unacceptable in our modern society. So why is it different for embryos? What gives us the right to say an embryo is less of a person that us? That’s some of the questions Ozimic raises and makes you ask yourself in his article.
At the end of the day the big morality issue here is the fact embryos which could have become human beings are destroyed, taking away the life that embryo could have had. For some people, this classes as murder, which in modern society is deemed unacceptable and also illegal.
Medical Potential
Moving away from general opinions, laws and other arguments for and against stem cell research, if you take a look at some medical miracles stem cells are already creating the evidence is concrete. Opinions and religious beliefs can be argued, but plain evidence, facts and anecdotes cannot be argued.
There are many conditions and diseases which have puzzled doctors for decades, and many have thought there would never be a cure. Until stem cells came into the picture, shining new hope on incurable illnesses such as cerebral palsy, spinal cord injury, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, MS, the list is endless. Although embryonic stem cell research is still in the process of being trialled, many patients have had treatments using their own adult stem cells from bone marrow. Although there are a lot of treatments out there, most of them are not complete cures yet. But scientists are gradually getting there. An American RT news anchor told of how scientists created their own hair follicles from animals, which shows promise for a cure for baldness and how a man with HIV and leukaemia was treated with his own stem cells for the leukaemia which subsequently eradicated all traces of HIV.
I found this case study online which perfectly show stem cell’s miracles at work: Chloe Lavine suffered from Cerebral Palsy, a condition which affects brain development and muscle movement. It was diagnosed when she was only a year old, and her parents were told their daughter would require up to 18 years of therapy. Seeking alternative answers, the Lavine’s heard about an experimental procedure in North Carolina which involved taking cord blood stem cells and infusing them. They hoped this would repair and regenerate her undeveloped brain. Her parents noted 2 months after that she appeared to have had a massive improvement, with her therapist saying she’d recovered about 50% already. And this could improve the quality of life of hundreds of children affected with Cerebral Palsy or other brain defects, with just more research and testing.
Another neurological condition which could be saved by stem cells is Alzheimer’s, which causes the degeneration of cells in the brain that are responsible for storing memory. However, there is a shimmer of hope as scientists believe they have created lab-grown neurons which could be implanted into a sufferers brain to improve their memory. They studied the genetics of the different neurons destroyed by the disease, including basal forebrain cholinergic neurons which are the neurons the disease hits first and hardest, affecting one’s ability to comprehend their surroundings. They managed to coax embryonic stem cells into becoming these important neuron cells, and when they implanted them into mice brains the neurons immediately interlinked into the system and produced the necessary chemicals needed for memory retrieval. Their hope is to use adult skin cells to behave like stem cells and grown into neuron cells. As of yet, the research is unpublished but the team behind it hold great hope and high expectations for this new found research. Like in Cerebral palsy, the new cells could be transplanted into the brain to repair destroyed neurons.
The British Heart Foundation (BHF) is very eager about stem cell research, and is very hopeful about its affect on heart tissue damage. They want to help the body repair tissue damage after someone has suffered a heart attack which would reduce the number of people needing a heart transplant. When the body is damaged, the body’s bone marrow releases different types of adult stem cells to repair damage. They have seized this idea and created a new drug that can induce the bone marrow to release different types of stem cells to repair and regenerate tissue. The drug successfully worked on mice, as their immune systems produced the needed stem cells. They managed to get the stem cell that becomes blood vessels released through this new drug, and hopes that this could help repair heart damage in the future. They announced they hope to conduct human clinical trials within the next 10 years. The research was published in the journal Cells Stem Cells.
Alternatives
As well as embryonic stem cells, there is another type of stem cell which I have previously mentioned in this dissertation, and they are adult stem cells. Adult stem cells are pluripotent cells just like embryonic stem cells, but they are not cultured from embryos and do not cause the death of the donor. There are many ways in which these cells can be cultured; from bone marrow, the placenta, umbilical cord blood and mammary glands. Although they are pluripotent, they are limited to only becoming a select few types of cells, unlike embryonic stem cells which can become absolutely any cell in the body. Anti-embryonic stem cell research groups are focusing intently on adult stem cells, offering them as an ethical alternative to stem cells.
