The unfolding legal dispute over human embryonic stem cells shifted to the political arena today as senators sounded off and prominent scientists pleaded their case before a Senate subcommittee hearing.
Convened by Senator Democrat Tom Harkin of Iowa (left), who chairs the spending subcommittee that funds the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the hearing in the hoary Dirksen Senate Office Building included Francis Collins, the NIH director, and George Daley, a stem cell scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital among others. Both deplored the 23 August decision by U.S. district court judge Royce Lamberth to issue a preliminary injunction shutting off NIH funding for the research. (That injunction has since been reversed, at least temporarily.)
But an unexpected guest was added to the speaker’s dais at the last minute—Republican Senator Roger Wicker (right) of Mississippi. If the surname sounds familiar, it is because it has been much in the news of late. Wicker, then a congressman, was one of the two coauthors, in 1995, of the Dickey-Wicker amendment, which prohibits federal funding for research in which human embryos are destroyed, and which sits at the heart of the current legal dispute.
Wicker, whom Mississippi voters elevated to the Senate in 2008, made it clear that his feelings have not changed in the 15 years that the amendment has been appended to the bill that funds the NIH.
“In my opinion, the body of scientific evidence developed since 1995 has served only to strengthen the argument in favour of Dickey-Wicker,” he told the senators. “If human embryonic research is to be done at all, it should be paid for with non-taxpayer funds.”
(Not many senators were present. Besides Harkin and Thad Cochran, the senior Republican on the subcommittee, the others in attendance were Democrats Patty Murray of Washington and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. There are 14 members on the full subcommittee.)
Wicker, no political naïf, brought out the big rhetorical ammo, reminding the senators that it was Jamie Thomson, the University of Wisconsin scientist who first reported isolating the cells in 1998, who said: “If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.”
Wicker went on to cite the results of a poll of over 1,000 Americans, conducted in early September by International Communications Research for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Forty-seven percent of respondents said that they oppose using federal tax dollars for “experiments” requiring that “live embryos …be destroyed in their first week of development.” (Crucially, the question did not mention that the embryos would otherwise be discarded, nor that the actual deriving of stem cells, with its attendant embryo destruction, is privately financed.)
The only senator who responded directly to Wicker was Specter, a passionate NIH advocate who is serving out his last weeks in office after losing a primary battle earlier this year. “I look forward to debating with Senator Wicker the issues that he has raised —more appropriately on the Senate floor than in this hearing,” he said.
Specter, a lawyer by training, cautioned that proponents should not count on the courts to come to their rescue: “The vicissitudes of the legal battle are very very uncertain,” he said, so “Congress had better get busy, had better act on this subject so we do not await court action.”
Specter on Monday introduced a bill that affirmatively states that it is legal for the government to fund human embryonic stem cell research – a bill highly similar to the one introduced in the House in March by Diana DeGette (Democrat, Colorado), with one important extra: Specter’s bill states that the government should fund the research “notwithstanding any other provision of law, including [the Dickey-Wicker amendment].”
In a highly divided, distracted Congress in an election season, pro-research legislators like Specter will have all they can do to debate and pass such a bill. But the panelists who followed Wicker did all they could to provide him and his like-minded colleagues with arguments to take to the Senate floor.
Collins warned of a “cloud hanging over this field,” of top US scientists potentially being driven into other disciplines or other countries, and of “severe collateral damage” to the burgeoning field of induced pluripotent stem cell research, which, he argued, relies on human embryonic stem cells as a “gold standard” comparator. His agency’s permanent withdrawal from the field, he added, “would be an absolutely devastating outcome.”
Daley, the associate director of the stem cell programme at Children’s Hospital Boston, decried his opponents’ portrayal of human embryonic stem cell research as replaceable with adult stem cell research or work on induced pluripotent cells. “Embryonic stem cells are not contestants on Survivor that should be voted off the island,” he said.
Panelist Sean Morrison, the director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, concurred. “Stem cell scientists do not cluster into adult versus embryonic camps. This framing of the debate comes from political lobbyists,” he complained.
Rather, he said, the system that has made American science a first-class enterprise is based on the cream of proposals, of whatever kind, rising to the top. “I would urge you to clarify the Dickey Wicker amendment so that there can be no question regarding Congress’s intent to fund the most meritorious science,” Morrison said.
To view a Webcast of today’s hearing, see this link.