Tomorrowland (25 page)

In the remaining two methods, fetal stem cells are culled from aborted fetuses or embryonic stem cells are removed from unused embryos taken from in vitro fertilization clinics. And it is these final two methods that have put stem cells into the middle of America’s reproductive rights debate.

“Every year since
Roe v. Wade
, thousands of women have been having abortions,” explains Alta Charo. “That’s thirty years — an entire generation of women who have experienced the ability to choose. That’s a huge demographic imperative. The evangelical right is fighting against a culture of tolerance for embryonic destruction, and they’re losing that fight every time a woman knows she can make a choice.”

While opponents have been trying to oust
Roe v. Wade
for
thirty years, one of the main reasons it’s held fast is the idea that a human embryo does not have the same rights as a human being. Thus, to overturn the decision, you need significant evidence showing that the American people have changed their minds and now feel that embryos are people too — an idea that is more than a little problematic.

For starters, while the Bush administration and the evangelical right are waging war against stem cells, neither has said a peep about fertility clinics. Yet, during the normal process of in vitro fertilization, embryos are destroyed by the boatload. Current techniques cull twenty or so embryos for every one that’s implanted. The remainder are frozen for short-term insurance (to make sure that implantation took), then eventually discarded. But it’s bad politics to piss off sterile parents and the billion-dollar industry they support, so both the Bush administration and the religious right have stayed mum on pregnancy, yet become exceptionally vocal about stem cells.

Then there’s that other problem — embryos really aren’t people too. “When I’m trying to explain this issue to a reporter or a congressman,” says Irv Weissman, “I run a little experiment. I’ll walk up to a stranger on the street and ask them to draw an embryo. Invariably, every time, without fail, they draw a fetus with a face. But a fetus with a face is not an embryo.”

An embryo is a scientific term used to describe the period of time from when a zygote is formed until the time it begins to have discernible organs — meaning that the word
embryo
was literally created to distinguish it from a fetus. It is nothing like the cartoons that people draw. There’s no face. Nothing even vaguely human. Under a microscope, it looks like a tightly wound ball of waxy string.

To come at this from the other direction, the current medical definition of death is the cessation of brain function. This means that the opposite of death — the beginning of life — must be the emergence of brain function. Scientists believe that the earliest
signs of an active nervous system are the development of pain responses, which show up around the nineteenth week of pregnancy, or long after an embryo has become a fetus.

If you ignore these facts and still want to prove to the Supreme Court that both the scientific community and the American public have changed their minds about the status of the embryo, then you need precedents. The evidence would have to show that in related — but not abortion-specific — cases the embryo is now being afforded the same protections as both a fetus and an adult human.

To this end, President George W. Bush stacked a bevy of antichoice judges in the lower courts and appointed a pro-life attorney general in John Ashcroft. Then, in October 2002, the administration changed the section of the Health and Human Services charter that regulates research done on human subjects. The old charter granted legal protection to adults and fetuses. The new version protects embryos as well. Next, while women’s groups had been lobbying the government to provide health care for pregnant women, the Bush administration extended the reach of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to cover both embryos and fetuses but, oddly, not pregnant women. Bush also lobbied for a ban on partial-birth abortions — which would criminalize a procedure now used primarily in extreme, life-threatening situations — and reinstated Ronald Reagan’s gag rule, barring federally funded family planners from discussing abortion or providing abortion services.

“The point of these things,” says Allison Herwitt, director of government relations for the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, “was to weave embryonic rights into law. These were not individual occurrences. They were a well-crafted strategy to end legal abortions. And one of the next steps in that strategy is to outlaw stem cell research — not because the research itself is in question, but because banning the way that research is conducted can help them to achieve their true goal.”

4.

Under a microscope, stem cells are even less impressive than embryos. They grow in tiny clusters — when magnified tenfold, individual cells are still smaller than pinheads — and look not unlike slimy, slightly metallic grapes. “It’s almost funny,” says Dr. Larry Goldstein, “that something this dull-looking could cause such a fuss.”

