ScienCentral: Reagan Stem Cells
Friends of Nancy Reagan say she plans to devote herself to pushing for federal support of stem cell research that scientists believe could lead to a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease. With Ronald Reagan’s death she’s expected to be more aggressive in asking the Bush administration to reverse its ban on stem cell research involving human embryos�a policy that led one leading American scientist to move his lab overseas. This ScienCentral News video has more.
Stem Cell Support
Ronald Reagan’s tragic deterioration from Alzheimer’s, the progressive, degenerative brain disease that currently devastates over 4 million Americans, was hidden from public view. But his wife Nancy has publicly asked for support of stem cell research, including research on very early human embryos. “Science has presented us with a hope called stem cell research, which may provide our scientists with many answers that for so long have been beyond our grasp,” she said after accepting the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s “Care Giver�s Award” on May 9th, 2004. “I just don�t see how we can turn our backs on this.” Stem cells have the potential to turn into any type of body cell, including brain cells.
Roger Pederson, professor of regenerative medicine at the University of Cambridge and director of the Cambridge Centre for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine, believes that stem cell research provides us with a whole new way of understanding health and diseases. “We are more than just a bag of DNA,” he says. “We are more than just our genetic material. We replace ourselves continually…This continual renewal or turnover of cells is what keeps us healthy. If we didn’t have cells being produced constantly from our stem cells, we would become very ill very quickly and die. In fact, the diseases that we see that are untreatable currently, are often diseases of tissues that don’t work effectively to renew themselves from stem cells�diseases of the heart, diseases of the pancreas, diseases of the brain.”
image: NBC News
In 2001 President Bush banned federally funded labs from doing research that involves the creation of any type of human embryo. That led Pedersen to leave the University of California at San Francisco for England. “The United States government had at that moment cancelled its plans, suspended really any consideration of funding this area of research,” Pedersen explains. “And I had by then dedicated my entire lab to carrying out research on human embryonic stem cells. I had to consider other options. One way would be to stop working on human embryonic stem cells, but I didn’t choose that option. I chose to move to a country that was willing to provide support, broad support for this research.”
While the U.S. supports research using stem cells from adults, Pedersen says learning to transform those cells for therapy will still require understanding embryonic stem cells and “what it is about the egg that has this awesome power, that it can take a body cell and turn it into a cell that can make every tissue in the body,” he says. “So just imagine that we do understand the secret of the egg. Then we could hopefully take tissues that are specialized and turn them into another type of cell, without going through the egg.”
New Jersey recently joined California in deciding to support embryonic stem cell research, but state dollars can’t come anywhere near the funding levels of federally supported research. “What we’re hoping is that the insights that we get from studying stem cells in the petri dish will lead us to an understanding of how to make that process work better in the body,” says Pedersen.