Ride For Life: Stem cells and my brother

My brother's life may be saved by stem cell research.

People attempting to limit this research for political or moral reasons threaten to send my brother to an early grave.

I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts these same people would not hesitate to use cures developed by stem cell research if they or their loved ones were diagnosed with terminal cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease or neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Lou Gehrig's disease.

Stem cell research, especially from human embryonic stem cells, holds out convincing hope for cures for each of these tragic diseases. My brother's diagnosis of multiple myeloma _ a cancer of the bone marrow for which there is currently no known cure _ was a bolt from the blue.

He has always been healthy, even somewhat of a health nut. He knows the value of a nutritious, balanced diet and the need for exercise. With varying degrees of success, he passed these important values along to his children.

He also got thorough annual physicals, one just a few months before his cancer diagnosis.

Popped in to check a small pain

A couple of months ago my brother noticed a small, unexplained pain in his hip. Rather than attempt to ignore this irritation in hopes that it would eventually go away, as I would have done, he popped in to see his doctor.

A few days later my brother's regular doctor suggested that he visit a cancer specialist. This man soon delivered the frightening diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a disease in which plasma cells stop taking signals from immune cells and begin to divide and form abnormal proteins that damage the bones, bone marrow and other organs.

I sent my brother a videotape of an ABC News "Nightline" program about efforts to match patients with clinic trails conducted by various medical research centers around the United States.

The program described the successful treatment of several cancer patients who underwent experimental therapies in clinical trials.

My brother's oncologist found a multiple myeloma clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, only a little more than an hour's drive from my brother's Reston, Va., home.

After another series of tests were conducted, my brother was accepted into the Johns Hopkins clinical trial, which includes removing bone marrow and employing some sort of stem cell treatment before returning the treated bone marrow in an implant operation.

Medical researchers say that the stem cells that hold out the most promise are human embryonic stem cells. Some religious fundamentalists and anti-abortion activists, including Roman Catholic leaders, are waging a fight to prevent the gathering of embryonic stem cells from human blastocysts, even from surplus ones in fertility clinics that eventually would be destroyed.

Responding to these critics, President Bush last year curbed federal funding to medical research efforts involving stem cell lines created before Aug. 9, 2001. He gave the green light to use 78 existing stem cell lines worldwide. It turned out that only a few of those lines were available and in good enough condition to use in medical research.

Stanford University just announced plans to launch a unique cancer and stem cell research institute which would develop a new series of embryonic stem cell lines that could serve as models to find cures for a wide range of currently incurable diseases, including my brother's cancer.

Regrettably, this exciting announcement has come under attack from the same critics who influenced Bush's stem cell decision last year.

Stem cell research takes on a moral urgency when it promises to save the life of someone you love.

Rowland Nethaway is the senior editor or the Waco Tribune-Herald. E-mail: RNethaway@wacotrib.com