Goldstein, another scientist in the middle of the stem cell storm, is a handsome, plainspoken man in his late forties. As a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, Goldstein oversees twenty-three researchers and several thousand mice. His work involves trying to decode how proteins, lipids, and organelles move through the neurons and brain cells, which is information that could help us cure Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease. But to get this information, he needs stem cells.

Currently, much of Goldstein’s work involves nonhuman-derived stem cells, which are not technically a point of contention. “But five years from now,” he says, “if I want to actually cure these diseases, I’ll need access to human embryonic stem cells, and I want to make sure they’re available.”

The issue of stem-cell availability is another front in this battle. In the summer of 2001, just after his first State of the Union, President Bush issued an executive order restricting federal research money to seventy-eight previously harvested lines of stem cells. These lines were cultivated between 1998, when human embryonic stem cells were first isolated, and that 2001 moment further research was nixed. “The problem,” explains Weissman, “is that all seventy-eight lines come from people who utilize in vitro fertilization clinics. IVF clinics serve a very specific segment of the American population. The stem cell lines are taken from rich, white, infertile people. One of the fundamental principles of bioethics is distributed justice. That means when scientists work on
medical cures, they want to develop cures for everyone — not just rich, white, infertile people.”

The impact of Bush’s order was considerable. Almost immediately, University of California, San Francisco stem cell pioneer Roger Pedersen packed his bags and his lab and moved to England, a country with no restrictions on this research. Other nations, including Israel, Japan, France, and Australia, have also declared their friendliness to the work. Singapore took an even more aggressive stance, calling itself an “international center for stem cell study,” then breaking ground on a $15 billion research park and quickly poaching top US scientists — including, for example, Edison Liu, once a leading scientist at America’s National Cancer Institute and now the head of Singapore’s new Genome Institute.

These developments have proven especially troubling for California, which is far and away the nation’s leader in biotech research. To give this a little context, in 2002, Californian biotech firms were granted over 19,000 patents. The next closest state was New York, with 6,100. Yet California also took a $12 billion dollar hit in the dot-com crash of 2001 and is running an annual budget deficit close to $35 billion. In other words, now and moving forward, the biotech industry is absolutely critical to California’s survival.

To combat the brain drain and bring more biotech money into California, state Senator Deborah Ortiz (D-Sacramento) introduced Senate Bill 253, which allows the use of state funds and private donations for stem cell research within California. It was signed into law on September 20, 2002, with Governor Gray Davis telling reporters: “By signing SB 253, we have opened the door to important life-saving research in California . . . We fully expect stem-cell research to attract world-renowned scientists to our state. Currently, there are 2,500 biomedical companies in California that employ 225,000 people. During 2000, this industry paid its employees $12.8 billion. While this life-saving research will continue to bring the necessary funding into the state, it will more importantly save lives.”

Not interested in losing their own shot at the “necessary funding” and almost immediately after the bill’s passage, four other states — Rhode Island, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania — enacted similar legislation. Both Massachusetts and New Mexico are now considering similar proposals. Ironically, the use of states’ rights to bypass federal control has lately been a Republican tactic, especially favored by evangelical Christians in their attempts to ban abortions (and block gay marriage), but here co-opted by liberal Democrats. Another tactic long favored by conservative Republicans in their attempt to oust lefty values from the crevices of government has been the creation of special-interest lobbying groups and their ruthless application of pressure.

As it turns out, two can play at that game.

5.

Jerry Zucker is the creator of his own brand of movies, a genre of wacky comedy that began with
Kentucky Fried Movie
, was perfected in
Airplane!
, and includes both the
Naked Gun
and
Police Squad
franchises. Without question, he’s Hollywood royalty. But unlike other Tinseltown royals, Zucker has never been especially political. That would change.

