Hi. I am Art Caplan, from the NYU
Langone Medical Center, Division of Medical Ethics. What is going on in the
field of regenerative medicine with respect to stem cell research? We have
recently had yet another in a long series of scandals involving claims about
the ability to manipulate stem cells in ways that turned out to be utterly
untrue and fraudulent. In this case, a scientist in Japan said that she was
able to make adult stem
cells revert to embryo-like stem cells with some pretty simple chemical exposures.
It was announced in leading journals and covered extensively by the media. Then
she had to admit that no one could duplicate what she had done and confessed
that she had made it up.
This is not the first time that
this has happened in the stem cell field. Going back all the way to right after
Dolly the sheep was cloned, people were trying to clone human embryos to see if
they could get cloned human embryos from stem cells. A group in Korea announced
that they had made the first
cloned human embryos. Nobody could replicate what they did, and they
ultimately had to retract their claims published in leading scientific journals
that they had cloned human embryos. Stem cell research seems again and again to
go off the rails when it comes to the ethics of research. What is going on and
why is that so?
I think there are a couple of
reasons why this particular area has gotten itself in so much hot water. One is
that there is a relative shortage of funding. Because of the controversial
nature of cloning -- getting stem cells
from human embryos -- some avenues of funding have dried up, and it puts
pressure on people to come up with other ways to try to make human stem cells.
With less funding, there is more pressure. Sometimes people cut corners. I
think that can lead to trouble.
Another problem in the stem cell
field is that if you can come up with a way to produce human stem cells without
sacrificing or cloning embryos from humans, you are going to find yourself
being a hero to the world. That is what happened in Japan. There was so much
pressure to come up with an alternative to using human embryos to generate stem
cells, that if anybody said that they had done it, people wanted to believe
that it was true. When we are looking at science, we have a tendency to think
that it is a breakthrough, but there are no breakthroughs. There are only
breakthroughs that are confirmed.
There is a lesson here: Until
somebody replicates and until somebody can show that they can also do what has
been alleged, there isn't a breakthrough. There is only confirmation and then
breakthroughs. I think we have to be a lot more careful -- both in science and
in media coverage -- before we start saying, "Aha -- here is a single
study, a single report, a presentation. Now we have shown that something can be
done." It doesn't work that way. It has to be duplicated before we can say
that it is true.
Another major problem in the stem
cell field is that the number of people doing research in this area has shrunk.
It is obviously of keen interest to come up with regenerative medicine
solutions to all kinds of healthcare problems. I think a lot of post-docs and
graduate students are saying, "I am not sure that I want to set my career
track into a field that is sometimes controversial and where funding may be
dipping." That may mean that there are fewer people to watch one another.
It is not a big field, so maybe part of the reason that it keeps getting in
trouble is less ability to do peer review. There are fewer mentors and fewer
students because it is seen as an area that is too controversial to stake one's
career in.
I think a combination of factors is
getting stem cell research in trouble: shortage of money, our willingness to
look for breakthroughs because we want them so badly without demanding the kind
of replication and duplication that is a key part of science, and small numbers
leading to less peer review.
I am Art Caplan, at the Division of
Medical Ethics at the NYU Langone Medical Center. Thanks for watching.
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