Adult Stem Cell offer hope and help for Parkinson’s

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0501319.htm

Stem-cell debate has personal ramifications for Catholic family

By Nancy Frazier O’Brien
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) — After 14 years with Parkinson’s, Patricia Payne would give almost anything to be free of the debilitating tremors that are characteristic of the disease and the constant pain caused by bone disintegration around her lower spine.

But as a Catholic and the mother of five, she will not consider any treatment that would involve the destruction of human embryos.

“I don’t want to see cures, even a cure for my terrible disease, to be obtained by destroying a fellow human being at the earliest and most vulnerable stage of their existence,” Payne recently told a joint committee of the Massachusetts Legislature in emotional and exhausting testimony.

“To kill one human being for the benefit of another is never morally justifiable,” she added. “To kill the weak in order to benefit the strong is even more objectionable.”

Still feeling the effects the next day of her appearance before the committee and the more than four-hour round trip to Boston, Payne spoke with Catholic News Service by telephone from her home in Winsted, Conn. She was joined by her husband of 40 years, Richard, whom she met when both were working for separate offices of the Canadian bishops’ conference.

Before the hearing, “I was extremely agitated and nervous, and I wanted to back out,” Patricia Payne said. “But my husband reminded me that I was not alone, and that it’s better to be a little nervous than to be without any nerves.”

Payne told Massachusetts’ newly created Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies that she has been selected as one of a dozen participants in the next phase of Dr. Michel Levesque’s adult stem-cell research and therapy program to treat Parkinson’s. The phase 2 clinical trials were to begin in about eight months.

Levesque, a physician and neuroscientist based at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, has developed dopamine-secreting neurons from patients’ own brain tissue and transplanted them safely back to the brain, greatly reducing the symptoms of Parkinson’s.

After the first phase of the trials, in 1999, Parkinson’s patient and retired nuclear scientist Dennis Turner — who had been unable to use his right arm because of the extreme shaking caused by the disease — was virtually symptom-free for nearly five years and regained sufficient motor control to indulge his passion for big-game photography on safari in Africa.

“Adult stem cells have treated and cured literally tens of thousands of people with almost 100 different diseases,” Patricia Payne told the Massachusetts committee. “How many people have been cured of any disease using embryonic stem cells? The answer is zero. None. Instead, the history of embryonic stem-cell research is replete with monstrous tumors, tissue rejections and immune reactions.”

One of the biggest misconceptions about stem-cell research is that the Catholic Church opposes it, said Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, who studied neuroscience at Yale University and theology at Gregorian University in Rome. On the contrary, he said, the church supports three of the four ways that stem-cell research currently is being conducted:

— Adult stem-cell research, involving the growth of stem cells from the patient’s own tissue or that of another living donor.

— Stem cells developed from umbilical cord blood or placentas after a delivery is completed.

— Cells from fetal tissue derived from miscarriages (also called spontaneous abortions), as long as the parents give informed consent.

Only the use of embryonic stem cells, usually harvested from living embryos five to seven days after their creation in a test tube, is morally unacceptable, because it involves the killing of a human being, he said.

Father Pacholczyk, a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Mass., who is director of education for the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, spends much of his time on the road, addressing national conferences, college groups, legislators and church-sponsored gatherings on the stem-cell issue.

“Just getting the basics out is the biggest challenge,” he said. “There are so many people out there who are trying to make the argument that it’s not a human being if it’s created for ‘therapeutic cloning.’ The issue is being systematically obfuscated.”

The only difference between an embryo created for “reproductive cloning” and one intended for “therapeutic cloning,” the priest added, is that the goal of the former “is to have a baby, walking and talking,” and the intent of the latter is “to strip mine the embryo at its earliest stage for the desired cells.”

“There’s a failure to understand that both kinds of cloning make a human being by a series of technological steps,” he said.

That’s the kind of information that the National Catholic Bioethics Center has been trying to disseminate since its founding in St. Louis in 1972 as the Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Research and Education Center.

“We were set up while abortion was still illegal in this country,” said John Haas, president of the center. “No one had ever even heard of HIV/AIDS. No one had ever even heard of stem cells, much less embryonic stem cells. Back then it was inconceivable that one could clone a human being or clone a mammal. So we’ve been through a lot.”

But whether the ethical issue relates to cloning, informed consent for clinical drug trials or in vitro fertilization, the center’s emphasis has always been on defending the dignity of the human person, Haas said.

“And we count all human beings of equal dignity, from the moment of conception until natural death, in whatever state they find themselves,” he added. “If you start excluding certain groups, what are the criteria that you’re using to exclude them? Then it becomes absolutely arbitrary.”