Stem cell concerns aired in Senate hearing

Cohen

Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson faced some tough questions from lawmakers and scientists Wednesday about the viability of the 64 stem cell lines eligible for federal funding. CNN Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen said the hearings raised specific concerns.

Q: What specific concerns were raised at the Senate hearing?

A: At the hearing, senators as well as a scientist and a bioethicist expressed some very specific concerns about President Bush's decision on August 9 to give federal funding only to 64 stem cell lines that were made prior to August 9. Remember this is the first congressional hearing on Bush's decision because when he made it Congress was on vacation.

The first question was -- are 64 stem cell lines enough? Why not give federal funding to more than that since more stem cell lines will inevitably be made in the future? There was a special concern whether or not all 64 lines are ready to go. Some of them have just been started. Thompson said clearly some of them are not ready for research yet, but he said it's only a matter of months before they're ready for research. The NIH has to accept applications to get money to do work on these cells and that will take several months. Those two events will go on concurrently and everything will work out fine.

Q: There's also concern about how these stem cell lines were created. What is at the heart of this concern?

A: Stem cells are made in much the way people are made -- a sperm and an egg meet. In this case they meet in a petri dish. The resulting embryo is allowed to grow for about five days. The stem cells are then extracted from it and cultured so they can grow. You can theoretically get millions upon millions of cells but you have to give those cells something to eat, basically. What they give them are mouse cells. They do that because mouse embryonic stem cells were made years before human ones were and that's what they used for mice so they just continued using that when they made human embryonic stem cells. But, there's a concern. If you take a human embryonic stem cell cultured in mouse cells and make a medical treatment out of them you're then giving human beings mouse cells. There are very serious medical concerns about doing that.

Q: Is this concern legitimate?

A: I spent the day with a company called BresaGen which owns four of the 64 stem cell lines that are eligible for federal funding. An executive there told me that lawmakers and scientists are right to be concerned. They don't see that any of their stem cell lines could actually be used to make treatments for human beings. They said these cells can be used in the lab. Years from now, when they can make a treatment for human beings they're going to need a whole new set of embryonic stem cell lines that don't use mouse feeder cells. Those new lines would not be eligible for federal funding because obviously they'd miss the August 9, 2001, deadline. So, that brings up a whole list of new questions.