Good Morality Is Good Medicine Compared to the morally acceptable alternatives, embryonic stem cells aren't making the grade.

The recent congressional elections have brought new hope for the passage of pro-life legislation, including a ban on human cloning. Equally important to the cloning debate, however, is a race of a different sort--the race for cures.

Four years ago, at a December 1998 Senate hearing, legislators and scientists announced that embryonic stem cell research would soon revolutionize medicine. If only we could overcome our qualms about destroying human embryos for their stem cells, we were told, there would soon be cures for diabetes, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, and other terrible conditions.

Some scientists added that the potential of stem cell research could only be realized if we could create embryos by cloning, to provide genetically matched stem cells for each patient -- a claim later endorsed by many in the scientific community. Pro-life arguments that scientists should pursue alternative means instead -- using stem cells from umbilical cord blood or adult tissue, for example -- were brushed aside as uninformed.

In December 2002, then, it is worth asking: Where are these cures? How close are we to providing cell therapies for these diseases, and where are the therapies coming from?

The answer is that scientists have made amazing progress in using stem cells and other avenues to cure debilitating diseases. But none of the advances now in human clinical trials come from destroying embryos. They come from the morally acceptable avenues that much of the scientific establishment has dismissed as inadequate.

* On April 8, Dr. Michel Levesque announced at the annual meeting of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons that he had used a patient's own neural stem cells to provide an almost complete cure for his disabling Parkinson's disease. Levesque removed neural stem cells from the patient's brain, cultured them in the lab for months to produce several million stem cells, then implanted these in the part of the brain affected by Parkinson's. A year later the patient's symptoms had improved by over 80%. The patient himself has been difficult to interview, because after his treatment he began going on ski vacations and deep-sea fishing trips! Levesque is now treating several dozen other patients. Another team, at Emory University in Atlanta, has reported promising results using cells from six patients' own retinas to supply the dopamine they need (Newsday, April 23, 2002).

* Umbilical cord blood, now thrown away four million times a year after live births in this country, is beginning to rival bone marrow as a source of treatments for leukemia and other ailments. Cord blood stem cells seem to be even more effective for some conditions than the adult stem cells in bone marrow, and less likely to be rejected as foreign tissue. Recently a British male nurse with leukemia was "brought back from the brink of death" by injections of cord blood obtained from seven live births (The Guardian, July 9, 2002). Once it was thought that umbilical cords could only produce enough stem cells to treat children. But researchers found that if only one sample has a good genetic match with the patient, it can be mixed with many unmatched samples for successful treatment.