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Boondoggle

Initiative Seeks Taxpayer Funding for Embryonic Stem Cell Research

BY THOMAS A. SZYSZKIEWICZ

If a voter initiative, which just got added to the November ballot, is passed, California will spend $3 billion over 10 years on stem cell research. And the true cost will be far more than that since this money will be paid by issuing bonds. The initiative aims to amend the state's constitution to require embryonic stem cell research and its funding through a bonding mechanism.

While proponents are looking at this initiative with the hopes of getting medical cures, it is the means involved that are at issue. Embryonic stem cells are obtained by fertilizing an ovum, either with a sperm cell or by cloning, waiting for it to develop for three to five days, and then extracting the stem cells -- the master cells that turn into other types of cells such as nerves, stomach and skin. The process kills the living embryo.

In addition to providing stem cell research money, this initiative would also be a "clone-and-kill" bill; allowing for somatic cell nuclear transfer, a technical name for one of the many types of cloning, while not allowing for the clone to be transferred to a uterus.

The language of the bill carefully avoids the word "cloning." It refers only to somatic cell nuclear transfer, something which most people know nothing about. Even its title, "The California Stem Cell Research and Cure Initiative," promises something, which won't necessarily come from the money spent.

Speaking of money, even though the state is facing a $12-15 billion deficit this year and a $6 billion deficit next year, the bill's proponents claim the $3 billion initial price tag would be beneficial to California's economy. That is based on a five-year delay in paying the bonds, monies from royalties, patent fees and new jobs and advancing "the biotech industry in California to world leadership, as an economic engine for California's future."

What will really result, according to Wesley J. Smith, a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, is "a boondoggle." The price tag will be at least $6 billion and probably more as interest rates begin to go up and bond prices rise in response.

Supporters also claim that the medical advances made would "significantly reduce state health care costs in the future."

What medical advances? So far, all research into embryonic stem cells has produced zero medical cures. That fact is something, which is not mentioned by proponents. Nik Nikas, an attorney for Americans United for Life, a pro-life law firm based in Chicago, trotted out this fact along with the stacks of cures proven to come from ethical adult stem cell research when he was testifying in front of the Louisiana state legislature in favor of a bill that would propose banning all cloning in that state. The bill passed, but so did a clone-and-kill bill. The competing bills now have to be fought over.

Stem cell research proponents have a big ally in their fight -- emotion. "At every committee hearing," Carol Hogan, spokeswoman for the California Catholic Conference, told Our Sunday Visitor, initiative proponents "import busloads of the ill and damaged. It really irritates me because they're being used."

While she admits that it's "heartrending to hear their stories," she's frustrated because they're being sold "snake oil" with promises that they'll be cured by these stem cells.

The same thing happened in New Jersey where the legislature recently provided $6.5 million a year for an institute devoted to embryonic stem cell research. That bill was opposed by the New Jersey Catholic Conference, said Bill Bolan, the conference's director. But the proponents "brought in Christopher Reeve every time," he said. "The public relations battle was lost from the beginning. They're selling hype and we're defending microscopic human life in a laboratory."

Here in California, some big names have expressed support -- both verbally and financially -- for this initiative, including Google's chief executive officer, Eric Schmidt, and now Nancy Reagan. Shortly before her husband died, the former first lady said embryonic stem cell research seeking a cure for Alzheimer's disease should be done in his honor.

William Clark, the late President Reagan's National Security Advisor, made it clear in a June 21 New York Times op-ed that "this cannot honestly be done without ignoring President Reagan's own words and actions," and the Washington Post stated that Alzheimer's patients won't benefit from such research because the disease is not cellular but affects the whole brain. But opponents fear these facts will lose to the emotional tactics of stem cell proponents.

If embryonic stem cell research were so promising, Smith argued, "Then you'd have to be beating the investors off with a stick." Instead, "people are doing due diligence and they're not writing checks." So the "rich companies and richest universities" have to turn to the public to fund what will essentially be one big experiment, he said. "This is corporate welfare," Smith stated bluntly. "This will let them do whatever they want and borrow money for it."

While certain technological advances are guaranteed with this kind of spending, making cures out of it is quite another statement, according to Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a Yale-trained neuroscientist, now a priest of the diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts. "With that kind of money, there is no question that the frontiers of stem cell biology will be pushed forward. But that question has to be linked to the question of ethics because one can use money to violate all sorts of human goods in the name of cures."

In fact, he said, the money "is not being well spent, but spent in a morally corrosive fashion. It would be better spent on adult stem cell therapies, which are already yielding remarkable cures in humans. There is no need to spend millions on a misguided and immoral quest for cures somewhere in the far distant future, when those cures can be realized much more expeditiously in the short term at much lower expense."

Scientists have the ability to do the very things they want to do with embryonic stem cells from a variety of adult stem cells and umbilical cord blood. A recent PBS documentary showed a number of patients who have benefited from this type of therapy including a man who avoided a heart transplant and a young woman who is learning to walk again after a spinal cord injury.

Doing embryonic stem cell research, Father Pacholczyk said, will "invariably turn the human person into a product."

Recent reports about artificially generated sperm and egg cells are disconcerting to Father Pacholczyk. The problem, he said, "Is that we have already slipped so far down the slopes of in vitro fertilization, abortion, and contraception that our faculty for moral judgment in these other new areas of biomedicine has become seriously compromised."

Abortions in this country now number more than 40 million since 1973, and Father Pacholczyk estimates the number of embryonic children destroyed during fertility treatments or killed for research purposes stands at more than a million.

And that is where the language is so important. Using the words "somatic cell nuclear transfer" obscures the fact that you have to destroy a living human embryo to get at the cells, Father Pacholczyk said.

In fact, it may even dehumanize a person almost by default, sort of an Aldous Huxley's Brave New World scenario. "That book is remarkably prescient," Father Pacholczyk said. "It is becoming less and less far out as the years and decades pass."

Being brought into existence in a petri dish presents, Father Pacholczyk worries, "a huge danger of depersonalization" so that these in vitro-generated people may eventually be prone to exploitation. Already there is open wonder about the nature of anyone who would be brought into existence by cloning. Are they really human? Do they have a soul? Father Pacholczyk has a very simple answer for that. "Cloning is just another way to make identical twins. Have you ever encountered a set of identical twins, one of whom does not have a soul of their own?"

What is needed, this priest-scientist said, "is a consistent ethic of life to inform and guide science and medicine so that it does not spiral off in a dangerously dehumanizing direction."

But many scientists believe they have something akin to a First Amendment right to do research, "the freedom of science," as Wesley Smith called it. "And only scientists can determine what is or is not moral in their experiments."

That sets science up with a struggle against the Catholic Church. Father Pacholczyk said, "The Roman Catholic Church brings a privileged perspective and well-formulated understanding of the critical human issues that are at stake in these discussions, and she needs to always be an active participant at the table."

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