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Senate Revisits Debate On Stem Cell Research
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"I couldn't imagine using these for a therapeutic product," Okarma said.
Bernard Siegel, executive director of the Genetics Policy Institute, a public interest group based in Wellington, Fla., called the Hope bill "nothing more than political cover so politicians can go back to their constituents and boast that they are supporting 'ethical' stem cell research."
Polls have indicated that a substantial majority of Americans -- including 50 percent of fundamentalist or evangelical Christians and 69 percent of Roman Catholics -- support loosening Bush's restrictions.
Supporters of the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act noted that fewer than two dozen of the approximately 70 stem cell colonies that Bush had said would be accessible under his policy became available. Meanwhile, hundreds of colonies created around the world since 2001 have remained off-limits to federally funded scientists.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who introduced the act with Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), drew particular attention to a 12-year-old diabetic girl he recently met, who he said must inject herself with insulin 120 times a month.
"If adult stem cells could provide a cure for juvenile diabetes, she'd gladly take it," Harkin said, suggesting that only embryonic stem cells have the capacity to cure diabetes.
In research to be published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association, scientists from Brazil and the United States showed that adult stem cells may indeed help cure diabetes. In that study, 14 of 15 patients with early-onset Type 1 diabetes, once known as juvenile diabetes, could stop taking insulin after undergoing a procedure that partially destroyed their immune and blood systems and then reconstituted those systems with the help of stem cells that had been isolated from their blood in advance.
It remains to be seen how long patients can go without their shots; one patient has lasted almost three years, but others were treated more recently.
In any case, said lead researcher Richard K. Burt of Northwestern University, it was the partial destruction of each patient's immune system that was central to the treatment's effectiveness, since Type 1 diabetes is caused by an overactive immune system. The stem cells simply helped speed patients' recovery after treatment, he said.
