My Wish List for Christmas 2007

If I could have anything I want this year? Here’s my short list. I obviously don’t think of these as occupying the same category of importance—but in their own context, each has its own significance.

* A massive, decisive and successful international military intervention to end the genocide in Darfur.

* The birth of an effective, and determined national movement of concerned wives and mothers who are absolutely fed up with Internet p*rnography, fed up with the havoc their husband’s p*rn addiction has wreaked on their marriage, and fed up with easy access to this filth on the Internet. Add to that how much I would love to see every one of those pimps who run the multi-billion dollar Internet p*rn industry end up behind bars.

* The prompt move to clinical trials for therapies using tissues derived from non-embryo destructive sources of pluripotent stem cells.

* A Congress with the moral integrity to pass a federal ban on research cloning and the clinical production of human embryos for any other purpose than implantation in a human womb for their gestation and live birth.

* A renewed surge of support—material, moral and spiritual—for the

men and women who have served in recent years or currently serve in our armed forces. Ultimately, in the great scheme of things—whatever our views happen to be on the Iraq war—these servicemen and women place themselves at risk to preserve our freedoms, not least among them, the freedom to worship God as our conscience directs us. We especially thank Almighty God for those who have truly “laid down their lives for their friends,” and to Him we entrust their eternal rest.

* A sudden outpouring of scientific honesty within the global warming research community. When dissenters from the dominant theory are publicly compared with—and treated with as much contempt as—Holocaust deniers, you know there’s a big problem.

* An end to the “steroids era” of American league baseball, and a return to the great American pastime as I knew it growing up as an avid Brewers fan in Milwaukee in the 70’s and early 80’s. “Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades—commissioners, club officials, the players’ association and players—shares to some extent the responsibility for the Steroids Era,” said former Sen. George Mitchell. “There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and deal with it early on.” And how!

Finally, what do I ask for all of you?

To put it one way, I ask something that Pope John Paul the Great appealed to several times in his encyclical Fides et Ratio: that we may all grow in an interior understanding of that ultimate Ground and Foundation of our lives, and use this knowledge for the transformation of culture:

Wherever men and women discover a call to the absolute and transcendent, the metaphysical dimension of reality opens up before them: in truth, in beauty, in moral values, in other persons, in being itself, in God. We face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as necessary as it is urgent. We cannot stop short at experience alone…[we] must penetrate to the spiritual core and the ground from which it rises (86).

To put it another way, I ask something that St. Paul asked for the Christians at Ephesus:

I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Have a very blessed Christmas!

Religion and Public Life

We must thank Governor Mitt Romney for getting us all thinking about religion and its place in our democratic way of life. Last Thursday in Texas he gave what was arguably the most important speech of his political career. Entitled “Faith in America,” the speech addressed both the issue of Romney’s Mormonism, and his understanding of the role that belief systems play in our democratic way of life. In my book, he scored well in both those endeavors. I happen to believe this speech will claim a lasting place alongside John F. Kennedy’s speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960. Kennedy’s speech has been remembered ever since for his dismissal of the role played by religious creed in American public life; Romney’s speech will be remembered for his wholehearted and unabashed endorsement of that role. And without hesitation, he declared: “I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it.” And then he added, to the amazement of not a few: "Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it.”


Daring words those, for a would-be first-ever Mormon president of the United States.


To be honest, I find such forthrightness a very welcome breath of fresh air in this campaign. And his thoughtful speech raises many issues worthy of discussion.


But here I want to latch onto one profound and beautifully crafted thought in particular from Romney’s speech:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

There you have three lines which really capture the crucial role played by religion in public life—and expressed in a manner which would evoke the admiration of thinkers as diverse as Alexis de Tocqueville and Benedict XVI. But more on that in just a moment.

This whole issue of religion in public life also got me thinking about Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’ 1984 tome The Naked Public Square.

If you are unfamiliar with the book, I could attempt to explain its content, but better to get that from someone much more qualified than myself, someone like Mary Ann Glendon. In a 2004 First Things symposium marking the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication, Glendon wrote:

In The Naked Public Square, Richard John Neuhaus charged that the United States, while calling itself a democratic society, was systematically excluding the values of the majority of its citizens from policy decisions. He contended that to rule out of bounds in public life religiously grounded moral viewpoints not only does injustice to America’s “incorrigibly religious” citizenry but also saps the very foundations of our democratic experiment. Convinced that the moment had come for men and women of faith to make themselves heard in setting the conditions under which we order our lives together, Neuhaus was heartened by what he saw as the growing political effectiveness of groups that were beginning to do just that. If religious voices in the U.S. today are stronger, more confident, and more adept at translating their values into terms that are persuasive to their fellow citizens, more than a little credit must go to the encouragement and example of Richard John Neuhaus.

