On a Thursday afternoon earlier this year, Willy Lensch sat at his desk in the “nonpresidential” section of a seventh-floor laboratory at Children’s Hospital Boston and watched in dismay as one of the recent congressional debates about embryonic stem cell research streamed into his laptop. Employing the arch rhetoric that has typified stem cell politics since 1998, some members of Congress denounced the research because it requires the destruction of human embryos. Others trumpeted “alternative” techniques that promise the creation of embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. Stem cell scientists like Lensch have heard it all before, and it never feels comfortable. “You feel the heat working on stem cells,” he said. “I’ve been working in labs for 20 years, and this is a different deal.”
While conservatives in Congress took turns echoing George W. Bush’s opposition to destroying human embryos for research, Lensch’s colleague Paul Lerou stepped into a small room behind a heavy black curtain to check up on a line of nonpresidential embryonic stem cells. These human cells were ineligible for federal research funds because they had been created after President Bush’s August 9, 2001, announcement freezing the number of government-approved stem cell lines. Every piece of equipment in the “nonpresidential suite”—the incubator, the microscopes, the boxes of gloves, and even the wastebaskets—carried a warning sticker reading “NP,” a brand intended to keep it separate from the items that are for federally funded hands only.
Lerou maneuvered the nonpresidential plastic dish under a nonpresidential microscope and adjusted the focus. “So that’s them,” he said, pointing out some of the nonpresidential embryonic stem cells that have been created and distributed among researchers since 2001.
When you glimpse these human cells in the lab, they make about as much of an impression as a black-and-white TV in the age of streaming video. Clumps of the cells floated, like wet pieces of dandruff, in a little plastic dish containing a fluid that looked a bit like watered-down pink mouthwash. Under magnification, each patch of the cells had a smooth, blobby surface. Yet each little scrap contained hundreds of cells that had the potential to grow into 200 distinct human tissues: heart tissue, neural tissue, liver, kidney, bone, muscle, and of particular interest in this laboratory, blood.
“And, like, that’s what all the fuss is about?” Lerou asked rhetorically.
In fact, these researchers are never far from the fuss—it follows them at meetings, in newspapers, on TV, and right into these balkanized labs, where certain scientists can use the equipment while others can’t. For some, the fuss is accompanied by a vague cloud of threat: Pictures of Kevin Eggan, a Harvard stem cell biologist, have appeared on antiabortion Web sites, where readers are urged “to stop madmen like Eggan.” And the fuss has mired cutting-edge science in a kind of bureaucratic sludge, bogging it down in an almost mindless series of administrative details. The questions that come up every day are so intricate, so Talmudic, that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) might as well be funding laboratories to have a rabbi on call.
In the research bay at Children’s Hospital where Lensch and Lerou conduct their experiments, for example, the NP sticker on an item distinguishes it from items purchased with the support of federal funds. To do experiments, these labs must purchase separate stocks of the most ordinary supplies—pens, pencils, clear plastic pipettes, household bleach, even Reynolds aluminum foil—and slap a sticker on them.
“If we run out of distilled water on this side of the bench,” Lensch explained, pointing to the narrow nonpresidential lab counter with supplies marked NP piled up to the ceiling, “I literally cannot reach across the bench and get it from the other side. Can I ask my colleague on the other side for advice? If he receives federal funding, does asking for advice violate federal policy? You just go down this rabbit hole. . . .”
The Harvard Stem Cell Institute is a loose-knit group of scientists in Boston and Cambridge who have opted to conduct this research in that rabbit hole, often without federal funding and despite political and logistical impediments the likes of which the public rarely glimpses. “The climate has become so burdensome in terms of regulation,” lamented George Daley, who heads the lab where Lerou and Lensch work. “The hurdles have become so much higher to get anything done, and it’s only the most intrepid people who push ahead.” Why? Because biologists like Daley are convinced that embryonic stem cells—the most generic, versatile type—may not only lead to dramatically different new treatments but can also uniquely illuminate the origins of disease in a way adult stem cells never will.
Over the past nine months or so, the news for stem cell research has sounded deceptively positive. Last January, the House of Representatives voted, 253 to 174, to pass a bill, H.R. 3, that would allow researchers to use leftover embryos from in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics to create new lines of embryonic stem cells, and in April, the Senate passed its version of the bill. But as long as the president vetoes such legislation, as he did in June, and as long as the current Congress is unable to override those vetoes, there is unlikely to be any change in federal stem cell policy.
For years, this tumultuous political climate has forced most ambitious stem cell researchers to run an obstacle course. In California, the state’s $3 billion stem cell initiative, passed in 2004, was bogged down by court challenges from conservative groups until the spring of 2007 (the first $45 million in grants was awarded only last February). Stanford University recently spent $15 million to outfit a separate nonpresidential laboratory—a facility that university lawyers insisted should have “no smell ever of NIH money,” according to Stanford biologist Irving Weissman. And in Bethesda, Maryland, where the NIH puts federal money where the administration’s mouth is, the government has spent roughly six times as much in the last six years on human nonembryonic stem cell research as for human embryonic stem cell research.
