The LA Times
Sunday, July 8, 2001
Possible Stem Cell Compromise Cited by Bush Catholic Advisors
Politics: President is torn between the religious vote and medical
community.
By AARON ZITNER, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON--In a development that could help President Bush
navigate one of the
thorniest issues of his administration, several
leading conservative
Catholic intellectuals have told the White
House they are open to a plan that would allow the government
to fund certain medical experiments that
use stem cells from
human embryos.

Bush has said he will soon decide whether to fund embryo
cell research, which many scientists believe will lead to new
treatments for a range of diseases. By backing the research,
Bush might win favor with millions of ailing people. But he would
anger anti-abortion groups and most Roman Catholic leaders,
who have said there is no scenario in which government funding
for the research would be morally acceptable.

The issue is especially tricky for Bush because his chief
political strategist believes Catholic voters will play a pivotal role
in the next presidential election. Choosing between medical needs
of patients and abortion opponents puts Bush "in a no-win
situation," said Gov. Thomas J. Ridge (R-Pa.).

Now, however, three conservative Catholics who advise the White
House are saying a compromise may be possible. Depending on
how the details shape up, these opinion leaders may publicly offer
arguments for why some funding of embryo experiments is morally
acceptable and help Bush win support for the policy among Catholic
leaders and voters.

The advisors are focusing in particular on one option, now
under discussion among White House aides, in which the
government would pay only for research that uses existing
stem cells scientists already have isolated from embryos. Any
experiment that caused the destruction of additional embryos
to obtain new cells would be ineligible for federal funds.

Spokesmen for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,
which represents the church in the United States, specifically
have rejected this idea, saying it would make the government
complicit in embryo destruction. But one of the nation's leading
Catholic thinkers on abortion issues now is offering a different view.
"I can imagine circumstances in which this would not only be
politically acceptable but could be a morally justified policy,"
said Robert P. George, a moral philosopher at Princeton University
who participates in a weekly telephone conference of Catholic
intellectuals that often includes White House staff.

Another participant in the weekly calls, Rev. Robert A. Sirico,
who leads a Michigan-based ethics think tank, said he has told
the White House that the compromise might be regarded as
acceptable and consistent with church teachings if it ensures
that the government never pays for the destruction of another
embryo.

"I am open to it," said Deal W. Hudson, editor and publisher of
Crisis, a Catholic magazine. While the compromise would be
"a victory for those who want to use embryonic stem cells,
it can also be seen as a victory for the pro-life side," Hudson
said, "because it ensures, for the time being, that there is no
more government support for the destruction of embryos for
their stem cells."

The stem cell issue came up during the conference call
Thursday, Sirico said, but he would not give details. The
Catholic advisors have seen no formal proposal and have
not endorsed any.

Still, the comments from the three advisors suggest there
is more diversity among conservative Catholic leaders regarding
the stem cell issue than previously has appeared in public debate.
If Bush moves in any way to support embryo cell research, it will
be crucial that he win the support of at least some conservative
Catholic leaders, George said. "Then they could say there's
a range of opinion and that this issue is not like abortion
or euthanasia," which are uniformly condemned by church leaders
and ethicists.

Embryonic stem cells, first isolated in 1998, have drawn wide
interest  because they can give rise to any other tissue in the
body--nerve cells, heart muscle, insulin-producing cells and
the like. Scientists hope to use the cells to grow replacement
tissue for people with heart disease, diabetes, muscular
dystrophy and other ailments.

The National Institutes of Health last year moved to start
federal funding for stem cell research. The cells were to come
from embryos donated by patients at fertility clinics. These
patients commonly produce more embryos than they will use
in any one attempt to have a child. The patients usually discard
the extras or freeze them for a future attempt at pregnancy,
but hundreds--if not thousands--of embryos have wound up
frozen indefinitely in fertility clinic storage tanks.

The Bush administration put the NIH funding plan on hold
to review the policy. It is unclear when Bush will announce
a decision. He is scheduled to meet July 23 with Pope John
Paul II in Italy, and some advisors feel the president runs
the lowest risk of offending the pope or appearing to
be swayed by him if he settles the issue before the trip.

There is no federal prohibition on using private funds to obtain
or work with embryo cells, and several groups have produced
embryonic stem cells using private money. It is these cells that
would be used under the potential compromise.

The compromise is one of several floated in recent weeks by
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson,
the administration's major proponent of embryo cell research,
people familiar with the discussions say.

By pursuing a compromise, the White House risks angering
people on both sides of the issue. Some scientists and patient
advocacy groups oppose Thompson's idea, saying the stem
cells already harvested by researchers do not include enough
genetic diversity to show the full potential of embryo cells.
That is because they come from only a dozen or so donors.

"The cells available now are not a sufficient number," said
Douglas Melton, a diabetes researcher and chairman of Harvard
University's department of molecular and cellular biology.
"Some of the lines don't grow well." Others do well at some tasks
but fail at others, he said. "We think some have a predisposition
to make nerve cells, and others to make muscle."

To understand the full potential of the cells, Melton said,
scientists should work with cells from between 100 and
1,000 embryos "and we should have four to five years
to find out whether the promise and high expectations in these
cells are borne out."

Under a second compromise under discussion at the White House,
the government would give money to private groups for
non-embryo research.  The groups then would be able to divert
their own money to embryo experiments.

Sirico said this option was "even more preferable" because it
would distance the government further from embryo destruction.
But George disagreed, and Richard Doerflinger, an official of the
bishops conference, said the group also rejected the idea.

In remaining open to a compromise, the Catholic advisors to the
White House are saying that embryo research raises two separate
moral questions.

One is whether it is acceptable to destroy human embryos. The
Catholic advisors and the bishops conference both say this is
not acceptable under church doctrine and that the principle can
never be violated.

The second question is whether a researcher or patient can use
or benefit from embryo cells if some other person carried out the
actual dissection of the embryo to obtain the cells. George called
this a "murkier" question that remains unsettled under church
doctrine and that the answer depends on the circumstances.

But Sirico, as well as bioethicists from other religious traditions,
have drawn comparisons to the potential use today of data
from Nazi experiments on Jews and other prisoners during the
Holocaust. Many have concluded that using the data would
make contemporary researchers complicit in the Nazi atrocities.
Similarly, they say, a person may not benefit from another
person's destruction of an embryo.

And yet, Sirico said, it might be most important for Bush to put
on record that the government opposes the destruction of new
embryos, even if it means using cells obtained through past
embryo destruction.  Employing the Nazi analogy, Sirico said,
"If you give me the choice of closing down the death camps
while allowing the use of the research data--if you give me
that choice--I'll take it. But it's still highly problematic."

Sirico noted that the pope, in the 1995 encyclical letter
Evangelium Vitae, acknowledged that public figures sometimes
face imperfect choices and in some cases can support laws
that have unjust elements. In some circumstances, the pope
said, a public official could support a law that continues access
to abortion if the law's intent was to narrow the number
of abortions legally performed.

But Doerflinger said that the Pontifical Academy for Life, an
advisory panel to the pope, had rejected this kind of argument
for stem cell research. In a declaration in August, the academy
said it is not morally acceptable for a researcher to use embryonic
stem cells supplied by other scientists. In using the cells,
the researcher would be complicit in the act of embryo
destruction, the panel said.

The pope said last year that medical techniques that destroy
embryos are "not morally acceptable, even when their proposed
goal is good in itself."

* * *
     Times staff writer Edwin Chen contributed to this story.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20010708/t000056151.html

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