As I mentioned before, Chloe Lavine had her cerebral palsy almost completely reversed thanks to stem cells. But this was using cells from her umbilical cord blood which her parents banked when she was born. Therefore, they were adult stem cells. And the new hair follicles were made using adult stem cells as well as the treatment used in the man who was cured of HIV. Adult stem cells have been around for over 50 years, compared to the young age of 10 for embryonic stem cell research. Therefore more research and more treatments have been found that use adult stem cell research. Doctors can already use stem cells to create skin grafts for burn victims and build new windpipes in a lab. This is all the work of adult stem cell research, so if that research is proving to help a lot of people and also showing promise, why are we still bothering with embryonic stem cell research which is causing immense controversy and costing the government money? This is the big question the people against embryonic stem cells ask the supporters. And it’s a question which cannot be easily answered.
A big type of adult stem cell which is proving very popular lately is umbilical cord blood. The stem cells found in the umbilical cord are the precursors to the person’s immune system. They can also generate themselves into white blood cells which are needed for fighting infections, red blood cells which are important for transporting oxygen around the body and platelets, which are cells in the blood which form clots (or scabs) to protect an external injury from infection while the damage is repaired underneath. Cord blood stem cells could therefore be used to replace diseased cells because of its haematopoetict ability.
Also, the stem cells found in cord blood are a different type of stem cell called Mesenchymal stem cells, or MSCs. These can be induced to become bone, nerve, cardiac, cartilage, muscle and skin cells. Because of this, it shows much promise is the regenerative medicine field. It is currently in trials on patients with Multiple Sclerosis, Diabetes, Parkinson’s and sufferers of strokes.
The third type of stem cell is called Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells, or iPSCs. These are normal, differentiated cells which have been altered to reverse the 4 chemical changes to its DNA. Scientists hope these will have all the properties of embryonic stem cells without any ethical issues surrounding them, since they are not from an embryo. Although they have much potential they are still not yet perfected. Differentiation involved flipping ‘switches’ in its genetic make up. If one switch is the wrong way, it could cause an abnormality leading to a mutation which could make the cell cancerous. This is why these cells require a lot more work and research to perfect them so all risks are completely gone. Or else they won’t be safe for human use.
Disadvantages
For everything we discover in the modern times, for every new idea we come up with there is always a downside. We’ve already explored the ethical downside to embryonic stem cells; the fact a human embryo has to be sacrificed. But what are the medical and scientific disadvantages for the wonders of stem cells? Is there any dangers to them we have yet to discover? Of course, embryonic stem cells are only 11 years old, and we haven’t gotten substantially far in the research. Embryonic stem cells are barely in human clinical trials yet. So we don’t know their effects on human tissue, and what any long term complications may be. It will take us decades to measure the true extent of any problems stem cells may cause. Only further testing will tell us, and even then we won’t find out any long-term effects which may end up being devastating.
As of yet, there has been no extreme breakthrough using embryonic stem cells. We may have found treatments using adult stem cells but embryonic just haven’t got any proper breakthroughs yet. This may be because further research is needed because they haven’t been around nearly half as long as adult stem cells, but the opposing side don’t recognise this. Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women of America repeatedly emphasized in a TV debate that there were so many cures and treatments around using adult stem cells but nothing hugely impressive on embryonic stem cells. Therefore, in her opinion, the stem cell debate is one big hoax because of the overhype of stem cell research when it is not embryonic stem cell research that is headlining the news and headlines, but instead adult stem cells which are proving to be giving what we need and hoped to achieve from stem cell research.
Another possible downside for embryonic stem cell research is that there are still possibilities of the immune system rejecting stem cells. Since adult stem cells are cultured from the donor, there is no chance of donor-host rejection. However, we just don’t know enough about embryonic stem cells yet to predict how they might behave, whether they will cause a rejection. They can also develop into tumours, as stated by Wendy Wright in the televised debate, which of course would cause a huge problem. Animal testing has shown more negative response to stem cells that positive. In some cases, the animals developed tumours. In others, they just caused more damage. They are very tricky and unpredictable, which is why we need much more time to research them before we try and type of human trial.
Conclusion
CONCLUSION (summarize findings and draw to a conclusion – should it be used in medicine?)
To conclude my findings, from looking at the argument from all angles I believe I have made a conclusion and found an answer for my question.
