Copyright 2003 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education
November 21, 2003, Friday
SECTION: GOVERNMENT & POLITICS; Pg. 20
LENGTH: 342 words
BYLINE: JEFFREY BRAINARD
The 78 lines of human embryonic stem cells eligible for use in federally financed research will probably not allow fair access by members of minority groups to any resulting experimental medical therapies, a panel of scientists and ethicists reported last week.
Researchers will need a larger number and variety of stem-cell lines, or colonies, the report said. To succeed, the scientists must either raise private funds or persuade the Bush administration to ease a policy that bans federal funds for research on lines of embryonic stem cells created after August 9, 2001.
Scientists could create a public repository of stem cells matched immunologically to the major ethnic groups in the United States, he said. Such a collection could consist of as few as 70 separate stem-cell lines for Caucasians, 120 for African-Americans, and 150 for Hispanics. The numbers reflect the amount of genetic diversity related to immune response in each of those ethnic groups.
Doctors hope to learn how to coax embryonic stem cells to morph into a variety of replacement tissues to treat diseases including diabetes and heart failure. To craft effective therapies, researchers will first need to find ways to prevent patients' immune systems from rejecting the foreign stem cells. Scientists have not yet obtained detailed information about the characteristics of the 78 federally approved lines. So far, only about 11 lines have become widely available to researchers. The panel argues that the genetic and immunological diversity among those lines is likely to be low, given their relatively small number.
The 18-member panel, with members from the Johns Hopkins University and eight experts from other institutions, wrote that a decision to create a bank with maximum utility for various ethnic groups would inevitably come with an ethically troubling trade-off: Scientists could instead try to create stem-cell lines matched immunologically to benefit the largest number of patients. For biological reasons, most of those people would be Caucasian.