Without addressing the author’s various political statements, the article included a number of insightful
statements about embryonic stem cell research. Some of those are excerpted below.

Please take a look at the excerpts below, and feel free to discuss here. We pose the following questions
related to the article:

• As the author asks, “What enemy could be bigger than chronic (incurable) disease and disability?”
• Do you agree with the author that “Cure research [such as hESC research] is the only way to cut the
  mountain of medical debt”? Why or why not?
• The author writes: “Embryonic stem cells were only isolated in humans in 1998, so the adult version
  had a half-century head start, not to mention massively preferential funding.” Does this make you more
  optimistic about the prospect for hESC-based therapies?

Excerpts from the story are below.

Posted: August 13, 2010 04:20 PM

How Stem Cell Research Can Unite Democrats, Excite Independents, and Marginalize the GOP

By Don C. Reed

Seventeen months ago, March 9th, 2009, while my paralyzed son Roman Reed watched from his wheelchair in the second row of the audience, President Barack Obama smiled, reached for a pen, and scrawled his signature at the bottom of a document. Then he did it again, with another pen, and copy of the document, repeating the action five or six times.

He was keeping a campaign promise, reverse the stem cell research restrictions of his predecessor. Embryonic stem cell research could now move forward, with the blessing and the backing of the United States government.

What enemy could be bigger than chronic (incurable) disease and disability?

The number of children and adults affected by chronic illness or injury runs from a “low” estimate of 100 million according to the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research to the statistic given by a Johns Hopkins study, which describes as many as 133 million Americans suffering chronic disease.

And disabilities? According to the U.S. census, “51.2 million people…had some level of disability and 32.5 million (11.5% of the population) had a severe disability.

Chronic illness grows the deficit, like a financial cancer.

In 2009, direct costs of chronic disease reached $1.65 trillion — as much as the entire national debt increase ($1.6 trillion) for the year.

Unless we are to abandon our loved ones, we have no choice but to either find a cure for them, or continue paying their hospital bills as long as they live. Since most of us cannot afford this, we increasingly turn to the government, which means taxes — and increases to the deficit — which is already imperiling our children’s future.

Cure research is the only way to cut the mountain of medical debt [emphasis ours].

Think what research meant for polio. Before the Salk vaccine was discovered, polio was the number one fear in America. Not only were people becoming paralyzed and dying from it, but the cost was growing and growing.

If the Salk vaccine had not been developed through research, it is estimated we might be facing medical expenses approaching $100 billion a year, right now, for this single disease, just to keep sufferers alive, gasping in their iron lungs.

That gigantic expense is gone now; we don’t have to pay for polio any more.

But consider this: the vaccine was developed from research involving embryonic tissue. That did not stop President Eisenhower from honoring Dr. Salk.

Business leaders have an important and legitimate concern: they can’t afford ever-growing health care costs for their employees.

How can incurable disease ever be fully insured? To pay the medical bills of an employee for the rest of his or her life, no matter how much hospitalization and special treatment is required? The costs are increasingly impossible to meet.

Consider: all federal income taxes combined ($1.2 trillion last year) are less than the cost of chronic disease and disability ($1.65 trillion). If we poured every dollar from our federal tax receipts into health care for the chronically ill — it would not be enough.

And everybody — Republican, Independent, or Democrat — wants jobs. Right now, what industry shows more growth potential than biomedicine? In California biomed is already the second largest industry — and growing so fast a special law had to be passed (Senate Bill 471, the Biomedical Training and Stem Cell Research Education Act, Romero/Steinberg) to insure enough trained workers would be available to meet the growing demand. How many industries can make that claim nowadays?

Catholic voters, like my family, have been mercilessly inundated with anti-embryonic stem cell research “information”. Yet poll after poll shows strong majorities of American Catholics in support of the research. A recent Gallup poll of the general public cited 63% Catholic support, compared with 62% of non-Catholics.

Indeed, a 2004 poll of Catholics only (conducted by former President George W. Bush’s polling company, Belden, Russonello & Steward) showed that: “A large majority of Catholic voters (72%) supports ‘allowing scientists to use stem cells obtained from very early human embryos to find cures for serious diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and Parkinson’s.’”

Very few people believe the “stem cell research equals abortion” nonsense anymore. They can verify the truth easily, because: in embryonic stem cell research, there is no pregnancy. An abortion without a pregnancy is like a man giving birth — impossible.

Embryonic stem cells are made from biological materials (sperm-egg blastocysts) left over from the fertility procedure — and only when the decision has been made to discard as medical waste. Without the nurturing shelter of a mother’s womb, it is biologically impossible to make a child. This is not rocket science: no mother, no baby.

Embryonic stem cells were only isolated in humans in 1998, so the adult version had a half-century head start, not to mention massively preferential funding[emphasis ours].

Just a few days ago, something wonderful happened: approval of the world’s first human trials of embryonic stem cells.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave long-awaited permission to Geron’s attempt to ease paralysis with embryonic stem cells.

That matters to me, and to my family.

My son, Roman Reed, is paralyzed from a spinal cord injury he received in a college football game fifteen years ago.

Roman inspired a California law, the Roman Reed Spinal Cord Injury Research Act of 1999. This legislation provided initial funding for the embryonic stem cell research of Dr. Hans Keirstead, carried forward by Geron. For the past eight years, the scientists and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have been testing the procedure again and again, to make it as safe as humanly possible. (There is never perfect safety; people died testing the polio vaccine; indeed, people die from simple accident in standard medical procedures.) Finally, the FDA gave it the go-ahead.

Ten newly paralyzed children or adults will be given the chance my son never got: to maybe get well.

