The always informative Michael Cook over at Bioedge notes that a former enthusiast and participant in ESCR has abandoned the field to pursue IPSCs. From the post:
Amongst scientists who promoted the use of human embryonic stem cells five years ago, in the middle of passionate debates in the US, Australia and elsewhere, few were more influential in shaping the ethical debate than Harvard’s George Q. Daley. “We must support the vitally important applications of embryonic stem cells to medical research,” he testified to a Congressional committee in 2005. He contended that work on hESCs was so important that it could not be delayed…
Now, he has transferred the same sense of urgency and excitement to an ethical non-controversial alternative to hESC research which he dismissed before the committee – induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). At the time, he said, “Although this strategy is worth pursuing, it is extremely high-risk, and may take years to perfect, and may never work as well as nuclear transfer, which we know we can practice today.” However, in 2007 iPS cells were developed by Shinya Yamanaka. Professor Daley immediately stopped campaigning for hESCs. In an interview with Nature Medicine, he says, “Once Yamanaka solved the problem, I turned around virtually my entire program to take advantage of that breakthrough.”
As I always say, good ethics is also good science. Time will tell, but believe that IPSCs (or some other ethical approach to obtaining pluripotent stem cells), along with adult stem cells, will eventually provide almost every regenerative medical and research benefit we were once told could only come from ESCR/therapeutic cloning.
July 3rd, 2010 | 2:27 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Lisa. Lisa said: BIOETHICS WATCH => Change of Tide: Former ESC Resarcher Abandons Field For IPSCs http://dlvr.it/2GqYf #912 #ocra #ucot #rs #tcot #tlot #sgp [...]
July 4th, 2010 | 2:44 pm
I thought it was interesting at the end of the article that he was asked about IPSCs, “Why haven’t there been any cures yet?” And he answered, “It’s only been two years.” Well, okay as far as it goes, but what nobody seems to want to say is, “We over-hyped the potential of pluripotent cells to provide cures for disease, because we never have solved the tumor problem, and IPSCs have it as well.”
July 5th, 2010 | 2:51 pm
From his testimony (linked to in post):
“Science certainly cannot define when in the gradual course of human development we deserve individual and autonomous rights. I do not agree with the premise that the single celled zygote should be given the same considerations as living persons and I do not view the embryo as a human being, particularly when it is frozen in a freezer. As a physician and as a scientist and as a father I live in a practical world of choices, and a world in which disease is a grim reality. Unless we want to turn back the clock, and outlaw in vitro fertilization, then we as a society have already accepted that many more embryos are created than will ever become children. I feel it is morally justified to derive benefit from these embryos through medical research instead of relegating them to medical waste. And unless we are willing to argue the biological absurdity that our humanity can be defined by a particular signature of gene expression that exists in the totipotent cells of the early human embryo, then we must support the vitally important applications of embryonic stem cells to medical research.”
This guy is testifying as a scientist, in which capacity he claims his hands are tied in determining when a human deserves rights – and then he claims that not only do they not deserve rights in the early embryonic stage, but it is morally wrong not to use them for research.
So is this guy moonlighting as a moral philosopher? Why can’t scientists just testify to the science and not earmark in their own personal beliefs?
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