TITLE: Eskimo boy and his faithful dog, in an igloo
Stem Cells FAQs
New York Times
January 24, 2006
A Conversation With Douglas Melton
At Harvard's Stem Cell Center, the Barriers Run Deep and Wide
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - To enter his laboratory at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute here, Douglas Melton must use a special key card that electronically checks his identity.
Even before President Bush barred federal financing for most human embryonic stem cell research in August 2001, the work of Dr. Melton was mired in controversy.
And once the ban was enacted, a new set of barriers rose, extending the scientists' challenges far beyond the test tube.
At Dr. Melton's lab, embryonic stem cells from fertilized human eggs are part of a search for a cure to Type 1 diabetes.
Though Dr. Melton's research is privately financed, he must certify that no federal money supports any of his efforts. Hence the key cards. They provide a kind of barrier against people and things that have a federal tie.
"Running a stem cell lab is a little like keeping a kosher kitchen: you've got to really keep things separate," said Dr. Melton, who is 52. "Actually, a kosher kitchen is probably easier."
Q. Last month, after the Korean stem cell cloning scandal broke, a Roman Catholic scientist-theologian, the Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, told The Boston Globe that too many researchers in this renegade branch of science had been playing down the grave ethical concerns for much too long. What is your response?
A. My first response is, There's nothing unethical about what we're doing here. We think embryonic stem cells can be made to become pancreatic beta cells and that they will be able to help diabetics produce their own insulin. I've never once doubted the morality of this work.
This is all about differing religious beliefs. I don't believe I have the right to tell others when life begins. Science doesn't have the answer to that question; it's metaphysical.
Now it's true, we use fertilized human eggs to derive embryonic stem cells. And those fertilized eggs have the potential, under certain circumstances, to become a living person. There are many who believe that there's a moral imperative to use that potential to try to help living sick people.
I hold with them.
Q. You have a child at home with diabetes, right?
A. It's a little bit uncomfortable to talk about this. But it's not a secret. My interest was, for many years, in basic embryology.
When my son, Samuel, was about 6 months old, he came down with Type 1 diabetes, which means that his pancreas couldn't make insulin. About four years ago, my daughter came down with this same disease.
Like any parent, I asked myself, What can I do? The answer was to shift my research to an area that might help them.
I wanted my children to know I was doing everything I could for them.
Q. Does the Korean stem call scandal surrounding the stem cell research of Hwang Woo Suk make your work harder?
A. It has to raise, in the public's mind, the question as to whether there's legitimacy to this kind of science. Fortunately, stem cell research is not dependent on one discovery. Even though Hwang's findings turned out to be fraudulent, nothing he claimed was a fundamental challenge to the principles of embryonic stem cell research.
Hwang claimed to have successfully cloned human embryos, which was only a technical accomplishment. It's something that's already been done in animals.
If you ask me what really holds this research back, I'd say that the policies of the Bush administration have affected us more significantly than the Hwang debacle. The lack of federal support keeps many of America's brightest young scientists from working in this area.
Q. Were you ever skeptical of Dr. Hwang as he reported a succession of breakthroughs in human stem cell research?
A. I'd like to tell you I suspected something. I didn't. When his papers were published, I read them carefully. I was impressed by the speed and the efficiency by which he'd cloned a human embryo. We hadn't done those experiments ourselves. So I didn't know how difficult it would be in humans.
I met Dr. Hwang and his colleagues several times. He didn't seem nutty, squirrely or deceptive or anything like that.
Q. How exactly has President Bush's ban on federal financing for most embryonic stem cell study affected your research?
A. It made it more difficult, to say the least. Long before Bush's speech, we had planned stem cell experiments. Afterward, we were able to go forward because the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Juvenile Diabetes Association and Harvard alumni provided private funding.
However, because of administration policy, we had to set up this whole new laboratory that was separate from everything else here at Harvard.
And we had to separate the money in a really scrupulous way. We have an accountant who makes sure that not a penny of federal funds goes to embryonic stem cell research. We have separate everything - light bulbs, computers, centrifuges.
This can be burdensome. Most of the activities at this university receive federal money in some indirect way. So you have to ask yourself, "How can you do the research without any imprint of federal funding?"
And we're not just talking about equipment and real estate; it's people. Let's suppose there's a graduate student who's receiving a federally funded fellowship, can he or she participate in thinking about this research or even look at the data? The answer is no.
Q. Some say that your laboratory's existence proves that the Bush administration's directive didn't stop research in this controversial area. Are they right?
A. Listen, I'm a tenured professor at Harvard, where I have a president who backs my freedom of inquiry - and puts money behind it. If I'd been at a state college, it would have been a different story. Though some states are now keen to support stem cell research, state governments, at first, were very worried.
The bottom line here is that it's unlikely that one person or one lab will solve a problem as big as degenerative diseases, which is what stem cell researchers are trying to do.
It takes a community of people in an area to solve a big problem. If you were trying to solve cancer at two places, no one would think that was enough.
Q. Your lab created 30 stem cell lines and offered them free to any scientist who wanted them. Why?
A. Because in his speech, President Bush said that he was going to permit federal funding for scientists to work with some 60 pre-existing stem cell lines and it turned out that there were probably only about 10 usable lines. Maybe a few more.
And many of those were problematic. Some had abnormal chromosomes, like a cancer cell might. If you're using stem cells to create pancreatic beta or muscle or nerve cells, you want to begin with high-quality normal cells.
