He told the senators that stem cells offered hope for Sam and others and described the promise for producing healthy islet cells that could be transplanted into a patient, or for producing bioengineered islet cells that would not be susceptible to an attack by a patient’s immune system. He talked about the ethical quandaries but said that he and the diabetes foundation “feel that appropriate safeguards can and should be established,” suggesting, as other proponents do, that stem cell research should be federally funded. Soon after, he joined a task force to help form the policies of the Clinton administration, which determined in 2000 that stem cells were not embryos under an act of Congress that forbids research on human embryos. The Clinton White House—and, presumably, a succeeding Gore White House—was poised to allow broad funding of embryonic stem cell research with safeguards when George W. Bush was elected. When the Bush administration at first failed to take any action on furthering stem cell research, Melton joined James Thompson and others in a lawsuit to force action, which was obviated when President Bush announced his stem cell policy in August 2001.
In 1990, the former president George H. W. Bush, the first Bush president, summed up the idea of scientific balance in a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. “Science, like any field of endeavor, relies on freedom of inquiry; and one of the hallmarks of that freedom is objectivity.” Under his son, President George W. Bush, and the Republican-led Congress, the pendulum in the debate between objectivity and ideology has taken a different swing. In 2003, the House of Representatives passed a bill calling for a complete ban on all forms of human cloning. The bill lumped together embryonic cloning to create stem cells with reproductive cloning, which virtually everyone believes should be banned. Under the proposed legislation, Doug Melton and his colleagues would face up to ten years in prison and fines of at least $1 million for cloning embryonic stem cells. In the 2003–2004 Congress, the Senate’s version of the bill failed to muster enough votes to pass. Proponents of a full ban and criminalization have vowed to introduce the bills again in the current Congress, which includes added numbers of conservative Republicans who are likely to support this legislation.
In the United Nations (UN), the Legal Committee of the General Assembly in 2003 defeated by one vote a measure to recommend to the full assembly a ban on all cloning, deciding to reconsider the issue in two years. Had the ban initiative reached the floor of the full assembly, a United States – led coalition advocating the ban looked likely to win, as the Bush administration claimed to have the support of 100 of 191 members. Such a ban would be nonbinding, but should it pass, it would send a loud message. The UN briefly reconsidered the measure in 2004, spurred on by the Bush administration, but again decided to postpone a vote.
I ask Melton whether he ever thought he would be jumping into the middle of a politics maelstrom like this.
“No, I never really thought much about that. It’s related to the accident of my own family history.”
“What has the experience taught you?”
“I was so naïve about the political process,” he says, “about how important policy decisions are made. I found that shocking. So I started to speak out, particularly against bioethicists, who I think are self-appointed priests of certain political views, saying to them, ‘I don’t know why you think you have the right to say what is ethical and what isn’t, and that my own views should have as much validity as theirs.’ I find that when most people say ethics what they really mean is ‘moral,’” he adds, “and that it has to do with their religious beliefs. No one’s really trying to do unethical things.”
He is dismissive of most of the bioethicists appointed by Bush to the President’s Council of Bioethics, a committee that is supposed to base its decisions on scientific findings but has been criticized by Melton and others for undue partisanship. He finds the chairman of the council, the University of Chicago physician and bioethicist Leon Kass, to be “extremely political.” Kass is a strident opponent of many genetic therapies that might be used to enhance or alter humans. He opposes efforts to extend life span by using genetics, and although he supports some stem cell research for medical treatments, he opposes the destruction of embryos to secure stem cells.
I ask Melton what he thinks the role of government should be for something like stem cells.
“I think the government needs to create the conditions for what I would call an informed debate,” he says. “And it’s not easy for someone sitting in my position to say that without sounding arrogant, but the simple fact is that our Congress doesn’t often think about the things that they’re trying to legislate on. They don’t educate themselves on what is the basic biology. And I can give numerous examples. A wonderful question was asked to people who are writing legislation on AIDS, if they know the difference between a cell and a virus. Most didn’t.”
4
In Melton’s office he shows me his personal bench, telling me it’s a little unusual for a principal investigator in a large lab to do basic experiments. Typically, these are done by graduate students and post-doctoral students. He also points out that he intentionally has no windows here to prevent distractions. He tells me that the lab is using frogs, chickens, and zebrafish, but primarily mice for their experiments. The lab has tracked the phases of development of a pancreas from embryonic stem cells that form the endoderm and then go through a complicated series of steps involving the activation of genes and proteins that cause different organs to develop according to a programmed schedule in their DNA. Melton says that researchers have learned a great deal but still don’t know all of the genes and steps needed to drive stem cells from their undifferentiated state to fully formed islet cells.
“What are you actually doing in your lab?” I ask.
“In here now, mostly what we’re doing is trying to turn embryonic stem cells into pancreatic beta [islet] cells that make insulin,” he says. “And so we do that with two approaches: one is to take the human ES cells and just try to make them do that, and the other is to study how mice and chickens and frogs normally make a beta cell, and then use that to inform our thinking about humans.”
“So you actually have some stem cells right here in this lab?”
“They’re in the incubator down the hall.”
“And you’re using private money?”
“It’s a mix. I’ve had Howard Hughes money but more than half my lab’s funding comes from the federal government. But we’re not allowed to use the federal funds on these human ES cells.”
I ask him why he thinks people fear this sort of research.
“I think that’s a deeply interesting subject. What is the source of that fear and maybe to take a digression on it, I would tell you that my own view is that there is an innate fear to crossing boundaries; people feel secure with boundaries. Why have ideas of chimeras fascinated man for millennia? Minotaurs and mermaids? Why is that so intriguing? If you think about it, the whole idea of classifying animals, which must have been invented in about the eighteenth century, that you could find a thing called ‘species,’ gave one a sort of stamp of approval on the idea that there is a natural order, there are boxes, there are shelves where everything has its so-called natural place. What is natural and what is antinatural changes with time, and is a very difficult subject. I’m thinking of offering an undergraduate course on the concept of nature.”
“But you now have the ability to create real chimeras—a human brain in a dog, or something,” I say. “This is upsetting to some people.”
“People get the heebie-jeebies when you talk to them about