Research on stem cells poses ethical questions

The Interview, a regular feature of The Catholic New World, is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today’s Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

This week, Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin talks with Jesuit Father Kevin FitzGerald.

Jesuit Father Kevin FitzGerald, a cancer researcher at Loyola University, has a doctorate in molecular genetics and is working on a doctorate in bioethics at Georgetown University. He often discusses the ethics of stem cell research and the church’s position on it.

Catholic New World: What are stem cells?
Father Kevin FitzGerald: Stem cells are cells that replace the cells that we wear out, for us adults. And they also are the cells from which all our cells come. We have many different types of tissue in the body; we have many, many types of cells. All these cells come, in a sense, from stem cells. What they’ve discovered is that we have many more types of stem cells than we thought we had and they are much more plastic than we thought they were.
By plastic I mean malleable, flexible. They can take on different sorts of careers than we used to think. When you start from a single cell, or a couple of cells, as the number of cells increases, cells start to take on specific jobs—liver tissue, brain tissue, whatever. We thought that the cells that replaced those cells later on—stem cells—were down the path a little ways, so that the brain cells were replaced by brain stem cells, if there were any. Now what we’ve found out is that these cells are more malleable than we ever thought. They have indications of blood [stem] cells replacing liver tissue or nerve tissue, or muscle tissue, or vice versa. That is incredible, that is amazing, the flexibility.

CNW: What are embryonic stem cells?
FKF: If you look at it logically, obviously at some point in development, there had to have been cells that could make all these different types of tissue. The point in development that they’ve discovered for that is the blastocyst stage. The blastocyst being an embryo [10 to 14 days after fertilization] that looks kind of like a beach ball with a softball inside. The beach ball itself is a layer of cells protecting the cells in the core, which are the embryonic stem cells. However, the only way you get them is by destroying an embryo.
To get adult stem cells—by adult, that means stem cells that are almost everything but embryonic. Even in the fetus, those are adult stem cells—you get those just like you go in and give tissue.

CNW: What are the scientific uses of embryonic and adult stem cells?
FKF: From a scientific or a medical perspective, if you’re looking to come up with therapies for various diseases or various illnesses, you could go one of two ways. You could look for stem cells which are specific for that particular disease or illness that you’re focusing on. Or you could take a broader approach and say, well look, we know these embryonic stem cells can make every kind of tissue, so can we take these cells and kind push them in a particular direction to make the kind of tissue we want? Types of research right now that are ongoing on adult stem cells look at specific conditions, such as brain diseases or illnesses of bone and connective tissue. Are there ways of taking shattered bones and instead of putting all kinds of pins and everything in there for the rest of a person’s life, can you grow the bone back? And can you direct that and guide that and make it as strong as it used to be? Fantastic, interesting stuff.
Some people who are interested in particular diseases are saying, “We haven’t yet found stem cells for these types of tissue. And, because we’re not sure we’re going to, we have to do the embryonic stem cell research.”
Now, very, very recently, there were two reports in a journal called Nature Medicine. One was on cells that would be important for juvenile diabetes, Type I, and that’s one of the groups that’s been very, very strong pushing for embryonic stem cell research because they’re saying that there haven’t been stem cells that they can use to treat this disease. Well, maybe now there are. The other was on the diseases that affect the nerve connections in the brain—Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, things like that—and now there may be some indication that adult stem cells may be useful in that sort of research.
One could, and we do, make the argument that what we need is research in the adult stem cell area, lots and lots of research, because, presumably, when we say we don’t have adult stem cells in this area, that’s because we didn’t look hard enough or we didn’t know what to look for.

CNW: Then would there be any value to embryonic stem cell research?
FKF: From the scientific end of things, you could say, “Yes, but wouldn’t it be interesting to do the research on the embryonic stem cells because it could tell us so much about development?” Absolutely, it would be very interesting. However, there’s lots of interesting research that we do not do for ethical reasons. Scientifically speaking, medically speaking, the best way to do cancer genetics research would be to take people who don’t have cancer and give them cancer, because we could control that, and it would help us understand a lot better what’s going on. We do that with mice. Why can’t we do that with people? Because morally, we say, that’s not right. The reasoning here is where the issue comes to a head for our pluralistic and diverse society: Do embryos count? How much do they count? If we protect human subjects from research risks that are inappropriate, should we be protecting embryos? What’s an inappropriate risk? Well, destruction is a pretty high risk. If you know this is going to kill the embryo, that’s pretty solid.
The argument has been, yes, but … these embryos are going to die anyway, because they’re spare embryos from in vitro fertilization clinics, or the good that we’re going to derive from this research, the benefit that we’re going to get for other people is so great that it justifies this destruction of the embryos.
If one wants to argue that the embryos are not the same as the human subjects our laws and morals already protect … the church argues that it’s certainly not clear where you’re going to start drawing these lines between what counts as a human subject and what does not count as a human subject. Our tradition—the Catholic and very much the Christian tradition— says how important it is to be inclusive, to not say you can use anyone for the benefit of others, regardless of what biological characteristic you want to choose: race gender, age or developmental status.

CNW: What is the status of federal funding for stem cell research?
FKF: The government cannot fund any research using embryonic stem cells. NIH has come up with guidelines which they suggested would allow them to use public funding to do embryonic stem cell research, as long as private funding was used to derive the embryonic stem cells. There’s certainly big ethical questions about that, and there are questions concerning the guidelines and how inappropriate they are from even a policy perspective. There is a phrase which is very important in all this. Back in late November, the resolution was passed and signed by the president, which said you could not use federal funding research in which these embryos are destroyed. … What the legal counsel for the NIH said is that we won’t use federal funding for the destruction part, we’ll just use it for the research part, trying to say that the “in which” phrase could be separated in that sense.

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