Missouri Struggling with 'Therapeutic Cloning'

More than 60 people came to the Capitol last week to share their stories with senators who are considering a bill that would ban a procedure for growing stem cells, the building blocks of all human tissue.

Martie Meador, a mother of four from Warrenton, said that the research technique creates a human embryo that is killed when the stem cells are removed. That makes the price of potential new cures too high.

Testifying against a ban was LaNeal Skinner of Kansas City. Her husband, Gary Skinner, was 49 when they learned that he had Alzheimer's disease, which plunged them into a three-year spiral of despair.

Skinner pleaded with senators to let the research go forward so that future Alzheimer's victims wouldn't suffer the same fate as her husband, who died in 1999.

The woman's testimony brought into focus the questions that senators are grappling with as they decide on the proposed ban. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote Monday on legislation that would declare a certain type of cutting-edge medical research a felony in Missouri. A similar bill was introduced this week in Kansas.

The controversy involves a technique known as therapeutic cloning. Researchers take a human egg cell and remove its nucleus. They take the nucleus from an ordinary body cell and transfer it into the hollowed-out egg cell. The egg cell is stimulated to divide, just as an egg cell does after fertilization by a sperm cell. The cells are placed in a nutrient culture and allowed to develop into a ball of about 300 cells. Inside that ball are the stem cells that have yet to differentiate into nerve, muscle, blood or bone cells.

Researchers are trying to discover how to prod the stem cells into becoming the various tissues of the body such as insulin-producing cells for diabetics or new nerve cells for spinal injury patients.

Gov. Matt Blunt said this week that he does not believe that the process creates a new human life. Blunt said that if the bill reached his desk, he is likely to veto it.

Meador and at least 19 other witnesses said that the cell created in the cloning process is a human embryo, just like an egg cell that is fertilized by a sperm.

James Cole, the general counsel for the anti-abortion group Missouri Right to Life, said that the technique is the same used to create cloned sheep and mice.

Even a few respected researchers said that limits must be imposed on research involving human cells. Richard Chole, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said, "I'm committed to advancing science. But a line has to be drawn somewhere, and I believe it should be at the creation of human life for the purpose of destroying it."

About 40 opponents of the ban said that the technique does not create a human life, only a cluster of cells identical to the patient who donated the nucleus. They urged senators not to block the dramatic advances in medical care that the technique might offer.

William Neaves, the president of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, which wants to do embryonic stem cell research, pointed to the writings of Richard McCormick, a Catholic priest considered one of the American church's leading medical ethicists.

McCormick noted that the majority of human eggs fertilized within a woman's body never implant in the uterus. Therefore, the fertilized egg is not a human being until implantation, he concluded.

Since it is not a human being, the ball of cells that result from fertilization could be used in medical research to help the sick, McCormick wrote. Therapeutic cloning, however, never even gets to that point, because the ball of cells that develops is not the product of a sperm and an egg, Neaves said.


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