Impossible Policy

Imagine a school principal who says he wants to learn how best to incorporate new technologies into the classroom but forbids participation by the most enthusiastic and recently trained teachers. This is, essentially, what the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is being forced to do through an executive order that calls for the study of “ethically responsible” stem cell lines. The order tries to obscure the fact that refusing to fund human embryonic stem cell research delays scientific progress.

I know about the Tuskegee trials and the horrors of the Nazis. If research is unethical, the government has a right and a duty to stop it. Our society does not agree whether it is ethical to destroy preimplantation embryos for research. However, opponents of the research, rather than arguing from their true, moral point of view prefer a specious argument: that research on embryonic stem cells is not valuable.

Such arguments lead to convoluted, confusing policy. In this case, the NIH is being forced to set criteria for a property that cannot robustly be assessed in human cells. Indeed, I asked nearly a dozen experts how one would try to figure out whether a human cell possessed the ability to become all sorts of body cells (a property known as pluripotency), the most common answer was “we can’t, not really.”

Below is an excerpt of “Political definition by political request” an article I wrote recently for Nature Reports Stem Cells. This article is referenced in an editorial this week from Nature, titled “Criteria creep: The politically motivated extension of a US stem-cell registry makes no scientific sense.”

Within a month, the US National Institutes of Health hopes to start adding to the registry that lists the human embryonic stem cell (ES cell) lines eligible for US federal research funding. The registry currently contains only the human ES cell lines already in existence in August 2001, when President George W. Bush declared that no federal funds could be used for subsequently created lines. But of the dozens of human ES cell lines established since then, none will be added to the registry (with the possible exception of a few created by an unconventional technique that removes individual cells from embryos without destroying them). Instead, the word ‘pluripotent’ will replace the word ‘embryonic’ in the name of the NIH Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry, and the list will begin to include cell lines derived from non-embryonic sources.

The impetus for the change comes from the White House in the form of a executive order that touts the potential of non-embryonic stem cells, and accompanied Bush’s veto of popular legislation to lift restrictions on federal funding for research on human ES cells. Researchers who derive and assess potentially qualifying lines will be given higher priority for new NIH grants and will be eligible for supplemental funds for existing grants. Before that happens, however, the NIH Stem Cell Task Force must set criteria for pluripotency in human cells. Politics has, essentially, mandated that an answer be found to a fundamental scientific question.