I have seen the therapy work. On March 1, 2002, in the Reeve-Irvine Research Center at UC Irvine, I held in my hand a laboratory rat which been paralyzed, but which scampered now, tail high — and this while my son sat in his wheelchair a few feet away.

This was the research featured on 60 MINUTES, which made Christopher “Superman” Reeve famously say, “Oh, to be a rat!”

Reeve also sent our family a dictated letter saying, “One day,Roman and I will stand up from our wheelchairs and walk away from them forever.” Cure did not come in time for our paralyzed champion, but the flame of his faith still lights our way. We will “go forward”, as he always said, and we will prevail: not only in paralysis, but in much more.

FDA permission opens up an entire field. Other diseases potentially affected by this single therapy include: multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s diseae) and Spinal Muscle Atrophy (SMA) a hideous disease which kills children, often before the age of two.

Success in this first attempt (all phase one clinical trials focus on safety: that is the initial and primary goal) will make easier the path for all future human embryonic stem cell (hesc) therapies to follow.

Do we still need embryonic stem cell research, now that the new “reprogramming” of cells, (induced Pluripotent Stemcells, iPS), can use genes to “turn back the clock” on adult cells to make them seem like embryonic? Absolutely. ESCR is the gold standard, by which every other method must be judged [emphasis ours].

As Dr. Kevin Eggan of Harvard put it, “Everything else is an imitation; HESCR is the real thing” [emphasis ours]. Even the best alternative form has problems which may take years to resolve. Also, iPS was developed by studying embryonic stem cells in the first place.

What do the experts think?.

Ninety-three percent of scientists support government funding of embryonic stem cell research.

But let’s take a different tack.

How many major scientific, medical, patient advocate or disease groups oppose embryonic stem cell research funding, even in the very moderate forms described in the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act? To the best of my knowledge, not one. The groups which took the trouble to officially oppose it are either religious or ideological.

There are so few, I can list them for you.

What does it all boil down to? Every American family has the right to the best medicine science can provide.

“FDA Lets Human Embryonic Stem Cells Trials Resume
Geron will begin tests of its therapy for spinal cord injury. Advanced Cell Technology hopes to follow with a stem cell treatment for blindness.”
Read the “FDA Lets Human Embryonic Stem Cells Trials Resume” article here

Advanced Cell Technology responded by saying:

“Today’s news from Geron is a very positive development, and we are excited for the company and for the stem cell sector, overall. The indication for which Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) is developing an embryonic stem cell-based treatment, Stargardt’s Disease, is very different from the condition that Geron is targeting, and there is certainly room for multiple therapies to be developed concurrently. The industry needs some wins, and once we receive FDA approval we look forward to joining Geron as one of just two companies to initiate a human clinical trial using human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), possibly later this year.
- William Caldwell, Chairman and CEO, Advanced Cell Technology, Inc.

• Are you aware of the ways in which the biotechnology industry is developing cures and treatments for life-threatening and debilitation diseases, using embryonic stem cells? (Tell us, we want to hear your opinions on the subject, positive or negative.)
• Does today’s news from Geron make you more optimistic that treatments and cures based on the embryonic stem cells will actually find their way to clinics and physicians’ offices sooner rather than later?

What do all these diseases and conditions have in common? All are chronic, debilitating conditions for which modern medicine has fallen short in terms of providing truly effective treatments, let alone cures.

Many scientists agree that only the field of embryonic stem cell research truly has the potential to develop cures for these and other conditions in coming years. Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) is at the forefront of these efforts.

One major hindrance to advancement in this promising field of research has been the ethical concerns expressed in certain quarters, revolving around the ways in which embryonic stem cells are derived. Fortunately, ACT has come up with a bridge between the two sides in this seemingly intractable ethical debate.

ACT has created a new method for deriving embryonic stem cells without doing any damage to the embryo. Called the “Single-Cell Blastomere” (SCB) technique, it is a method for deriving these “master” cells without affecting the developmental potential of the embryo. First described by ACT scientists in a major paper in the scientific journal Nature, this proprietary technique mitigates the major ethical concerns heretofore surrounding the sector.

Using its proprietary SCB technology, ACT has developed a treatment for eye disease, specifically a form of Macular Degeneration called Stargardt’s Macular Dystrophy (SMD, also known as Stargardt Disease), a form of juvenile macular degeneration that causes progressive vision loss, eventually resulting in blindness.

In studies designed to satisfy the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), this treatment has already been tested on animals and has demonstrated an excellent safety profile. FDA approval for a “Phase I/II” clinical trial is anticipated later this year. Twelve patients are to be enrolled into the study, at three clinical sites throughout the country.
This would mark a historic milestone: the first-ever FDA-approved human clinical trial using embryonic stem cells. After years of anticipation, it would mark the arrival of embryonic stem cell research into the clinic.
ACT believes this initial program will help validate human embryonic stem cell research as a viable path towards true cures for a variety of debilitating diseases and conditions, including those listed at the beginning of this blog post. After success with this program, the “flood gates” might well open.

With this background in mind, we at ACT pose the following questions, to patients, patient advocates and other interested parties:

• Do you know anyone with Macular Degeneration or Stargardt’s Disease?
• What is your view on using stem cells to treat disease?
• Have you heard before of ACT’s “embryo-safe” technology? What are your impressions?
• Does the growing government support for stem cell research change your attitude toward it?

You may remain completely anonymous in your post, feel free to post responses here using the comment button below or Join us on facebook and share your strength and hope.

For individuals suffering from a debilitating disease or condition, as well as their loved ones: The day is drawing nearer when a host of debilitating diseases and conditions can be not only treated but actually cured using “immortal,” pluripotent stem cells. Stay abreast of the latest developments and meet others interested in this promising field.