Posted on behalf of Brendan Maher, locum Nature biology features editor
Last night I went to the Philadelphia public television station WHYY, to see an independent film on stem cell researcher Jack Kessler of Northwestern University and the sharp turn his research took when his daughter lost the use of her legs after a skiing accident. The movie is called “Mapping stem cell research: Terra Incognita”.
Shot in stark video, the piece paints an intimate portrait of Kessler, his family and his “other” family — the postdoc and student working on a spinal regeneration project under his direction. The movie is positioned to put a human face on the ethics of embryonic stem cell research. Kessler is an outspoken activist for this kind of work – moreso even than his college-aged daughter, who just wants to get on with her life.
I was more compelled by the personal look at his postdoc and student, as they test the effects of injecting a self-assembling gel matrix into severed mouse spinal cords and see if axonal growth is able to cross a crucial barrier. It’s a live animal follow-up to the experiments presented in this Science paper.
In the movie you see tense lab meetings with negative results, time-consuming troubleshooting, and that odd mistrust that junior researchers feel about their results that is overshadowed by the enthusiasm of a PI. Ultimately, their paper is rejected from Science without review. Not your happiest of endings, but certainly appropriate.
The screening was followed by panel discussion including science journalist Marie McCullogh from the Philadelphia Inquirer; Jonathan Epstein, a University of Pennsylvania stem-cell biologist; and two bioethicists, Paul Root Wolpe from Penn and Catholic priest and biologist, Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, who appears in the movie comparing embryonic stem-cell research to slavery. Needless to say, it was a heated discussion about the nature of the embryo and the equivocation between potentiality and identity. The roundtable more or less proved that the recent discovery of reprogrammed, or induced pluripotent stem cells, in no way changes the nature of the debate.
The question was raised, but never adequately answered by the main stem-cell opponent in the room (that would be Fr. Tad) whether it would be acceptable to use treatments, if ever developed from these induced cells, based on the fact that they were made possible by research he finds otherwise abhorrent.
The film starts running on US public television stations on 15 January. A listing of screenings around the country is available here.
Cross posted from Brendan Maher on The Great Beyond.