Amidst the fawning press coverage of President Obama’s overturning of the Bush stem cell funding policy, it is important to understand a few basic facts about what he has and has not done.
First, the stories about this decision suggest Obama has restored federal policy to what it was before George W. Bush’s 2001 stem cell policy announcement. This is simply not true. The federal government has in fact never before-even under President Clinton-used taxpayer dollars to encourage the destruction of human embryos, as it will now begin to do. Obama’s decision is an unprecedented break with the longstanding federal policy of neutrality toward embryo research. Before 2001, not one dollar had ever been spent to support embryonic stem cell research, and when George W. Bush provided funds for the first time, he did so in a way that made sure tax dollars did not create an incentive for the ongoing destruction of human embryos. President Obama’s new policy will do precisely that: it will tell researchers that if they destroy a human embryo, they will become eligible for federal dollars to use in studying its cells; establishing an obvious and unprecedented incentive. And the president has not established any moral constraints whatsoever on funding: he has instructed the NIH to create the rules, so it’s safe to expect that they will permit not only the use of embryos “left over” after IVF, but also those created solely to be destroyed for research, including those created by cloning. This is well beyond what even most advocates of overturning the Bush policy have tended to argue for in public.
Second, the coverage suggests the Bush policy was a ban on embryonic stem cell research. In fact, again, the Bush policy provided federal funds for the first time, and it placed no limits on the conduct of embryo research with private sector dollars, except in requiring that those funds not be mixed with federal money. President Bush made clear that he believed embryo research was unethical, but his powers to act to constrain it were limited, and the policy he pursued sought to establish clear bounds for the use of taxpayer funds while at the same time encouraging the development of alternatives to the destruction of embryos. He believed-rightly, as it turned out-that if policymakers carved out the proper channels for this research, it could be directed away from unethical practices
And this brings us to the third missing piece of the stem cell story: the emergence of alternatives to the destruction of human embryos. In the early days of the stem cell debate, the hope that such alternatives might be found had been expressed by people on both sides of the argument. In 1999, President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission issued a report supporting federal funding of embryo-destructive research on the grounds that, as they put it, “in our judgment, the derivation of stem cells from embryos remaining following infertility treatments is justifiable only if no less morally problematic alternatives are available for advancing the research.” At the time, no such alternatives seemed apparent, and even when Bush announced his policy in 2001 the possibility of such alternatives was largely speculative. But in the last few years, researchers have made groundbreaking advances in the development of pluripotent cells (that is, cells with the ability to be transformed into the various cell types of the body and to proliferate, like embryonic stem cells) without the need to use or destroy human embryos. Such techniques are beginning to dominate stem cell science, and they avoid entirely the moral, and therefore the political, controversy inherent in the taking of nascent human life for research. They offer a path to genetically matched embryonic-like cells without the shadow of ethical abuse. It seems increasingly clear, therefore, that embryo destruction is not the only, or best, path to exploring the promise of pluripotent stem cells.
Fourth, it’s crucial to understand that whatever their source, the promise of pluripotent stem cells remains quite speculative and uncertain. Indeed, it now increasingly seems like the real holy grail for the treatment of degenerative diseases may be the employment of small molecules to transform cells from one type to another within the body of a patient: a different model of treatment altogether from the cell therapies that stem cell science was once expected to produce, though one that has emerged from the study of embryonic stem cells. No one knows which, if any, of these avenues will provide treatments and cures. What we do know, however, is that cells derived through the destruction of embryos left over after fertility treatment-the cells that President Obama’s executive order addresses-are far less useful, far less necessary, and far less appealing to researchers than they seemed eight years ago when the controversy surrounding federal stem cell funding policy began in earnest.
The president’s decision to take the unprecedented step of encouraging the destruction of human embryos with taxpayer dollars every day seems more removed from the scientific and ethical realities of the debate, and from the aspiration that underlay the policy he has chosen to end: that science and ethics might both be championed together, rather than set against one another.
