The Real Lessons Of Stem Cells

"Embryonic stem cells without embryos? Could it really work?" George W. Bush's question was directed to me. It was May of 2005, and the president, vice president and half a dozen White House staffers—of whom I was easily the most junior—were gathered in the Oval Office. I was a member of the domestic-policy staff, and the briefing was on the state of the stem-cell debate, which fell in my portfolio.

Toward the end of the meeting, I gave Bush a copy of a report about to be published by his bioethics council, entitled "Alternative Sources of Pluripotent Stem Cells." The council (on which I had previously served as executive director) had been looking into obtaining the kind of valuable cells researchers derived through the destruction of embryos, but without requiring such destruction. If an alternative worked, it could offer a scientific way around the ethical dilemma at the heart of the embryonic-stem-cell debate.

The most ethically and scientifically appealing of the potential approaches the council's report raised was what it termed "somatic cell dedifferentiation": taking a mature, adult cell and turning it into the equivalent of an embryonic cell without the need for an embryo.

And in my conversations with scientists that spring, I discovered that work toward this approach was much further along than the council suggested. Again and again researchers said there was real promise there, and pointed to preliminary work at Harvard and in an Australian lab. So could it work? "The scientists seem to think it could, with time," I told the president, "but no one knows for certain."

In the months that followed, we did what we could to gather information and to help. Several researchers came to meet with the president, and we on his staff talked to many more. Bush also began to mention the subject in remarks on the stem-cell debate. And he sought to put funding where his mouth was. In 2007, he signed an executive order to increase support to such techniques.

All the while, against immense political pressure, Bush stood his ground on the basic moral conviction that because we are all created equal, nascent human lives should not be treated as raw material for experimentation. We could support medical research without crossing that line.