Specially disturbing, they said, is parents choosing a specific embryo because the child's tissues or organs might save the life of a sick sibling.

OOPS.

The Vatican isn't much for trying to save sick children's lives with embryonic stem cell research or PGD because they both mess with embryos and an embryo deserves the same respect as any adult. This is an old argument.

The best response is a perhaps over-used hypothetical scenario:

A building is burning down. Twelve small children are inside screaming for help. The building also contains a freezer storing a dozen or so frozen embryos. Which do you save first?

Chemical found to simplify production of stem cells
Harvard team hopes technique cuts tumor risk
By Maggie Fox
Reuters / October 13, 2008
WASHINGTON - Researchers trying to find ways to transform human skin cells into stem cells said yesterday that they found a shortcut by adding a chemical to the cells.
The chemical allowed the team at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute to use just two genes to transform skin cells into more powerful induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells.
"This study demonstrates there's a possibility that instead of using genes and viruses to reprogram cells, one can use chemicals," said Dr. Doug Melton, who directed the study published in the journal Nature Biotechnology. That could reduce the risk of tumors developing in the cells.
Melton said Danwei Huangfu, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab, developed the new method.
"The exciting thing about Danwei's work is you can see for the first time that you could sprinkle chemicals on cells and make stem cells," said Melton, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Huangfu tried treating the cells first with valproic acid. After she did this, she found it took only two of the four usual genes to reprogram the human skin cells into iPS cells, which resemble embryonic stem cells.
Huangfu said the valproic acid unraveled the chromatin - the physical structure of the chromosomes - making it possible to get in and alter the DNA more easily.
"We may need two types of chemicals, one to loosen the chromatin structure, and one to reprogram. We are looking for that reprogramming chemical, and it should be possible to find it eventually," she said.
Stem cells are the body's master cells, giving rise to all the tissues, organs, and blood. Embryonic stem cells are considered the most versatile kinds of stem cells.
Doctors hope to someday use stem cells to transform medicine. Melton, for instance, wants to find a way to regenerate the pancreatic cells destroyed in type 1 diabetes and perhaps cure that disease.
But embryonic stem cells are difficult to make, requiring the use of an embryo or cloning technology. Many people also object to their use, and several countries, including the United States, limit funding for such experiments.
In the past year, several teams of scientists have reported finding a handful of genes that can transform ordinary skin cells into iPS cells.
To get these genes into the cells, they have had to use retroviruses, which integrate their own genetic material into the cells they infect. This can be dangerous and can cause tumors

Link

A breakthrough, then a surge, in stem cell research

A year after report, research into new type of stem cells continues to grow

By Jeremy Manier | Chicago Tribune reporter

October 9, 2008

Less than a year after a Wisconsin team helped discover a major alternative to human embryonic stem cells, the Madison scientists say more than 800 labs have begun using the approach, suggesting that many stem-cell researchers are starting to move beyond controversial embryonic sources for their work.

Such shifts may reframe the emotionally fraught debate over stem cells--an issue that has ignited passions across the political spectrum. Both presidential candidates have indicated they would lift President George W. Bush's restrictions on research funding, though Sen.Barack Obama has been more adamant than Sen. John McCain.

The biologist doing more than anyone else to stir the debate is University of Wisconsinresearcher James Thomson, who co-discovered human embryonic stem cells a decade ago, in November 1998. Last year Thomson shook the field again when his lab and a Japanese team showed a way of genetically reprogramming adult skin cells to act like stem cells, including the ability to form any of the body's tissues.

Some groups that oppose destroying embryos for research have hailed the new cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells, as a way to eliminate the need for stem cell research based on embryonic material. In a rare extended interview, Thomson said he shares some of their qualms but believes the issue's moral and scientific contours have never been more complex.

Thomson still supports lifting Bush's restrictions, he said, because no one knows whether the new iPS cells can match embryonic cells' knack for growing into any kind of tissue--brain cells, heart muscle, insulin-producing cells and dozens of others--in mass quantities.

Some scientists cite this potential in saying the true moral course is to accelerate research on embryonic cells because it might produce transplant tissue for illnesses like diabetes and Parkinson's disease. But Thomson also said many arguments for expanded federal funding have exaggerated the field's short-term promise. Perfecting such techniques could take many decades, he said. "It's certainly going to happen, but it's going to be hard, and people are not prepared for how hard it's likely to be."

