News last week that separate teams of scientists had managed to reprogram human skin cells to be the virtual functional equivalent of human embryonic stem cells, sent a shock wave through the scientific world. The reprogrammed cells—called induced pluripotent state cells (iPSCs)—are produced without damaging, destroying or even involving human embryos. After the Japanese team led by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka reported further successes in reprogramming mouse skin cells last June, no one expected that only five months later he would already be reporting on successes with human cells.
But what has been perhaps most surprising, not to say amazing, is what stem cells scientists themselves—many, ardent advocates of embryonic stem cell research—have been saying about this new alternative to embryo-destructive stem cell research.
First there was Dr. Ian Wilmut, the creator of Dolly the sheep, who, foreseeing the successes that were coming in reprogramming (which renders the cloning of embryos for their stem cells obsolete) announced two weeks ago that he was abandoning cloning. “Reprogramming,” he was reported to have said in the London Telegraph, “is the future of stem cell research” possessing as it does “so much more potential” than standard ESC research.
Dr. Yamanaka affirmed that “Any scientist with basic technology in molecular and cell biology can do reprogramming." Dr. Doug Melton, a stalwart advocate of ESC research and of human “therapeutic” cloning affirmed in the New York Times that “anyone who is going to suggest that [reprogramming] is just a side show and that it won’t work is wrong.” And Alta Charo, a UW-Madison professor of law and bioethics, and popular secular voice on the ethics of stem cell research said the discovery “could be a game-changing event.”
Then, of course, to top these and many other declarations, there was an interview last Wednesday in the New York Times with Dr. James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who lead the other team that reported successful reprogramming and who is himself the first scientist to isolate human embryonic stem cells, the feat that initiated the great stem cell controversy in the U.S. “Now with the new technique, which involves adding just four genes to ordinary adult skin cells,” affirmed Thomson, “it will not be long…before the stem cell wars are a distant memory.” “A decade from now,” he said, “this will be just a funny historical footnote.”
Affirmations like these have led many of us to ponder whether or not we now indeed find ourselves—happily—at the end of the stem cell wars. Only time will tell. Voices to the contrary have certainly not been lacking. A chorus of voices have also been insisting that all avenues of research need to go forward, including embryo-destructive research. The reasonableness of such claims, however, has been dealt a serious blow. To the general public, the concept of ethically uncontroversial research which now holds out the same promise as human ESC research and can be used immediately in the laboratory, is not a difficult sell. As Institute senior fellows Maureen Condic and Markus Grompe affirmed in a TheWall Street Journal op-ed last Friday:
iPSCs are clearly superior to embryo-derived ESCs. Pluripotent stem cells can be used to study "developmental biology in a dish." They enable researchers to observe how human organs and tissues form. The insights garnered from such studies are likely to lead to the development of new drugs and strategies which can benefit human health.
Direct reprogramming techniques make it possible to generate pluripotent cells from specific individuals, including those with particular diseases. It will be possible to make iPSCs from children with Fanconi's anemia, a devastating genetic disease, and to study the effects of candidate drugs on the formation of human blood. These kinds of experiments are now immediately possible and likely will be the first practical application of iPSCs. (Emphasis added).
Not a hard sell to a nation that is by and large exhausted—or simply fed up—with the controversy surrounding the use of embryos for research. Add to all this the technical ease and cost-effectiveness of somatic cell reprogramming, and one cannot help but imagine a not-so-distant future in which the sad spectacle of embryo-destructive research has become for the most part—as Dr. Thomson says—a footnote in the history of science. Let’s hope so.
