New N.J. law permits stem cell experimentation

A recent New Jersey law aimed at encouraging controversial research on stem cells from human embryos will not immediately affect scientific work at the University, but some faculty members involved in research are applauding it anyway.

On Jan. 4, Gov. James McGreevey signed the measure permitting experimentation on stem cells, which many scientists say holds the potential for medical breakthroughs because of their ability to grow into any type of cell or tissue. The law allows scientists in the state to extract stem cells from human embryos, as long as they have permission from the owners of the embryos.

The legislation makes it a crime to use cloning technology to try to produce a human being, however. It offers no funding, and it doesn't authorize activity that is not already legal.

Only the second of its kind in the nation, the law expressly permits therapeutic cloning. This process involves the insertion of an individual's genetic material into an unfertilized egg, which then grows into an embryo capable of producing stem cells that match the donor's DNA.

"I think it has real symbolic value," said President Tilghman, who submitted testimony supporting the bill to a committee of the state legislature. In addition to being University president, Tilghman is a well-known molecular biologist.

"Therapy based on cell replacement represents the best chance of providing effective and long-lasting treatment for such diseases" as juvenile diabetes and Alzeheimer's, Tilghman said.

But, she noted, President Bush's August 2001 decision to deny federal research funding to most forms of stem cell research means that the New Jersey law will have little effect on Princeton scientists. The University accepts substantial amounts of federal funding each year.

"It has no practical impact because of the current ban on the use of federal funds to study stem cells except in a very few approved stem cell lines," she said. Bush's directive denies federal support to all research on stem cells not already extracted from embryos as of August 2001.

Tilghman looked ahead to the repeal of that directive, and said the private sector would move forward with stem cell research in the meantime.

"[The law] certainly lays the groundwork for when that regulation is overturned, and it certainly sends a signal to one of the most important industries in New Jersey, which is the pharmaceutical industry, that the state is fertile ground for this kind of research," she said.

Research partnerships between the University and the private sector could still happen, though Tilghman said there were currently no such plans.

"Absolutely, we are always open to the possibility of those kinds of collaborations," she said.

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Tilghman chaired a National Institutes of Health panel that drafted ethical guidelines for the use of stem cells in scientific research.

Scientists have recognized the potential of stem cell research only within the past few years, and no work on stem cells from human embryos has yet been conducted at Princeton.

But at least one University professor, immunologist Ihor Lemischka, has said his work on the production of blood could possibly require the use of human embryonic stem cells in the future.

Lemischka currently works with stem cells taken from mice. But he has been a vocal proponent of human embryonic stem cell research, and he expressed support for the new state law aimed at promoting it.

"We don't have any current plans to move into the human embryonic stem cell arena," Lemischka told The Scientist magazine earlier this year. "But if we did, which is certainly possible, I welcome the more permissive climate this legislation provides.

Ethical dimensions

The ethical dimensions of stem cell research have proven highly controversial. Gov. McGreevey's decision to sign the bill encouraging stem cell research drew sharp criticism from conservatives and religious organizations, who argue that it is immoral to create and then destroy life for medical purposes.

Proponents of stem cell research argue that the embryos from which stem cells are taken, never more than a few days old, are microscopic clumps of cells, and not recognizably human. They also say that the possibility of curing debilitating diseases cannot be ignored, and that the many excess embryos in fertility clinics are going to be destroyed anyway.

Politics professor Robert George, a member of President Bush's Commission on Bioethics, could not be reached for comment. But his opposition to stem cell research is well known. George has argued that embryos are not potential life, but life itself.

Human embryos are "whole, living members of the human species . . . capable of directing from within their own integral organic functioning and development into and through the fetal, infant, child and adolescent stages of life and ultimately into adulthood" he said in 2001.

Bioethics professor Peter Singer said the embryo has no moral status because of its inability to experience pain or anything else.

"I think that we should not give any particular protection to the human embryo at this stage when it simply does consist of a group of cells with no nervous system," he said.