Catholic Ethicists Support Emergent Stem-Cell Technique

SAN FRANCISCO — John Francis Hurlbut is only a few months old, but he's already figured out that if he drops his pacifier, his father will put it back in his mouth.

And, for Dr. William Hurlbut, one of the pioneers of a theory to create embryonic stem cells without killing embryos, the joy and love he feels for his infant son tangibly affirms the miracle of life and the rightness of his quest.

“I think it's kind of a game with him,” Hurlbut said as he put the pacifier back in for the fourth time. The whole process of becoming a father has inspired a new sense of “awe” over the way human beings develop, the veteran Stanford professor said.

Now, a team of 35 scientists, theologians and philosophers have lined up with Hurlbut to advocate animal testing of a theory they say may prove within a year that it is possible to create human pluripotent stem cells without killing an early embryo.

Pluripotent stem cells can develop into any cell in the human body, and many scientists believe that they hold the key to curing a variety of diseases. They are called “pluripotent” to distinguish them from “totipotent” stem cells, which can develop into an embryo.

Archbishop John Myers of Newark, N.J., is among the who's who of bioethicists, scientists and theologians — including some prominent Protestant and Jewish scholars — who signed a paper supporting further exploration and animal testing of oocyte assisted reprogramming (also known as OAR). The complete paper is available on the website of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (www.eppc.org).

Other signers of the statement supporting oocyte assisted reprogramming included Legionary Father Thomas Berg, executive director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person; Jesuit Father Kevin FitzGerald, professor of Catholic health care ethics at Georgetown University; Jesuit Father Kevin Flannery, dean of the philosophy faculty at the Gregorian University in Rome; and three officials of the National Catholic Bioethics Center: John Haas, president, Father Tad Pacholczyk, director of education, and Edward Furton, an ethicist there.

President Bush is receptive to funding such research, according to three lawmakers who discussed it with him, the Associated Press reported June 30.

In an essay published June 20 in the Wall Street Journal, Princeton University's Robert George, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, and Oregon Health and Science University's Markus Grompe advocate oocyte assisted reprogramming, which would involve transferring the nucleus of an adult cell (the nucleus is the part of the cell that contains the genetic code) into a human egg without its own nucleus. The process would create a new cell.

Because of the advanced genetic alterations to both the transferred nucleus and the egg, the resulting cell would be genetically identical to a pluripotent stem cell and could immediately give rise to cells with properties identical to embryonic stem cells. Significantly, the goal of oocyte assisted reprogramming is to use the egg lacking its own nucleus to directly transform the transferred nucleus into a pluripotent stem cell by completely skipping any embryonic stages.

Oocyte assisted reprogramming “is a method that can be tested and applied very quickly, because it uses already existing technologies,” said Grompe, who serves on the board of the International Society for Stem-Cell Research. The technique takes advantage of the emerging field of “epigenetic reprogramming,” the ability to use so-called “master genes” to turn on or off certain genes in a cell.

Grompe explained that the DNA sequence is exactly the same in every cell, but that the combination of which genes are turned on and which are turned off determines how a cell behaves.

If successful, OAR might also allow the creation of pluripotent stem cells without using human eggs at all, advocates hope.

“There's nothing wrong with human embryonic stem cells. What's wrong is if they're derived in ways that a human embryo is killed,” said Dominican Father Nicanor Austriaco, who holds a doctorate in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is one of the 35 signers of the oocyte assisted reprogramming statement. “If we can derive them in another way, they are good in themselves.”

A human embryo is a boy or girl from conception to eight weeks, with unique DNA, normal life-expectancy — and the right to life.

Currently, the way researchers obtain embryonic stem cells is by cutting open a three- to six-day-old embryo and extracting his or her stem cells, thereby killing a human being.

The Church states in the encyclical letter Donum Vitae, “Medical research must refrain from operations on live embryos, unless there is a moral certainty of not causing harm to the life or integrity of the unborn child and the mother, and on condition that the parents have given their free and informed consent to the procedure” (No. 4).

But there is still opposition.

