Stem Cell help a long way off [Archive]

NYer

09-09-2005, 07:56 AM

Leon Kass Leaves Bioethics Council

Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Bioethics Council, is stepping down and will be replaced by Georgetown University bioethicist Edmund Pellegrino. Last year Kass oversaw the removal of a couple of members of the Council who dissented from his conservative views on biotechnological progress and replaced them with three much more conservative and much more tractable members.

Pellegrino is certainly a distinguished bioethicist and he is also a conservative Roman Catholic. Pellegrino serves as a senior fellow at the Christian bioethics think tank, the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity.

Pellegrino has been active in the national political debate over various biotech developments. For example, he participated in a press conference sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) in 1999 opposing all human embryonic stem cell research. At the press conference, Pelligrino urged that a congressional ban "should be extended permanently to include privately supported as well as federally supported research involving the production and destruction of living human embryos."

The bottom line: Pellegrino's appointment as chairman of the President's Bioethics Council will, if anything, increase that body's opposition to a lot biotechnological progress.

http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2005/09/leon_kass_leave.shtml#010887

el_diablo

12-12-2006, 05:56 PM

Child who received stem cells from aborted fetus on way home
By PAUL ELIAS AP Biotechnology Writer

(AP) - SAN FRANCISCO-Daniel Kerner's parents knew the experimental brain surgery was risky, but without it the 6-year-old would surely die.

Last month in Portland, Oregon, doctors for the first time transplanted stem cells from aborted fetuses into his head in a desperate bid to reverse, or at least slow, a rare genetic disorder called Batten disease. The so-far incurable condition normally results in blindness and paralysis before death.

Doctors do not know if the neural stem cells taken from fetuses - donated to a nonprofit medical foundation by women aborting early-stage pregnancies - will save Daniel's life. But the boy has sufficiently recovered from his 8-hour surgery to be expected to return to his Orange County, California, home on Friday for the first night of Hanukkah.

"We don't think that is a coincidence," said Marcus Kerner, who said a deep faith in Judaism and long hours of prayer prompted the family to volunteer Daniel for the risky procedure. Daniel was diagnosed two years ago and has since lost the ability to walk and talk. Daniel is the first volunteer of an experiment that plans to operate on five more afflicted children over the next year.

"He was a little boy who was basically waiting to die, now he's waiting to get better," said Kerner. He said Daniel recently called him "Dad" for the first time in two years.

The stem cells injected into Daniel's head are not human embryonic stem cells, a research field for which President George W. Bush has limited federal funding because of moral objections. Nonetheless, the new cells in Daniel's brain do carry their own ethical baggage.

Anti-abortion groups oppose the research, which was banned from federal funding by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. President Bill Clinton removed the prohibition in 1993.

"They are trying to give an aura that this is good when this is the most grisly of examples that can be given about abortion," said Gayle Atteberry, executive director of the Oregon Right to Life, the state's leading anti-abortion group. "They are taking the brains from babies."

Research opponents argue that beyond their moral opposition, there is the long list of failed fetal tissue transplant experiments - most notably those involving hundreds of Parkinson's patients over the last decade, none of whom have shown dramatic improvements.

But Martin McGlynn, chief executive of Stem Cells Inc., which developed and owns commercial rights to the experimental Batten treatment, said the current operation differs dramatically from previous fetal tissue transplant attempts. The Palo Alto-based company is paying for the experimental operations.

McGlynn said the injections Daniel received were "highly purified" stem cells selected for their ability to obey commands from the brain to replace damaged cells. McGlynn said previous transplants were crude by comparison because those researchers simply injected fetal brain tissue with little selectivity of needed cells.

Batten disease is caused when defective genes fail to make enzymes needed to dispose of waste made by brain cells. The waste piles up in the brain and kills healthy cells until the patient dies. Most victims die before they reach their teens.

The company's idea is to inject the sick kids with healthy, fetal neural stem cells that will "engraft" in the brain, which will direct the new cells to turn into cells able to produce the missing enzymes.

The company's treatment showed promise in Batten-afflicted mice, but such an ethically charged test has never been tried before in children.

That is why Oregon Health Sciences University researchers have been trying to temper expectations since they first operated on Daniel on Nov. 14, steadfastly refusing to discuss the experiment except for a brief press conference two days after the operation.

The goals of the Portland experiment are modest and the results will not be known for at least a year. The researchers are mostly looking to see whether the stem cell injections harm Kerner and the other patients.

If they are satisfied that the side effects are mild enough, they will enroll more children in additional trials designed to measure whether the fetal stem cells are succeeding in loosening Batten's fatal grip. Batten afflicts roughly 3 out of every 100,000 children in the United States.