Stepping up for stem cells
Now California bids to lead the way in this controversial medical work
Living up to election-year expectations for the country's foremost social guinea pig, California last week became the first state in the nation to fund embryonic stem cell research. Under Proposition 71, which passed with 59 percent of the vote, the state will commit $3 billion to studying stem cells over the next 10 years. The effort will surpass all public funding in the field and is expected to make California the "Silicon Valley" of the burgeoning biotechnology industry.
The initiative, which has already touched off a pilgrimage to the state by stem cell companies, was a classic California case of direct democracy and deep pockets, with a Hollywood twist. It was endorsed by actor turned Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who broke ranks with his party and President Bush to back a group of Democrats pushing the measure. It was bankrolled by $25 million in contributions from venture capitalists and Silicon Valley billionaires, including Microsoft cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Both the late actor Christopher Reeve, who was paralyzed as the result of a spinal cord injury, and actor Michael J. Fox, who is afflicted with Parkinson's disease, publicly supported it.
Big goals. Scientists believe that stem cells may make treatment successful for a wide range of diseases that include cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, and spinal cord injuries. More than 128 million Americans suffer from such diseases. "We need this now," says Beatrice Berkman of Los Angeles, whose son died recently of a blood disorder. Many voters on both sides of the political spectrum echo Berkman's sentiment, saying that the initiative was necessary because of the Bush administration's limits on federal funding of stem cell research. The president and many religious groups object to the destruction of human embryos to create stem cell lines.
But politics is far from the only barrier to a stem cell revolution. Charles Jennings, executive director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, points out that only six years have passed since scientists first extracted stem cells from a human embryo and coaxed them to grow in a lab dish. "Realistically, I think it will be some time before the field comes to fruition."
An embryonic stem cell is a kind of blank-slate cell, taken from a five-day-old embryo, that can divide indefinitely in a lab dish and give rise to all the different cell types of the body. Scientists hope someday to use these cells to create made-to-order transplant tissue. In the case of diabetes, for example, studies have shown that transplants of insulin-producing cells taken from donated organs can offer a cure for the disease. But donated organs are in short supply. Scientists could theoretically solve this problem by brewing up a bunch of stem cells and getting them to transform into insulin-producing ones, offering an endless supply of cells for transplant. The trouble is that scientists are "nowhere near" being able to do that, says Robert Goldstein, scientific director of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, though a few initial studies seem promising.
Scientists hope to get new insights into various diseases by combining stem cell science with the power of cloning. The California funding initiative would prohibit reproductive cloning, but it will let scientists take genetic material from an adult cell--say, a brain cell from an Alzheimer's patient--and insert it into a hollowed-out egg. The resulting cloned embryo would have stem cells with all the genes that cause Alzheimer's, and these cells would let scientists watch and experiment on diseased neurons as they grow and develop in a lab dish. Such studies could aid in new drug discovery, says John Gearhart of the Institute for Cell Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
"I am really encouraged that we will have something in a five-to-seven-year period that we can apply to patients in need," says Gearhart, who notes that some of his students currently go off to Australia or England to do stem cell work. Now, he predicts, they'll head for California.
This story appears in the November 15, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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