And as Fr. Neuhaus himself describes it, the book “was a plea not for religion as such but for reasoned public moral discourse, which discourse must also and of necessity draw on the resources of religion.”

Which brings us to the point of this column: what—we need to be reminded—is the role of religious belief in American public life? Or to paraphrase Governor Romney, why does (ordered, political) freedom “require” religion?

Fr. Neuhaus just offered us one answer: the moral tenets embedded in systems of religious creed are an important source of nourishment for a vigorous public moral discourse, without which a democratic system simply cannot thrive.

In addition to invigorating moral discourse, the expression of religious creed in the public square plays a further important role, a role certainly not lost on that young Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville who came to the United States in 1831 to study the flourishing young democracy. Wrote Tocqueville:

If you give democratic peoples education and freedom and leave them alone, they will easily extract from this world all the good things it has to offer. They will improve all useful techniques and make life daily more comfortable, smooth, and bland…But while man takes delight in this proper and legitimate quest for prosperity, there is a danger that in the end he may lose the use of his sublimest faculties and that, bent on improving everything around him, he may at length degrade himself. That and nothing else is the peril.

In a democracy therefore it is ever the duty of lawgivers and of all upright educated men to raise up the souls of their fellow citizens and turn their attention toward heaven. There is a need for all who are interested in the future of democratic societies to get together and with one accord to make continual efforts to propagate throughout society a taste for the infinite, an appreciation of greatness, and a love of spiritual pleasures.

The expression of religious creed in the public square continually points us toward the transcendent—and experiments in ordered liberty like ours have thrived thanks in large part to those constant and manifold reminders of the “infinite,” the religious representations of “greatness,” and creedal appeals to the “love of spiritual pleasures.”

That individuals and the democracies they compose necessarily suffocate without these continual invitations to transcendence is a truth wholly present in the thought of Pope Benedict. As I noted in my series of reflections on Benedict’s Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, the Pope understands that the question about God is unavoidable. There is something in our very human make-up that forces us to answer a “yes or no” question about God. "The thirst for the infinite," affirms Benedict, is a fundamental aspect of human nature, indeed, "the very essence of human nature." Speaking of the impossibility of putting agnosticism into practice in one’s personal life—and consequently in public life—Benedict wrote:

As a pure theory, it may seem exceedingly illuminating. But in its essence, agnosticism is much more than a theory: what is at stake here is the praxis of one's life. When one attempts to "put it into practice" in one's real field of action, agnosticism slips out of one's hands like a soap bubble; it dissolves into thin air, because it is not possible to escape the very option it seeks to avoid. When faced with the question of God, man cannot permit himself to remain neutral. All he can say is Yes or No-without ever avoiding all the consequences that derive from this choice even in the smallest details of life. Accordingly, we see that the question of God is ineluctable; one is not permitted to abstain from casting one's vote (pp. 88-89).

We are creatures who ask about the infinite, about our origin, about our ultimate destiny, and the Cause of it all. And that's why the presence of religious creed in the public square is so important. We need creed- based invitations to seek the Cause of it all, to aspire to that Ultimately Reality that is the ground and source of our own reality.

Lacking this, or in a liberal democracy which attempts to sanitize the public square of expressions of religious belief, as Governor Romney cogently reminds us, freedom will indeed “perish alone.”

As for the Commander in Chief of a liberal democracy that welcomes expressions of religious belief and draws on their richness, we would expect him (or her, as the case may be) to govern, drawing on the guidance of a religiously informed conscience. As Michael Gerson put it quite cogently last Friday in The Washington Post:

It is one thing to assert, as Kennedy did, that politicians should not take orders from popes and prophets—that is the institutional separation of church and state. It is another thing to assert, as Kennedy seemed to, that politicians should not take guidance from their own religiously informed conscience—that is a multiple personality disorder.

Our American democratic way of life not only allows us, but encourages us to draw guidance from our systems of belief as we continue to order our lives together. It is permissible to talk religion in the public square, to talk theology, to dispute theology, to question our fellow citizens—and even our presidential candidates—about their creedal beliefs. Not only is it good, it’s essential to our survival. As Fr. Neuhaus surmised three years ago:

The liberal democratic tradition is a Western and Christian achievement and its future depends, for better and for worse, chiefly on the American experiment. If it dies here, I do not see anyone else picking up the fallen flag.

I can’t help but agree.

The Beginning of the End of the Stem Cell Wars?

Syndicated columnist and one-time member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Charles Krauthammer drew fire for a Washington Post op-ed published last Friday in which he asserted that a recent embryo-friendly breakthrough in stem cell research—somatic cell reprogramming—vindicates the Bush stem cell policy, and claimed that “the embryonic stem cell debate is over.” Since the breakthrough was announced two weeks ago, we have now come to understand that, while the former claim may be true, the latter one is clearly not. That notwithstanding, and if euphoria evidently led many of us to believe for a fleeting day or two that we had definitively reached “the end of the stem cell wars,” it is not unreasonable to believe that we find ourselves at least at the beginning of the end.

