Stem Cell Research's Wide Divide

Thirteen-year-old Svati Narula is one of the two million Americans with type-1, or juvenile, diabetes, reports The Early Show's Dr. Emily Senay.

"I look like a normal person," Narula said. "I look like I lead a normal life, but people don't realize that it's a lot harder than it looks."

Svati's mother Elna Narula says juvenile diabetes is a full-time job for kids.

"I think one of the hardest things about having diabetes, any chronic illness, especially type-1 — juvenile diabetes for kids — they never have a day off," Elna said.

Elna wants to spare her daughter from complications of the disease--nerve and kidney damage, even blindness.

"Those things happen," Elna said. "I've seen it. I've been a nurse for over 22 years and it happens."

The Narulas' hope for a cure, a cure they believe may one day come from stem cell research--a technique using human embryos to obtain embryonic stem cells, cells many scientists say could become replacement tissue to treat diseases like diabetes. But in the process the embryos are destroyed. And that is precisely what politicians are debating in Washington: Should the government expand funding for this research on human embryos?

"The deliberate destruction of unique living self-integrated human persons is not some incidental tangent of embryonic stem cell research, it is the essence of the experiment: kill some in hopes of saving others," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said.

Despite vocal opposition like that from Delay, a bill that would greatly expand federal funding for embryonic stem cell research recently passed in the House of Representatives with the support from other republicans like Randy Cunningham.

"I am for life and the quality of life but I don't want another six-year-old to die. You cannot look a child in the eye when the only chance they have to live is this."

But opponents like Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) intend to the fight the bill.

"We're putting one set of human lives above another set of human lives, and the reason we do so is because the one set that we're favoring here, that the House passed, can speak and can vote and the others can't," Santorum said.

"The consequence of the current federal policy is not to prevent this work from being done," said Doug Melton of Harvard University's Stem Cell Institute. "It's just a guarantee it'll take ten times longer."

Melton wants to see stem cell research go forward, both for professional AND personal reasons.

"I have two roles: one is as a scientist working on a cure for diabetes, but then like millions of parents, I unfortunately have two children who suffer from the disease," Melton said. "Like any parent, I'd like to do anything I can to try to find a cure."

"It's very frustrating to have a federal policy which says this work can be done, but only sort of with one hand tied behind your back — with shackles," Melton said. "Either we should do it or we shouldn't"

Right now Melton conducts research with both private and federal funds. But government restrictions on how those federal dollars are spent create real obstacles for him and his colleagues.

The division is so sharp that here at Harvard's stem cell lab scientists have to separate all their equipment. In this lab, all the supplies, even the felt tip pens, are paid for using federal money only. But down the hall is a lab, where all the equipment the scientists use is paid for only with private money.

"Every embryo is unique and genetically complete, like every other human being," President George Bush said at a recent press conference.

The bill to increase federal money for embryonic stem cell research is about to come up for a vote in the Senate, but President Bush has already promised to veto it.

"These lives are not raw material to be exploited but gifts," Mr. Bush said.

To prove his point, the president made his remarks surrounded by Snowflake Babies--babies born from frozen embryos left over from fertility treatments. Under President Bush, the government has funded a program to encourage families to donate these embryos rather than discard them.

And one of them is now two-year-old Noelle Faulk. She was donated as an embryo to her parents, Stuart and Paige Faulk, by another couple who had completed fertility treatment.

"It is absolutely morally wrong, legally wrong, spiritually wrong to use these embryos for anything else," Stuart Faulk said.

The Faulks' chose this route as a statement of their faith and belief that life begins at conception.

"I think the people that are leaning towards research are saying, well, you know, it's just out there in a Petri dish," said Paige Faulk. "And it's not viable yet. But we disagree with that. She was frozen for five years. She's pretty viable to me."

"So as I see it what we're dealing with is nascent human life. Just as we should not discriminate based on race or ethnicity or sex, we shouldn't discriminate based on age or size or stage of development or condition of dependency," said Princeton University Professor Robert George. He sits on the President's Council on Bioethics and recommended to the President that's scientists look for ways to find cures with stem cells.

"Where we have an ethical problem, what I think we should ban is the deliberate destruction of human embryos to obtain the cells," George said.

"It's important to explore the full implication of the claim that an embryo is equivalent to a person, that it's like a baby," said Michael Sandel of Harvard University. Sandel also sits on the President's Council on Bioethics but disagrees with his colleague Robert George.

"If you believed that it was, then of course you would oppose embryonic stem cell research. It would be a kind of infanticide, But then you wouldn't just want to deprive infanticide of federal funds, you would want to ban embryonic stem cell research, you would want to punish scientists who engaged in it, and for that matter, you'd want to ban all fertility treatments that created and discarded excess embryos," Sandel said. "We might even ask whether we should be providing burial rites and funerals for lost embryos if you play out the moral logic of that position."

"The pro-life position is to use these stem cells to save lives," Republican Senator Arlen Specter said.

Specter is sponsoring the bill to expand federal monies. And for him the stakes are high. He has been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma

"These embryonic stem cells have tremendous flexibility," Specter said. "And the scientists know more than the people in the White House. And the scientists tell us that have enormous potential to cure diseases like the one I am suffering now."

Scientists like Evan Snyder don't want to wait for the federal government. He left the East Coast for California, which passed Proposition 71 last November. The government has pledged $3 billion dollars of state money for research regardless of what happens back in Washington.

"I am a physician, meaning that I take care of real kids with real problems, many of them lethal," said Dr. Evan Snyder. "The impatience is just excruciating."

For Svati Narula, time spent debating the issue is time wasted in the search for a cure.

But for those who oppose the research, like the Faulk family, it's a matter of taking one life to save another. The conviction on both sides ensures the debate will not end any time soon.