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Senators Denounce Scientist's Stem Cell Claims
Sen. Arlen Specter: "It's a big black eye if scientists are making false and inaccurate representations."
(Alex Wong - Getty Images)
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Harkin said: "ACT should have made it more clear from the beginning that none of the embryos survived." He added that he suspected the wording was intentionally misleading to raise the company's long-suffering stock price. The stem cell field, he said, has "been hyped too much. We need to come back to Earth."
But Ronald M. Green, a Dartmouth University ethicist who was among several who approved the experimental protocol, told the senators they were wrong to belittle the findings or the way they were reported.
"We're speaking here of an enormous breakthrough in American medicine," said Green, who said his only financial link to the company was the approximately $200 per day he was paid -- more than a year ago -- for attending a handful of meetings to review the research.
Not addressed by the senators was a plainly incorrect announcement sent to science reporters by the journal Nature itself.
"By plucking single cells from human embryos, Robert Lanza and his colleagues have been able to generate new lines of cultured human embryonic stem (ES) cells while leaving the embryos intact," the release said.
That erroneous description -- written not by scientists at Nature but by the journal's lay staff -- was corrected after news stories were published.
Nature later apologized to reporters, blaming the mistake on "internal communication problems."
Lanza and the senators agreed on one thing: The quickest way to boost the availability of stem cells for research would be to pass legislation like that recently vetoed by President Bush, which would allow scientists with federal funding to study embryos about to be discarded by fertility clinics.
