Save Those Stem Cells!

Having an oncologist in the delivery room with his wife can be interesting. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, told this story about the birth of his first child to NPR's Terry Gross on Nov. 17:

I'm trying to cut the umbilical cord, but on the flipside of my mind, it's almost a split of my right brain and my left brain, and here I am in sort of the most glorious moment of my life, the birth of my child, and on one side of my brain I'm saying to myself, I have got to harvest her umbilical cord blood cells because these cells are useful in transplantations for kids who have leukemia....

[T]he tragedy of it [is that the umbilical cord is] often flushed down the sink and often not collected all. I think, you know, we absolutely need to have better centralized banking facilities free of charge which allow us to bank these cells because kids with leukemia can benefit from cord blood transplantation and they need these - these are very precious cells....

[T]hey contain blood-forming stem cells that can go into the blood and create new blood. And they are so precious because they can be transplanted into another child and give rise to the blood system of the child and you can therefore eliminate the leukemia. And if you eliminate leukemia you can often eliminate the normal - the child's blood stem cells and you can replace it with the cord blood from another child, and that's why they're incredibly precious.

The fuss over embryonic stem cells has died down since March 2009, when President Obama overturned the Bush administration's ban on the use of federal funds for new stem cells lines. While I favored the Obama policy, it bothered me that, during that lengthy debate, the coloration of being ideological was applied only to the pro-life side. And now we learn that hospitals have been flushing billions upon billions of stem cells down the drain that could help patients immeasurably, and without so much as a peep from either megaphone.

Bill And Ann And Ron And Nancy

Ann Coulter and Bill Maher, both gifted comic-polemicists, sparred over President Obama's stem cell research decision at a debate in New York:

That led to the two battling over Nancy Reagan, who has come out in support for Obama’s decision.

“Nancy Reagan was so madly in love with Ronald Reagan,” Coulter said, “if you told her that we could bring Ronald Reagan back to life, cure Alzheimer’s by disemboweling everyone in this audience, she would say ‘do it.’”

Maher: “So you’re saying Nancy Reagan, the patron saint of the Republican party ... ”

Coulter: “She’s not the patron saint of the Republican party.”

Maher: “She’s somebody you revere. ... You’ve just said she’s bats--t crazy.”

Coulter responded that it’s funny to see liberals — who once chided Reagan for following astrology — now trying to bring her into a science debate. “I never saw her as a seer of technology,” she added.

Putting Life Ahead Of Life

William Saletan equates proponents of embryonic stem cell research to proponents of torture:

Think about what's being dismissed here as "politics" and "ideology." You don't have to equate embryos with full-grown human beings—I don't—to appreciate the danger of exploiting them. Embryos are the beginnings of people. They're not parts of people. They're the whole thing, in very early form. Harvesting them, whether for research or medicine, is different from harvesting other kinds of cells. It's the difference between using an object and using a subject. How long can we grow this subject before dismembering it to get useful cells? How far should we strip-mine humanity in order to save it?

If you have trouble taking this question seriously—if you think it's just the hypersensitivity of fetus-lovers—try shifting the context from stem cells to torture. There, the question is: How much ruthless violence should we use to defeat ruthless violence? The paradox and the dilemma are easy to recognize. Creating and destroying embryos to save lives presents a similar, though not equal, dilemma.

From Little Things, Big Things Grow

From President Obama's remarks today as he overturned the Bush administration's ban on using federal funds for new lines of embryonic stem cells:

In recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values. In this case, I believe the two are not inconsistent. As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering. I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research -- and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly.

On several occasions, the President was interrupted by boisterous applause and cheers as yet another hated Bush policy was buried. I'll confess to some relief that those who believe that the earth is 6,000 years old (President Bush probably wasn't among them, incidentally) don't have the influence they once did on science or indeed any other kind of national policy. I also appreciated Obama mentioning his faith. Bush would've come right out and said that God calls us to care for each other and gives us the capacity to make the world better. If the Almighty works better for the President in the passive voice, so be it.

Beyond that, I wish I felt more certain about the issue myself. Opponents of the use of new embryonic stem cell lines argue that adult lines can be manipulated in such a way that they can be just as effective as embryonic lines in research and treatment. Proponents counter that it makes no sense to proscribe the additional resource of new embryonic lines if scientists want them, especially since most of the embryos to be used would be discarded anyway.

What bothers me most is that only the anti-embryonic party is generally referred to as being in the thrall of ideology. I can't help but think that some of the energy behind the policy Obama adopted today comes from those who for any number of reasons don't want society to get too sentimental about embryos. And yet if through some miracle I could have been introduced to the ones that would become my daughters, wife, colleagues, or seminary professors, I would've gotten pretty attached to them.

I do believe that the President probably made the right decision. If he erred, it was on the side of logic, compassion, and hope. And yet there are some who celebrate today for different reasons, who have muffled their reckless wonder at the miraculousness inherent in humanity's smallest, most vulnerable potentialities and want to muffle ours as well. They're ideologues, too.