We need to consider very carefully the two principal reasons why the “wars” are not yet over and why we will need to work even harder to rein in the cultural scourge of embryo-destructive research.

First of all, the specter of human cloning looms near.

The recent breakthroughs in human reprogramming reported just before Thanksgiving in papers published by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, and by James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison have offered proof of principle that we now have a scientifically viable alternative to human “therapeutic” cloning (SCNT), and an alternative of such potential magnitude in terms of cost-effectiveness and simplicity—not to mention ethical integrity—that it could render moot the putative “need” for cloning. That theoretical success, however, will do little to stop the impetus of science to move ahead with human SCNT, especially now that recent research has apparently cleared any remaining obstacles to the cloning of primates and deriving viable lines of stem cells from the cloned embryos. Researchers now suspect that it will not be long—perhaps within the coming year—before these technological advances lead to successful human “therapeutic” cloning. Unless researchers now actively pursuing human cloning run into as yet unforeseen technical barriers, the successful cloning of human embryos appears inevitable.

Second of all, consider that the ‘holy grail’ of stem cell science has been a technique that would allow scientists to create stem cells genetically matched to a sick patient, and then grow and develop these cells into tissues for use in tissue replacement therapies (everything from regeneration of damaged heart tissue to Parkinson's to spinal-cord injury). A perfect genetic match, these tissues would not be rejected by the donor's immune system. The advent of somatic cell reprogramming would now appear to allow scientists to do just that, and to have stolen the prize from the human cloning enterprise—a technique that would conceivably afford the same benefit. We have to recognize, however, that while the ‘holy grail’ is certainly within reach of the reprogramming scientists, it is not yet in hand.

To be sure, the science of reprogramming still requires substantial refinement. Reprogrammed skin cells, the kind recently produced by Yamanaka and Thomson, are referred to as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). They are “pluripotent,” capable of producing all the tissue-types in the human body. However, multiple scientific studies show that all pluripotent cells, including human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), form tumors (teratomas) and can convert to cancer cells. Westchester Institute Senior Fellows Maureen Condic and Markus Grompe have pointed out to us that the risk of tumor formation may, at this time, be higher in iPSCs than in hESCs because the genes used for reprogramming remain inserted in the reprogrammed cells. However, leading stem cell biologists are optimistic that they can modify the iPSC technique to eliminate any added risk of tumor formation. Dr. Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, predicts this problem will be “solved quickly, maybe within a year or so” (AP, 22 November 2007), also noting: “Anyone who is going to suggest…that it won’t work is wrong” (New York Times, 21 November, 2007). Rudolf Jaenisch, a leading stem cell researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts concurs, stating: “I don't think it is a big hurdle” (Washington Post, 21 November 2007). The ideal way to reprogram will ultimately be one which does not involve the insertion of genes (or the viruses that transport them) into the somatic cells at all. You have to believe that stem cell scientists are hard at it right now trying to make this work. The day we can reprogram stem cells this way, will be the day we have the holy grail in hand. While we don’t know how long it will take, the optimists say this too could happen within the coming year.

That said, however, let’s consider a number of key reasons why the advent somatic cell reprogramming could be the beginning of the end of the stem cell wars:

1- Advances in reprogramming undermine continued scientific claims regarding the putative superiority of hESC research.

In a response to the Krauthammer op-ed, Susan Solomon and Zach Hall purport to know that human ESC research is that which “remains the most promising and important.” Now, neither they nor any of us can look into a crystal ball and say which form of stem cell research known today holds most “promise.” And of course, their assertion begs the further question: what counts for “important” stem cell research these days, anyway? In the field, what counts today is not that stem cells be “embryonic” but that they be “pluripotent.” As I noted in my column last October, the Bush administration, in requiring the HHS to rename the "Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry" as the "Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Registry" has simply adjusted itself to the fluctuating state of the science. The question today is which pluripotent stem cells—from embryos, from bone marrow, or from reprogrammed somatic cells—will be “most promising”. It is no longer a foregone conclusion that hESCs are the answer to that question.

Add to this that we now know three significant ways in which human iPSCs are better for research right now:

• First, patient-specific iPSCs are available “here and now,” compared to the merely theoretical prospects of getting such cells through human embryo cloning. Reprogramming is currently the only way to derive patient-specific stem cells for research on genetic diseases at this time. Reprogramming allows researchers to study the diseases in human cells in a Petri-dish, a real first in the field and holding out potential for research breakthroughs on any number of genetic diseases.