The most profound effect of stem cells in the meantime could be to screen new drugs for safety and to gauge a medication's effectiveness on real human tissue without using patients as guinea pigs.

"It simply means that for the very first time we have access to the human body in the lab," Thomson said. "And for drug screening and drug discovery that's going to make a huge difference. When you use one of those drugs you won't know that human embryonic stem cells or iPS cells were involved. It won't make the front pages at all."

With a day's stubble on his chin and flip-flops on his feet, Thomson does not look like the sort of person who could change the world once, much less twice. He grew up in Oak Park and still keeps a beat-up dart board in his office that dates to his high school days. Thomson said he recently found a pay stub for $14 from his first job--delivering copies of the now-defunct Chicago Daily News.

One of his key skills as a biologist is the patient, constant nurturing of cells that other labs have found difficult to master.

"Things grow for me," Thomson said, gesturing to a set of flourishing staghorn fern plants in his office.

He said he's amazed at how quickly scientists have begun exploring the use of the reprogrammed skin cells he reported on last year. "People are jumping in very rapidly, much more rapidly than they did 10 years ago" after the initial discovery of embryonic stem cells, Thomson said.

In all, 812 labs in dozens of countries have requested the materials needed to reprogram ordinary cells into iPS cells, said Addgene, a Massachusetts-based repository for research supplies. By contrast, a half-dozen or so labs started working with embryonic stem cells in the months after his landmark 1998 paper, Thomson said.

In recent months Thomson has been racing other labs to grow an improved form of iPS cells that potentially could be used in human patients. The original method probably could not be tested in people because it relied on a retrovirus to activate a few genes that reprogram the cells.

The first successful attempt to make iPS cells without such potentially dangerous viruses was published online recently in the journal Science. A group from Massachusetts General Hospital grew the cells using relatively safe viruses that can be cleared from the cells once they do their jobs, though the method was not as efficient as existing techniques.

Already, researchers said, iPS cells have proved easier for individual labs to make than embryonic stem cells, fueling the intense interest.

Before the iPS papers, stem-cell research "was still a select fraternity," said Evan Snyder, director of the stem cells and regenerative medicine program at the California-basedBurnham Institute. "Now it's been kind of opened to the masses."

To use embryonic stem cells, labs must either make their own--which requires the destruction of human embryos--or get them from a lab like Thomson's that already has made its own cell lines. Only cell lines made before August 2001 qualify for federal funding under Bush's research restrictions.

With iPS cells, Snyder said, "you can do a skin biopsy on yourself if you want" and use that tissue as raw material for the stem cells.

Many scientists said the absence of ethical concerns over iPS cells also is a draw. "As soon as you have a cell type that is relatively free of this black cloud, then obviously there's huge pent-up interest," said George Daley, director of the stem cell program at Children's Hospital Boston.

Yet no one knows whether iPS cells can fill the same roles as embryonic stem cells, most researchers said. Some believe iPS cells may work differently depending on the type of tissue they came from--that skin cells might be difficult to transform into blood cells, for example.

That's a major reason why Thomson still refers to his original embryonic stem cells as a "gold standard."

"My belief is that if iPS cells turn out to be completely biologically equivalent [to embryonic stem cells], scientists will just migrate to them because they're easier to deal with," Thomson said. "But that may not be true, and we should simply let the science play itself out."

THE EMBRYO DILEMMA
Donating embryos for research may be easier said than done
By Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer 
October 6, 2008
CHRIS AND TANYA Bailey of Mission Viejo have a 3-year-old and triplet toddlers, all conceived through in vitro fertilization. After the birth of the triplets, they had 13 embryos left over in cryopreservation.

The idea of discarding them made the couple uneasy.

"I thought of them as potential life, but I don't think of them as children," says Chris Bailey. "They are definitely more than sperm and egg."

After much discussion, the couple decided to donate the embryos to research.

"We felt we were so lucky that research had been done and [that it] gave us the opportunity to have children," says Tanya Bailey. "So why not give our embryos to research as well to help somebody else out?"

The decision to donate to research, says Chris Bailey, "was a logical choice."

Even after grappling with the decision, however, many people find that donating to research is easier said than done. People wishing to donate to research must complete detailed paperwork and may even be asked to select the type of medical research for which they want their donation used. Others find they cannot proceed with their donation if they used egg and sperm donors who would not consent to the donation. Still others simply can't find a medical research organization to accept their donation.