In 2000, Zucker found out that his eleven-year-old daughter, Katie, had juvenile diabetes. Immediately, he began researching the disease. A year later, he started hearing stories about stem cells and how they might be able to not just provide better treatment for Katie, but could actually provide a cure for the disease. This was also when he heard that the Bush administration was working hard to halt this work. “As a director,” says Zucker, “I tend to be calm. I try not to get carried away or lose my cool. I don’t want to be another Hollywood maniac. [But] what was going on with stem cells made me very angry.”

Through sad circumstance, Zucker and his wife, Janet, got to know producer Douglas Wick (
Gladiator, Stuart Little
, and
Working
Girl
), and his wife, Lucy Fisher, the former vice chairman of Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group. Wick and Fisher also have a daughter with juvenile diabetes. In the summer of 2002, this foursome formed the stem cell research advocacy group Cures Now, hired a lobbyist, and went to Washington. They took their daughters and Caltech biologist David Anderson along. It was, as Zucker explains, an educational crusade meant to exert considerable pressure: “We would walk in to a senator’s office with my daughter and her insulin pump attached to her belt and ask them what was more important — my daughter’s life or the life of a couple of cells?”

Cures Now had an impact. One of their early converts was Utah Republican pro-life advocate Orrin Hatch. Centenarian Strom Thurmond also joined their cause. And Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle agreed not to put a Senate stem cell bill on the floor for a vote until Cures Now had a chance to talk to everyone who would listen.

A lot of that talk has involved Zucker and Co. trying to separate fact from fiction. Over the past few years, there has been a concerted effort among stem cell foes on the religious right and within the Bush administration to conflate therapeutic cloning (which produces stem cells) with reproductive cloning (which produces carbon-copy humans). This is also where Leon Kass comes into the story.

Dubbed “The President’s Ethics Cop” by
Time
, Kass is a University of Chicago bioethicist and was head of Bush’s influential Council on Bioethics, which is charged with advising Congress and the administration on stem cells. A few years back, Kass wrote a now-famous article for the
New Republic
, “Preventing a Brave New World or Why We Should Ban Human Cloning Now,” explaining the mechanics of somatic cell nuclear transfer — the main way scientists obtain stem cells.

What is cloning? Cloning . . . is the production of individuals who are genetically identical to an already existing individual.
The procedure’s name is fancy — “somatic cell nuclear transfer” — but its concept is simple. Take a mature but unfertilized egg; remove or deactivate its nucleus; introduce a nucleus obtained from a specialized (somatic) cell of an adult organism. Once the egg begins to divide, transfer the little embryo to a woman’s uterus to initiate a pregnancy. Since almost all the hereditary material of a cell is contained within its nucleus, the re-nucleated egg and the individual into which it develops are genetically identical to the organism that was the source of the transferred nucleus.

Scientifically, Kass is correct, except — and this is a big except — the somatic cell nuclear transfer process actually stops short of transplanting that egg into a woman’s uterus. What Kass knows, but is choosing not to acknowledge here, is that once that new egg begins to divide, it can be used to either create stem cells or to create a carbon copy human. But it’s an either-or. Using somatic cell nuclear transfer to create stem cells actually destroys the embryo. Moreover, almost no one wants to see the technology used for reproductive cloning. Pretty much every mainstream scientist, including Irv Weissman and Larry Goldstein, are seriously opposed to this procedure. But, because the subject is tricky and the news media tends to prefer sexy headlines to complicated reporting, Kass’s conflation had an impact.

In the spring of 2001, a pair of cloning bills was introduced — one in the House, one in the Senate — that outlaw all forms of cloning (both reproductive and therapeutic), with severe penalties of up to $1 million and ten years in prison for either doing research in this field or receiving medical treatment based on that research. This means, if the French invent a stem cell–based cure for Alzheimer’s, and you go to Paris for treatment and then try to reenter the United States, well, you go straight to jail.