• Second, reprogramming makes multiple iPSC lines from an individual patient’s skin cells with relatively little cost or effort, especially when compared to the prospect of human cloning. This is an enormous scientific advantage. Obtaining iPSCs does not require the use of human eggs, nor access to fertility clinics, thus simplifying the requirements for research. And because these cells are easier to produce than hESCs, more scientists will work with them and research will advance much more quickly.

• Third, because iPSCs do not involve human embryos or human eggs, they will be subject to significantly simpler regulatory requirements. iPSCs are fully eligible now for funding by the NIH, and in fact the Wisconsin iPSC study was partly funded by the NIH.

2. Advances in reprogramming undermine continued scientific insistence on the “need” for new lines of hESCs.

It can be granted that reprogrammers will want to compare human iPSCs with lines of existing hESCs. From all that we can tell, and from what stem cell scientists have been telling me, however, such comparisons need not require cloning or destroying human embryos to make more hESC lines. At least 21 viable lines of human embryonic stem cells are available for federally funded research to make these comparisons.

Furthermore, Dr. Grompe notes that the non-human primate system now represents the best in-depth platform for comparative studies between types of stem cells. From rhesus macaque monkeys, primate pluripotent stem cells are available from all conceivable sources: IVF embryos, naturally conceived embryos (removed from the Fallopian tube after fertilization), SCNT-cloned embryos, parthenoids and soon rhesus-iPSCs.

3. Human embryonic stem cells are not the gold-standard any more; what “works” will now be the standard.

Solomon and Hall also asserted, as a chorus of scientists did over the past week, that “no one yet knows the extent to which these new cells will behave like true human embryonic stem cells”.

To this we could respond that Dr. James Thomson, the first scientist ever to isolate, culture and characterize human embryonic stem cells in 1998, and author of one of the two iPSC studies, found that iPS cells “meet the defining criteria” for embryonic stem cells “with the significant exception that the iPS cells are not derived from embryos.”

Mouse iPSCs have passed the strictest possible scientific tests for being functional equivalents of mouse ESCs. Tests for human cells are more limited, but human iPSCs have met all the available criteria for being the functional equivalent of hESCs. And as mentioned just above, this can be established with somewhat greater certainty by comparing human iPSCs with the existing hESC lines eligible for federal funding.

But I would like to go a step further here. The contention that human iPSCs “must measure up” to hESCs suffers a severe internal incoherence. To be sure, this view presupposes that hESCs represent some kind of absolute gold-standard. It presupposes the misconstrued notion that hESCs are some kind of natural, pure–the real deal—point of reference.

But we must remember that hESCs are as much a product of a Petri dish as iPSCs are. Human embryonic stem cells are a laboratory product; they are not literally “harvested” from the embryo. In embryo-destructive stem cell research, scientists remove special cells from a 6-day-old embryo (at the blastocyst stage). These are the “inner cell mass” (ICM) cells. These cells are, indeed, pluripotent. But extracted, and left on their own, they will not proliferate indefinitely—a key characteristic of stem cells. It is only in the Petri dish that the ICM cells acquire the characteristic of indefinite proliferation, and likewise come to remain in an unnaturally undifferentiated state (ICM normally rapidly differentiates into more specific kinds of human tissue in a developing embryo). The acquisition of these particular characteristics—in the artificial environment of the Petri dish and culture matrix—reconstitutes these cells as essentially something new, a laboratory artifact confected in vitro.

While at present the existing lines of hESCs may be the only point of reference we have for understanding the pluripotency of iPSCs and drawing comparisons, in the end, the question is not going to be whether the latter “measures up” to the former, but rather, which ones get the job done best, which ones will be most useful for giving us patient-matched tissues for therapy. And in that sense, iPSCs do not have to “behave like” hESCs. In fact, they may prove even more useful and versatile.

All of which makes the age of developmental biology and stem cell research all the more fascinating, complex and morally precarious. And we must vigorously continue our efforts to protect the dignity of embryonic human life in this arena.

And returning to Charles Krauthammer’s other point, yes, I believe recent events have at least partially vindicated the Bush stem cell policy. As Yuval Levin pointed out earlier this week, “the message Bush has tried to deliver with his policies and speeches on stem cell research is that he does not think curtailing the destruction of embryos for research needs to mean preventing the development of stem cell science.” This is a view that millions of reasonable people ascribe to. In our interest to see stem cell science proceed, we have also pondered the significance of allowing science to use human embryos as raw material for that research, and we find this utterly unreasonable. And we cannot help but believe, to borrow the words of Dr. James Thomson himself, that “if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.” Seems to me like a lot of researchers in the field are owning up now to the fact that they find the prospect of embryo-destructive research not only discomforting, but deeply disturbing—which may itself turn out to be the best single indicator that we are indeed nearing the end of the stem cell wars.