Stem cell research entangled in issues
BY erica stanley
UCLA Today
What promise does stem cell research hold for us? Who speaks for the public interest? What is occurring with the Proposition 71 litigation? And how is the field of stem cell research being regulated?
These and other questions were discussed during the fourth annual public symposium, “Stem Cells: Promise and Peril in Regenerative Medicine,” hosted by the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics on Feb. 5 in Covel Commons.
While experts from various fields explored these perplexing questions from different perspectives, they all shared one common link, Kevin FitzGerald, a scientist from Georgetown University and a Jesuit priest, told the gathering: “We have a shared goal [of] treatment, cure and healing people.”
Stem cell research may hold the key to new therapies for many diseases, including pancreatic cancer, for which there has been virtually no change in treatment for the last 30 years, said Owen Witte, director of the UCLA Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Witte is also professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Participants heard about the potential therapeutic promise of stem cell research as well as the risks it poses. Speakers from around the UCLA campus and across the country discussed the tangle of legal, ethical and economic issues that may affect the viability of stem cell research and the goal of someday providing regenerative treatment to individuals.
Funding for Proposition 71, the California initiative approved in 2004 by voters to spend $3 billion on stem cell research, is being held up by litigation. But Sherry Lansing, a member of the oversight committee for the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine and a UC regent, explained that the institute is pursuing alternative financing.
Patrick Terry, a patient advocate for various genetic diseases, cautioned against viewing stem cell research through a single lens, seeing it as either hype or hope. He underscored the importance of understanding who is advocating for the research, whose interests they represent and why.
Terry explained that while it is the patient community that often represents the public’s interest and sets the moral guidelines, the patient community’s interests do not necessarily align with the public’s. Yet it’s the patient advocates who now sit at “tables of influence,” such as the oversight committee, he said.
Professors Stephen Munzer and Russell Korobkin from the UCLA School of Law talked about the legal issues surrounding stem cell research and their belief that the two lawsuits challenging the validity of Proposition 71 are legally frivolous claims. While there are no federal laws prohibiting stem cell research and somatic cell nuclear transfer, also known as cloning, the federal government has restricted the use of federal funds for embryonic stem cell research and has prohibited their use to create human embryos, which cloning would do.
States have enacted various statutes, ranging from prohibition to permission of embryonic stem cell research and somatic cell nuclear transfer for therapeutic purposes.
Chancellor Albert Carnesale emphasized that society needs to think about the wide-ranging implications of genetic technologies such as stem cell research.
“When I got involved in nuclear arms control,” said the chancellor, “I came to realize that the people who were involved with the Manhattan Project had given virtually no thought to the implications posed by the existence of nuclear weapons.”
Stem cell research will yield both great opportunities and substantial challenges for our society. That’s why it’s important that stem cell research be examined from an interdisciplinary approach, Carnesale said. And that’s where UCLA, with its breadth and depth of research and scholarship, can play a key role in promoting education, research and science, he noted.
For details about this event, go to www.socgen.ucla.edu.
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