Nancy and the Embryos

I am inclined to think charitably of Nancy Reagan. Her husband obviously loved her very much and I thought highly of the now departed President. However, on the occasion of her husband's death, and the slow decade-long spiral into that goodnight brought about by Alzheimers, she has been rolled out to call for embryonic stem cell research. Her husband would be unlikely to countenance this, since he was a very thoughtful pro-lifer with a well developed apologetic for protecting pre-born infants.

Mrs. Reagan, the poor dear, has always struck me as a bit flaky. Why embryonic research flacks would want the same woman who consulted astrologer Joan Quigley to pimp their product is beyond me. Mrs. Reagan would do almost anything to have her beloved Ronnie back, to forestall that slow, sad decline that marked his last years, but in reality, dead baby parts may very well not produce a cure for anything.

Totipotent stem cells, that is, stem cells that will become anything, come from pre-born babies (I'm not going to be euphemistic here - this is my column after all). This opens up a number of logistical problems before you even get into the ethics.

First, it takes a lot of embryos to get enough cells to do any good. Considering how hard it is to get them, this means any treatment will require a huge number of harvested eggs. Do we think there are tens of thousands of women ready to take hormone shots to provide eggs for research, much less actual treatments?

Second, while there may be ways to get around the previous problem, stem cells are like any other tissue, in that it can be rejected by the body as foreign. Unless you are getting stem cells from your embryonic clone (shudder), whatever cells are used in a treatment will likely have the same tissue rejection issues endemic in any other treatment requiring foreign tissue.

Finally, there is a thin difference between what a totipotent stem cell does when making a baby, an what cancer cells do when making a tumor.

On the other hand, adult stem cells (ASC) suffer from neither of the first problems, and are to my understanding, much less likely to have the third problem. Adult stem cells are plentiful, and already used to living peacefully in the body in their pluripotent form, meaning that they are partway down the path of becoming a particular tissue type. In fact, one of my friends (who has provided most of this information to me) is researching ways to coax an ASC back a few steps to allow it to become another tissue altogether, doing what you need a totipotent cell to do

In my view, not only is ASC research completely ethical, it is far more likely to produce feasible treatments. It would be a tragedy if people like Nancy Reagan were used to drain funding and interest away from the very research that could produce the desired results.

Tim McNabb