“I don'd like it. I still feel that you are sabotaging development of an embryo. Doing nuclear transfer into an oocyte, into an egg. … It starts embryonic development,” said David Prentice, science adviser to the Family Research Council, and to Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., main sponsor of the U.S. Senate's cloning ban legislation. Prentice, an Evangelical Christian, is a leading scientific opponent of human cloning. “I don'd think you can overcome the innate programming of the egg to start some kind of development.”

While opposing the idea, Prentice said he has no problem with animal testing, although he is not sure it will be able to definitively show no embryo is present.

Father Austriaco, who is a biologist and moral theologian at Providence College in Rhode Island, said animal testing, especially in mice, will show whether Prentice's worries are valid.

“Let us put an OAR-generated mouse cell into a mouse and see if it grows up,” said Father Austriaco. “If it becomes a mouse then OAR makes embryos. However, if the OAR-generated cell becomes a tumor, then OAR does not produce embryos, since organisms never become tumors. I think David Prentice has a legitimate concern, but the scientific experiments that are being planned in animals should address them.”

Prentice said efforts would be better devoted to adult stem-cell research, which has proven effective in treating conditions ranging from paralysis to blood disease, while decades of investigation into embryonic stem-cell research has yet to yield a cure.

“The people who are doing embryonic stem-cell research do not see destruction of the human embryo as unethical. They might snap up the so-called embryonic stem cells — but they want fertilized real embryos, they want cloned embryos. I don'd think we gain a thing [politically] by offering this up,” Prentice told the Register.

Oregon Health and Science University's Grompe told the Register that human embryonic stem cells were only discovered in 1998, and so research is still in its early stages. Earlier embryonic stem-cell research was used primarily in making mouse models to study genetic disorders, he said.

“I am not saying [embryonic stem] cells are superior to adult cells. I am just stating the fact that the research has not been going on long enough to know if [embryonic stem] derived cells are better or worse than adult stem cells,” Grompe said.

“We, as Catholics, should not say that adult stem cells are equal or superior to embryonic stem cells when we don'd know that in fact to be true. You can only win with the truth in the end. White lies for a good purpose get you nowhere,” Grompe said.

Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of the U.S. bishops’ pro-life secretariat, supports animal testing of oocyte assisted reprogramming.

“This new proposal addresses the Catholic Church's fundamental objection to embryonic stem-cell research as now practiced, by offering to create cells with the properties of embryonic stem-cell research without ever producing or harming an embryo,” Doerflinger said.

The policy of President George W. Bush allow federal money for embryonic stem-cell research only if it uses a limited number of stem-cell lines derived from embryos killed prior to Aug. 9, 2001. The policy denies federal funding not only for research conducted on embryos killed after that date, but also for the cloning of any human embryos or the creation of any human embryos. However, there is no ban on cloning itself.

Connecticut on June 21 joined New Jersey and California in choosing to use taxpayers’ money to fund research that kills embryos. Earlier, in May, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to expand federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research to embryos frozen in fertility clinics that were slated for destruction. Bush promised to veto the law, if it were passed by the Senate.

However, with several pro-life lawmakers voting for the bill, Father Austriaco noted, it shows how concerns about the highly touted — and so far unrealized — expectations of patient cures from embryonic stem cells is shaping the debate.

“This third option allows the pro-life side to be both pro-life and pro-patient with both pluripotent cells and adult stem cells,” Father Austriaco said.

The oocyte assisted reprogramming theory is a development of the altered nuclear transfer theory Hurlbut presented to the President's Council on Bioethics in December, and included in a white paper published by the council in May entitled “Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells.” That theory would have deleted a gene during the process, and critics feared that altered nuclear transfer might produce a severely deformed embryo.

With oocyte assisted reprogramming, however, the genetic alterations would bypass this criticism by directly transforming the adult nucleus into a pluripotent stem cell. In presenting Hurlbut's and other theories in May, Council chairman Leon Kass said the group was trying to find a middle way, to defuse the polarizing debate over the use of embryonic stem cells racking the country.

In an interview with the Register, Hurlbut repeated that theme.

“I think this will turn out to be an historic occasion, because what this represents is positive bioethics instead of just nay-saying and objecting,” he said. “We assembled leading scientists, moral philosophers and theologians and defined with precision and clarity exactly what moral principles we are trying to protect and sought a creative scientific solution.”

Valerie Schmalz writes from San Francisco, California.