It is clear embryonic stem cells have so much medical potential. Scientists have claimed it could help treat many, many previously incurable illnesses, for example Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Paralysation. With more research we could uncover many other things stem cells are capable of, opening more doors in the medical corridor in our battle to overcome such terminal diseases.
However, the side against stem cell research make comments about alternative adult stem cells, which they claim could be used instead since they have crated all the current miracle cures using stem cells. As much as this is true, since all trials using embryonic stem cells have not yet reached human testing, it is only this way because research on adult stem cells in almost 40 years ahead of embryonic stem cells. So with more research put into embryonic stem cells, the hope is they will catch up and exceed the current success of adult stem cells.
As for morality, Ozimic is right in his argument that we have no right to deem embryo’s less of a human being and take away their moral status. He raises many interesting and thought-provoking questions, which certainly got me thinking very hard, almost swaying me completely. But, I still trust science in that a human embryo hasn’t developed a complex nervous system until 2 weeks into development. Since the embryo is destroyed earlier than 2 weeks it has no nervous system and no possible ability to feel pain. And it’s not like growing embryos just to destroy them, its embryos from abortions and failed IVF that would’ve just been thrown away anyway.
I am going to conclude with the answer to my question which is yes – I do believe embryonic stem cell research should be applied to regular medical practice. However, only after a lot more research. As a few tests have shown they are unstable and unreliable at present, so a lot more research and testing is needed to perfect these stem cells. After this, I believe they could save hundreds, maybe even thousands of people that previously would have died. And at the end of the day, if it saves lives is it not worth the struggle?
Bibliography
Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority Website (UK)
The Times Newspaper online (UK)
Oxford Journals – Online library of various journals open to the public
Fox News (US)
The Economist online (UK Magazine)
Euro Stem Cell – Organisation made up of scientists, ethicists, clinicians and social scientists
American Catholic.com – American site set up for Christians and Catholics for information on their faith
God and Science.com (Website)
Christian.org (Website)
The New Statesman Online (Magazine UK)
Concerned Women for America – Christian pro-life organisation (US)
Smart Cells – UK organisation who stores umbilical cord stem cells from newborn children
Health Articles 101.com – Website built as an information portal about health
British Heart Foundation (UK)
New Scientist Online (UK Magazine)
Cells 4 Life – UK Organisation who stores stem cells from newborn children
Evaluation
EVALUATION (what was good/bad about your project, any changes you would make, what went well, what problems did you face and how did you overcome them etc.)
I will now evaluate my project in its entirety.
I needed to properly plan my project fully before I even started. I made a plan on what I needed to do and set guidelines on when I needed to do them by. This helped me keep on a schedule so everything got done in time. I broke down my dissertation into different sections to make it easier to research, write and read. I found it easy to write my contents before I started, so I knew exactly what I needed to do. I put little notes of what would be in each section for myself (which I obviously deleted as I completed each section) to help me keep on track and not wander off topic, which it is easy to do.
Overall I believe I did a very good job with my project. I am pleased with the outcome and what I have written. It was well researched, as I spent hours researching embryonic stem cells on the internet and reading different arguments, case studies and news articles. I made a clear list of what I needed to include and made sure I researched them evenly and properly. This research helped me compile my list of sources, which I noted down as I researched. I slotted each source into appropriate sections which made it easy to keep them balanced; I wanted to avoid having more sources for some sections and less for others. However, I only used sources obtained from the internet, no books or journals. This is because my local library didn’t have any relevant books; they had books on what stem cells were, but not any information I needed ie. Religious attitudes, morality and ethics. Although a lot of the sources were just newspaper and magazine articles on websites, so they count as articles. Still, some variety would have been better, but it just wasn’t easily possible.
I tried to professionalize my project as best as I could, trying to avoid certain font styles and kept clear organisation. I hope this will make it easier to read since often big colourful headings and pictures can be distracting. I kept the text formal, using proper English and advanced field-specific vocabulary where necessary. I am pleased with how it is written; it is in a sensible order as the paragraphs flow together very well. Information was broken up into paragraphs very well and there was no overlap. It followed a sensible, chronological order which makes it easy for the reader to follow and understand.
Overall I believe I succeeded with my project. I am very pleased with its outcome, and I successfully came up with an informed answer to my question. I came to find this answer through proper research and organised ideas.
Appendix