All the pre-existing lines were grown with mouse cells - which probably means you can't ever use them with human patients to treat diseases. Some of the lines, when researchers asked for them, came from a biotech company or some investigator who wanted to impose onerous restrictions on their use.
So we made our cell lines because we thought there aren't enough human stem cell lines around for researchers to really explore their properties.
We offered them free of charge because there's a long scientific tradition of making the fruits of one's research available to others.
Q. How far have you gotten in your quest to find a way to make pancreatic cells that will produce insulin for patients?
A. I'd say we've made progress. We don't know exactly how much because we don't yet know how many pieces there are in the puzzle we're trying to solve. I'm an optimist, though. I don't think we'll fail.
President Bush continues practice of taking audience questions 
Artwork from: http://www.dc37.net/news/PEP/6_2005/medicareD.html
A woman goes to the doctor for her yearly physical.
The nurse starts with certain basic items.
"How much do you weigh?" she asks.
"115," she says.
The nurse puts her on the scale. It turns out her weight is 150.
The nurse asks, "Your height?"
"5 foot 8," she says.
The nurse checks and sees that she only measures 5' 3".
She then takes her blood pressure and tells the woman it is very high.
"Of course it's high!" she screams,
"When I came in here I was tall and slender! Now I'm short and fat!"
Quoted from Maureen Dowd's New York Times column, dated 1-4-2006:
And since the imperial presidency is run by the vice president, W. has a lot of free time to do the things he likes to do. Confined with his wife and mother-in-law at the Crawford ranch, he spent his Christmas vacation mountain-biking and clearing brush.
He left the ranch for a brief visit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where he kidded in a way that again showed his jarring lack of empathy with the amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan:
"As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself - not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch. As a matter of fact, the colonel asked if I needed first aid when she first saw me. I was able to avoid any major surgical operations here, but thanks for your compassion, colonel."
"All of the concerns about contaminating proteins in existing stem cell lines can essentially be removed using this medium," says the Nature Biotechnology paper's lead author, Tenneille Ludwig, a UW-Madison research scientist working at WiCell who led the effort to develop the
new culture media. "This work helps us clear some of the major hurdles for using these cells therapeutically."
"We've been optimizing (culture) media on the existing stem cell lines since 1998, but it has only been recently that there have been dramatic improvements," says James Thomson, the senior author of the new study and a UW-Madison professor of anatomy who seven years ago was the first to successfully grow human embryonic stem cells in the lab. "This is the first time it has been possible for us to derive new cell lines in completely defined conditions in medium that completely lacks animal products."
Jan 3, 4:26 PM EST
Studies: Statins Don't Lower Cancer Risk
By CARLA K. JOHNSON
Associated Press Writer
CHICAGO (AP) -- Two new studies deal a double blow to hopes that cholesterol-lowering statin drugs could help prevent cancer as well as heart disease.
In one report, researchers analyzed 26 rigorous, randomized studies involving more than 73,000 patients and concluded that drugs such as top-selling Lipitor and Zocor had no effect on the risk of developing or dying from any form of cancer.
The findings appear in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.
The other study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found that cholesterol-lowering drugs, including statins, were of no benefit for preventing colorectal cancer.
"We were very hopeful that we would verify there was an anti-cancer effect," said C. Michael White of the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, who led the analysis appearing in JAMA. "We ended up showing no change in cancer or cancer death."
White said the new findings - as well as the rare but potential side effects of statins, which can include liver damage and muscle pain - should discourage doctors from prescribing them solely to prevent cancer.
People should continue taking them to lower cholesterol and prevent heart attacks, he said. "It really is a great drug for heart disease," White said.
Hope for statins as cancer fighters was sharpened by the fact that so many people already take them to lower cholesterol and the drugs are widely considered safe. Previous research, including animal studies and observational studies of people, had suggested statins might prevent various types of cancer.
For example, researchers looked at medical records for 1.4 million patients treated at 10 Veterans Affairs centers and found that those taking statins had lower rates of breast, prostate and lung cancer than those who hadn't taken such drugs.
And a study of Israeli patients published earlier this year showed a 47 percent lower risk of colorectal cancer in people who used statins for at least five years.
However, these were not randomized studies - meaning patients were not randomly picked to receive statins and then studied to see what effects the drugs had. Researchers consider randomized studies to yield the best evidence.
The colorectal cancer study was observational - the weakest sort of evidence - but very large. Researchers found no link between statin use and colorectal cancer when they looked at data on more than 132,000 people enrolled in the cancer prevention study.
In an accompanying editorial, John McLaughlin of the Prosserman Centre for Health Research in Toronto, wrote "... it remains premature to conclude that a large chemoprevention trial with statins that is aimed at reducing colorectal cancer risk is warranted."
White also believes it is time to stop spending money on more studies of cancer and statins.
However, Dr. Stephen Gruber of the University of Michigan, who led the Israeli study, said the new analysis is valuable but suggests that more research is needed.
"When you see contrasting conclusions like this, it's often an opportunity to learn more," Gruber said.
Top Ten George W. Bush New Year's Resolutions
From the "Late Show with David Letterman"
10. Fewer decisions based on wild, drunken hunches
9. Have N.S.A. find out what really happened between Nick and Jessica
8. Stop using Situation Room monitors to play X-Box 360
7. More C-SPAN, less "Yes, Dear"
6. Team up with leading scientists to make Cheetos even cheesier
5. To capture and bring to justice King Kong
4. Beat the twins at beer pong
3. Respond to reporters questions with, "Bitch, don't go there"
2. Scale back on grueling 12-hour work week
1. "Who needs resolutons? Everything is fine"