For Californians, at least, donating unused embryos to research has become somewhat easier in the last two years. The launch of the state's stem cell research program and the opening of a dedicated tissue bank at UC San Francisco has opened at least one clear path for donation by providing a place for families to send their embryos where they will be available to researchers.

"As stem cell research moves forward and viable treatments emerge, there will be a greater demand for the use of frozen embryos," says Lois Uttley, director of the MergerWatch Project, a patients' rights organization based in New York City. "That could raise the profile of this issue."

The few states that fund stem cell research are more likely to be able to connect donating families to specific research programs that need embryos. People in other states do not have a clear pathway to donation, says R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "Most IVF clinics are not hooked up to a research team and they may not be able to refer couples to a clinic who can do it for them," she says.

Research options

At the UC San Francisco IVF Tissue Bank, which opened in 2005, couples have some choices as to the type of research they will be assisting. In cases where families donate to a specific research program, they often do not have the ability to specify the kind of research they wish to support.

There, however, Level 1 allows donated tissue to be studied but doesn't allow for the creation of stem cell lines. Level 2 allows all Level 1 research and the creation of a stem cell line. Level 3 allows Levels 1 and 2 research and, in addition, allows tissue to be used for stem cell nuclear transfer, which is also known as therapeutic cloning. In this type of research, stem cells are extracted from the embryo and are allowed to grow into a piece of tissue or organ, but never a human being.

Individuals who donate do not incur any costs, but they should be prepared to spend a lot of time on paperwork, says Denise Bernstein, coordinator of the bank. The packet sent to donors from UCSF contains pages of information as well as numerous forms, some of which must be notarized. In addition, the tissue bank conducts a telephone interview with the donors. The process' goal is to fully inform the donor or donors and to gather information scientists may need for their research.

"Some people say, 'You know what? It's easier to discard them,' " Bernstein says. "They have to be motivated to want to do this."

Though the UCSF bank's paperwork may be especially laborious because of the options for stem cell research, most research groups have a detailed consent process, says Dr. David Diaz, an infertility doctor with offices in Fullerton and Fountain Valley.

"The bureaucracy can be overwhelming." In his clinic, says Diaz, fewer than 1% of patients with frozen embryos have donated to research over the last three years.

And a sizable number of potential donors are turned away because of consent questions.

People who used donor eggs or donor sperm to create their embryos must obtain the consent of those donors before embryos can be released to researchers -- something that may be impossible if the gametes (eggs or sperm) were donated long ago, especially if anonymous donors were used. About 15% of all IVF cycles involve donor eggs.

Egg and sperm donors may also be asked to provide some personal health information. Researchers often want to know about the donor's personal and family medical history. Donors may be asked if they can be contacted in the future if the research yields information that could be useful to them or to see if any health changes have occurred since the donation.

Moreover, many research organizations -- including California state-funded research groups -- will not accept frozen embryos in which an egg donor was compensated in any way, which is often the case with anonymous donors.

Protecting gamete donors' rights is critical, says Nanette Elster, director of the Health Law Institute at DePaul UniversityCollege of Law in Chicago.

"Someone may have donated with the idea that he or she is donating to help a woman build a family," she says. "But if that is not what the family is going to use it for, maybe they wouldn't get consent. The donors are individuals with concerns and a stake in the process."

Many uses for embryos

Researchers hope that as the process becomes more familiar, more couples will donate. Evolving research suggests that stem cell researchers may have a need for many embryos.

For example, some studies show that individual stem cell lines have a preference for the way they develop, Charo notes. "Some differentiate more easily into heart tissue. Some seem to differentiate more easily into neurological tissue." Having a broad range of stem cells will help develop lines that can be used more efficiently.

Moreover, some people may have an immune reaction to tissues made with specific stem cells, she says. Thus it may be necessary to have a large variety of stem cell lines to get a variety of immunological matches. Disease-specific stem cell lines are also needed, researchers say. For example, cell lines may be created from an embryo that carries the gene for a specific disease or a high risk of developing that disease.

Link

Although stem cells may one day be derived by other methods, those derived from embryos are, for now, the gold standard in research, says Dr. Marie Csete, chief scientific officer for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

"There is absolutely no need to take every frozen embryo and make a stem cell line," she says. "But the science is changing a lot. We need diverse human stem cell lines to really understand the biology of a stem cell at a baseline."