Senators Denounce Scientist's Stem Cell Claims
Confusion Over Harm to Embryos In Study at Issue

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 7, 2006; A04

Two senators who strongly support human embryonic stem cell research 
lashed out yesterday at the scientist who recently reported the 
creation of those cells by a method that does not require the 
destruction of embryos, saying the scientist and his company have 
harmed the struggling field by overstating their results.

"It's a big black eye if scientists are making false and inaccurate 
representations," a combative Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said during 
a hearing of the Senate Appropriations labor, health and human 
services subcommittee, which he chairs.

Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Mass., 
defended his work and the company's statements. "Our paper is 100 
percent correct," said the visibly shaken scientist, referring to the 
highly publicized article that appeared in the Aug. 24 issue of the 
journal Nature.

"You're on the ropes!" Specter retorted, capping one of several 
exchanges in which he and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), a fellow advocate 
of stem cell research, repeatedly interrupted and scolded Lanza.

At issue was the initial publicity and resulting media coverage of 
ACT's widely reported experiment, which showed that a single cell 
taken from a human embryo can be coaxed to become a colony of stem 
cells.

Embryonic stem cells are prized for their medical and research 
potential, and until Lanza's experiment they had been grown only by 
methods that necessitated the destruction of an embryo.

Because the removal of a single cell from an early embryo is widely 
regarded as harmless (hundreds of apparently healthy children began 
as fertility clinic embryos that first had a cell or two removed for 
testing purposes), ACT characterized the technique as a way to make 
stem cells without destroying embryos.

But opponents of the research, most prominently representatives of 
the Roman Catholic Church, quickly attacked that claim as bordering 
on fraudulent. They noted that, in ACT's experiments, the scientists 
destroyed the embryos to get as many single cells as possible to work 
with.

While that fact was clear in the Nature report, it was less than 
clear to some members of the media and the public.

Specter and Harkin focused on what they said was the main reason for 
the confusion: the company's news release, which said the team had 
derived stem cells "using an approach that does not harm embryos."

The approach -- removing single cells -- may be harmless when only 
one cell is removed, the senators agreed. But in this case, it did 
harm embryos because the scientists, wanting to make the most of the 
few embryos donated for the work, took many cells from each.

Similarly, the release quoted Lanza as saying: "We have demonstrated, 
for the first time, that human embryonic stem cells can be generated 
without interfering with the embryo's potential for life."

Harkin said: "ACT should have made it more clear from the beginning 
that none of the embryos survived." He added that he suspected the 
wording was intentionally misleading to raise the company's long-
suffering stock price. The stem cell field, he said, has "been hyped 
too much. We need to come back to Earth."

But Ronald M. Green, a Dartmouth University ethicist who was among 
several who approved the experimental protocol, told the senators 
they were wrong to belittle the findings or the way they were 
reported.

"We're speaking here of an enormous breakthrough in American 
medicine," said Green, who said his only financial link to the 
company was the approximately $200 per day he was paid -- more than a 
year ago -- for attending a handful of meetings to review the 
research.

Not addressed by the senators was a plainly incorrect announcement 
sent to science reporters by the journal Nature itself.

"By plucking single cells from human embryos, Robert Lanza and his 
colleagues have been able to generate new lines of cultured human 
embryonic stem (ES) cells while leaving the embryos intact," the 
release said.

That erroneous description -- written not by scientists at Nature but 
by the journal's lay staff -- was corrected after news stories were 
published.

Nature later apologized to reporters, blaming the mistake 
on "internal communication problems."

Lanza and the senators agreed on one thing: The quickest way to boost 
the availability of stem cells for research would be to pass 
legislation like that recently vetoed by President Bush, which would 
allow scientists with federal funding to study embryos about to be 
discarded by fertility clinics.

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