The Catholic Church is racing against time with stem cell research.
While there is a fair degree of ignorance about it, the church is in with a chance of getting the total ban it wants imposed by the Federal Government. But once more knowledge gets into the community and researchers, either here or elsewhere, get some worthwhile results, its chance of getting a ban will be reduced.
Catholic bishops have called for a nationwide ban on any stem cell research that would destroy human embryos. The House of Representatives Committee on legal and Constitutional Affairs reported on human cloning and stem-cell research in August last year and was divided. The Government is yet to respond, though the Minister responsible, Kevin Andrews, has addressed Cabinet on it.
The Victorian Government has banned all embryonic stem-cell research. The NSW Government promised this week to allow the research and oppose any federal ban.
The research holds great promise to treat and perhaps cure many degenerative diseases – motor neurone disease, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, some heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, perhaps paraplegia and other diseases.
Stem cells are taken from embryos that are a few days old. The cells have the capacity to develop into different sorts of cells, depending on when they are taken. But as soon as they are taken, the embryo loses its capacity to be implanted into a mother and develop into a human. This is the objection of the Church – that the research kills embryos. However, scientists say that the embryos used are either those left over from IVF programs or from aborted foetuses; either way, the embryo will not survive anyway.
To date, there is only promise of treatments or cures; of understanding how human develop and of enabling cheaper, safer and quicker testing of new drugs.
Stem cells can be cultured indefinitely and cultures have been created, but no-one yet has fully mastered how to trigger them to specialising in the way required, let alone taken cells from a sick person’s body, replaced their nucleuses with a disease-free nucleus from stem cell, grown a culture of cells or a whole organ and re-implanted them in a way in which they will not be rejected (but that’s why you use the patient’s non-nucleus cell material) and in a way that will treat disease in the brain, nerve cells or other part of the body.
But once those promises turn to actuality it will impossible to stop the research. Few politicians faced with constituents with degenerative diseases will be able to resist on the strength of abstract theological arguments.
Moreover, as with IVF the religious argument will find itself in an instant dilemma. Just as the church accepts for membership humans born after IVF conception, it will find it hard to resist therapies developed from embryonic research in countries that do not ban it. It is pretty hard to tell someone to stay in a wheelchair and suffer in silence when a treatment is available — just because that treatment was developed from research that destroyed embryos that had no chance of being born human anyway.
This did not worry 10 Anglican bishops and assistant bishops of the archdiocese of Sydney who joined the Catholic position. But the Anglican Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn saw the logical (and ethical) difficulty of supporting one and not the other.
Of greater importance is the fact that many MPs are bound to have friends, relatives, loved ones and (more importantly) constituents with degenerative diseases who are holding out hope for scientific research. It was similar with the euthanasia debate – where MPs citied personal experience and experience of those know to them. But with stem-cell research it will be magnified because there is usually a support/information/lobbying group for every degenerative disease. They will be arguing and informing. So will the therapeutic industries who hope to make money, but that is a separate issue.
Hence the race against time.
The church began early. In 1999, the Archdiocese of Melbourne ran a meeting of more than 100 invited church, scientific and parliamentarian participants – including Mr Andrews — which came to a consensus about what approach to take to help ensure a prohibition on stem-cell research.
A critical tactic was to try to lump stem-cell research in with cloning – so that scientific research to cure disease is lumped with Frankensteinian visions of human clones. The meeting pressed the use of the phrase “”reproductive cloning” to cover all these procedures and tor eject the use of the phrase “”therapeutic cloning”. That way, ” it would still be possible to achieve community support for a complete ban on human reproductive cloning,” according to a report to the archbishop (then George Pell) on the meeting. “”There is still a level of repugnance in the initial public reaction to human cloning and the technology is not yet well enough advanced for there to be the hard case stories of people who would be denied the so-called “”benefits” of the new technology.”
So the tactic was to mislead and play on ignorance to deny research that could help alleviate human suffering. Worthy of the tobacco industry.
Fortunately, since 1999, education and knowledge about the promise of this sort of research has spread and the politicians have put the matter in the too-hard basket. The longer it stays there the better, because at least it will give NSW the chance to continue and develop research – under standard ethics guidelines that, for example, allow in-vitro fertilisation programs that of their nature result in many left-over embryos that will not be implanted into a mother and lead to a birth.
If the Commonwealth attempts a ban it will pose a huge constitutional fight about the limits of state and Commonwealth power. The Commonwealth can usually get its way through the purse-strings – as the US central government has done.
Finally, the Church and others will argue that adult stem-cells and animal stem-cells can be used, obviating the ethical problem.
But animal material runs the risk of viral species hopping and adult stem cells divide more slowly have a greater likelihood of being damaged and do no cover all forms of tissue. Researchers want to work with the best resources to get the best results for alleviating suffering.