A two-day stem cell conference, the Stem Cell Summit, is underway at the Hynes Convention Center, organized by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. I stopped in yesterday to find several hundred people gathered to talk mostly about the political, regulatory and ethical issues that have dogged the field.

Kevin Eggan of Harvard, who has been trying for a year to generate disease or patient-specific human embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embyros gave a short and somber talk about all the regulatory obstacles he’s had to face. He didn’t show any slides, because, as he said, “there are no experiments to talk about.” The frustration was apparent in his voice. To clone embryos and create these specific types of embryonic stem cells, he needs eggs donated by women. Despite spending more than $100,000 in newspaper and magazine ads, asking women to go through the invasive procedure of egg donation for research purposes, “we have yet to find a single donor,” said Eggan.

The issue: should women be paid for egg donation for research? Massachusetts law says that they cannot be paid, for fear of commoditizing women and reproductive materials. Eggan said that his group got hundreds of phone calls from women saying that they were interesting in donating, but backed away when they found out how onerous the procedure was and that they wouldn’t be compensated (even though women who donate eggs for fertility treatments do get paid in MA).

The irony is that the Massachusetts law that outlaws this kind of payment is the same one that protects stem cell research in the state. This part of the law that bans the payment of women for egg donation for research was one of the concessions made by state legislators when they were trying to get a 2/3 majority to vote for the bill, according to state Rep. Peter Koutoujian, who also spoke yesterday. He was a major player behind the stem cell bill and is the chair of the state’s Joint Committee on Public Health. A 2/3 majority was needed to veto-proof the bill…Mitt Romney was governor at the time and had vowed to veto a bill permitting human embryonic stem cell research.

So a law that at first seemed to be good for stem cell scientists has ended up actually hurting some, like Eggan. The moral of the story? States across the US have or are aiming to pass laws on stem cell research, in light of President Bush’s restrictions. Even if state laws are passed that support the research, they carry a risk of impeding it in ways.

All that discussion about payment for egg donors got me thinking about the ethics of this issue, and I couldn’t come up with any easy answers. Deciding how I felt about human embryonic stem cell research from an ethical point of view was easy for me. This payment issue is much tougher for me, and, for other scientists too. “George Daley”:https://www.childrenshospital.org/cfapps/research/data_admin/Site92/mainpageS92P0.html of Children’s Hospital talked about the wide range of opinions on this issue held by members of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (of which Daley is president) as they wrote up the “guidelines for the conduct of human embryonic stem cell research.”:https://www.isscr.org/guidelines/

Eggan said that the public and politicians were so consumed with the ethics and morality of human embryonic stem cell research that there wasn’t enough discussion about this issue of compensation for egg donors. Now that MA politicians have decided that stem cell research is ok, are we prepared to go back and talk about the compensation issue?

“Ian Wilmut”:https://www.scrm.mvm.ed.ac.uk/group_Ian_Wilmut.html, the Scottish scientist behind Dolly, was on hand to discuss one “way”:https://www.hfea.gov.uk/en/1496.html the UK is dealing with this thorny donor payment issue, which made sense to me. Couples undergoing fertility treatments could agree to donate some of the eggs to research and in return are permitted to receive some compensation, such as reduced treatment costs, provided that the couple gave informed consent. The Massachusetts law doesn’t allow for this so-called “egg sharing” approach, according to Eggan.

Overall, it was an interesting conference…definitely not your typical biology conference. Many top stem cell scientists from Boston were there, but they didn’t talk much about science. Instead, they sat on the same panels as patient advocates and in one session I attended, a couple of them even spoke a lot like advocates: the usual skepticism was replaced by passion about the promise and hope of stem cell-based therapy for disease. I wonder if having to work so hard to find non-NIH funding and earn public acceptance of stem cell science has made US stem cell researchers more likely than the average biomedical researcher to speak about the future and promise of their work in such optimistic and passionate ways.

There were a couple of bizarre moments in the afternoon, such as when a doctor from Chennai, India got up during a Q&A session and said how his work transplanting bone marrow stem cells resulted in some paralyzed patients getting up from their wheelchairs. Another paralyzed patient raved about treatment she received from another doctor in India…treatment that she said resulted in some regained sensation and the ability to wiggle her toes. She said she was a professional speaker and it showed. She spoke in a very dramatic, emotional fashion, claiming she’s living proof that human embryonic stem cell treatment works.

Both instances made me feel uncomfortable. Having hopeful doctors and patients present and involved in discussions about biology that most scientists in the field would say is still pretty far away from therapeutic reality can be risky. Still, those speeches did open up discussion about the risks of testing experimental treatments in humans too soon and with little regulation, so that was useful. I hope patients at the conference were able to get both sides of the story and that false hopes weren’t raised.