Roman Catholic Religion

The June 25 issue of Time Magazine has a rather pleasantly surprising and hopeful article on stem cell research. Many of us may recoil when we see the phrase "stem-cell research", just as I did when I saw the heading of this article. It's the story of a Japanese researcher (Shinya Yamanaka) who discovered that all he needed to do was modify 4 (four) genes in the cell of a mouse to enable it to revert to the state of a stem-cell and therefore enable it to develop eventually into more specialized cells. In a nut shell Yamanaka tuned a specialized cell into a non-specialized cell that could eventually be coaxed to become any other type of specliazed cell!

Such a technique, if reproducible with human adult cells, would be very pro-life indeed as no embryos are being destroyed in the process. It is equally amazing that the technique is so simple - tweeking four genes. It is "clean" compared to embryonic stem-cell research as there is no need for exploitation of a woman, man and child (the embryo).

You would be surprised that there has been no hurrahs for this team. What we see are the insistence of the Democrats in pushing for stem-cell resarch legislation that has been vetoed once again by President Bush. As long as the Democrats control the legislature, we will not see the end of more attempts at getting the Bill approved. We don't even see the mainstream media (besides Time Magazine) expounding on this exciting discovery.

Why not? Simply because embryonic stem-cell research is sexy. The media has hyped the concept of embronic stem-cell research as the pot of gold. The fact is that the less sexy stem-cell sources, such as, umbilical, placental and other adult stem-cells are not perceived to be sexy. There is also probably the psycological yucky effect with umbilical and placental tissue, which are by-products of the birth process. There could also be a rejection of adult cells as we perceive adulthood as old. Whereas embryonic cells are seen to young therefore the associated promise of new life and new hope.

We can only pray that God has guided Yamanaki's team to this discovery and will show the path to other scientists in other institutions to similar discoveries that are not associated with the destruction of innocent life. There is definitely more advances coming from the field of adult and alternative stem-cells than from embryonic stem-cells that are being researched by teams from several European countries. So there seems to be more hope in adult stem-cells for sure.