British Stem Cell Support Lures U.S. Scientists
11/17/2002
CAMBRIDGE, England, Nov 17, 2002 (The Boston Globe - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News via COMTEX) -- Roger Pedersen had spent three decades in his San Francisco lab studying human embryos, and the powerful stem cells within, when a lilting British accent on the phone upended his life.
It was April of last year: US medical researchers and the new president were on a collision course, the scientists proclaiming embryonic stem cells the next big thing while President Bush looked warily at the new science, which requires the destruction of human embryos for its raw material.
So Pedersen called his British colleague back, said yes to the job offer, and took 30 years of knowledge and a still-burning desire to heal across the Atlantic Ocean. He assumed a powerful perch in the Renaissance-towered University of Cambridge's surgery department, from which he now guides an all-out national push, tinged with Union Jack patriotism, to bring stem cell medicine to England first.
"I'm a scientist," said Pedersen, whose stature has put him at the center of Prime Minister Tony Blair's directive to make Britain the world's leader in stem cell research. "Having decided to focus my career on helping people through stem cell research, I did not feel [the Bush administration] could stand in my way."
Stem cells are the key component of fetal development, capable of transforming into any human tissue, and doctors hope to harness them to replace diseased or damaged tissues, potentially treating conditions such as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, spinal damage, and host of other ailments.
But as Americans continue to debate the ethics of embryonic stem cell research, the British are charging ahead. Blair has made stem cell research part of his campaign to restore national pride. And the government's Medical Research Council is directing the effort, funneling funds to researchers and setting up a "bank" where they have easy access to the prized stem cells. Though Pedersen has no formal title, he is taking the lead in organizing stem cell research and recruiting scientists into the field.
In the United States, by contrast, Bush's recently enacted limits on taxpayer-funded stem cell work have produced a sluggish, decentralized research effort.
The differences offer ample proof that politics can dramatically shape science. The antiabortion movement here noticeably lacks the teeth of its US counterpart, which pressured Bush to set limits on embryonic stem cell work. And organized religion here has a muted presence in politics, while religious denominations wield considerable influence in American life.
Perhaps most telling: To date, the US National Institutes of Health has spent $18.8 million for ongoing human embryonic stem cell research. Much smaller England has set aside $57 million and encouraged foreign researchers to relocate to England, though Pedersen is the only big name to take the offer so far.
As a result, dozens of government-funded labs here are either preparing to grow stem cell lines or work with them. And Pedersen and collegues are organizing committees that will guide the research nationwide.
Pedersen excitedly discussed the effort from his office here on a rainy, gray afternoon, soggy green fields and a tiny gray-bricked hamlet visible outside his office window on the bustling medical campus of the Addenbrookes Trust hospital.
The 58-year-old scientist began his academic career at a one-room schoolhouse in Fawnskin, a rugged small town in southern California. He earned a PhD from Yale, then settled down for 30 years at the renowned University of California at San Francisco's biological sciences department.
As a pioneer in the fledgling field of embryonic stem cell research, he struggled often to win US government funding, clashing with the Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and, finally, George W. Bush administrations. Pedersen grew frustrated with NIH's on-again, off-again endorsement of embryonic stem cell work, which seemed to shift with the political winds. But he doesn't feel he's sacrificed much by moving.
"I do miss my friends," he said, adding that e-mail, phone, and jet travel bridges the distance. "If you choose to, you can be anywhere."
Cambridge scientists actively recruited Pedersen, and he in turn has been quietly encouraging US scientists to join him.
Pedersen decided on his move in May 2001, just months before stem cell science landed on the national agenda. In fact, before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, transformed American politics, stem cell policy was one of the nation's hottest issues. Bush had delivered a prime-time address outlining his stem cell policy just weeks before the terrorist attacks. His policy required US stem cell scientists seeking taxpayer-funded grants to work with a small, preapproved supply of about 60 human embryonic stem cell "lines," or batches of stem cells each derived from a single embryo.
Bush reasoned that by limiting work to these lines, which already existed at the time of his policy, the government would not have to financially support the destruction of any more human embryos, a necessary part of creating new lines.
But scientists argued that limiting lines would limit research. As it turns out, only about a quarter of the 60 lines are available for use, while the rest are tied up in various financial and scientific complications. To date, only eight US scientists have received US government grants to work with approved lines, two in the Boston area: Harvard's Doug Melton and Dr. George Daley at the Whitehead Institute. But even Daley complained of the cumbersome Bush regulations.
"If there was a bank of stem cells that allowed easy, open access, that definitely would make it easier than fighting through the paperwork of multiple institutions, which we've been doing to get cell lines," he said.
Such a bank looms large on Pedersen's agenda these days. The British government recently opened a stem cell bank, a London-based lab that stores quality-controlled human embryonic stem cell lines available to any approved British researcher. This centralized approach contrasts to the current US system, in which the federally approved lines are held by a patchwork of companies and universities scattered around the world.
But the most dramatic contrast between the two nations will emerge a few years from now, said scientists, when British scientists begin to make significant medical discoveries.
Currently, scientists do not fully understand the biological mechanisms at work in stem cells. In a few years, many researchers said, this will be remedied. Then, patient treatment tests could begin -- but not necessarily in the United States.
"We hope there's not a therapy available in the UK that's not available here. That would be tragic," said Dr. Robert Goldstein, chief scientific officer for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, which privately funds some US stem cell research.
Pedersen believes British patients will indeed get experimental stem cell treatments before Americans.
"The clinical interface is going to happen here," he said.
It's hard to discern if Pedersen has made personal sacrifices to participate in the British effort. He refuses to discuss his family, perhaps a holdover from the controversy he faced in the United States for his embryo work. That controversy, however, is nowhere to be found in England.
Many observers believe religion lies at the root of the difference. Abortion politics remain high profile and contentious in the United States, with church-based groups providing much of the opposition. But England's most powerful religious institution, the Church of England, though against abortion, has raised few objections to stem cell work, even praising the British government's decision a decade ago to create a regulatory branch dedicated to embryo work, which paved the way for government support of stem cell work.
The Church of England, led by Queen Elizabeth, allows laity to shape church policy, and the result has been muted criticism of abortion, which the British government's national health care system covers. Antiabortion groups here have little influence.
"The prolife groups in the US know what they are doing. The ones here are useless," said James Dowson, national coordinator for UK Life League, an upstart antiabortion group seeking to radicalize the movement here. "They're very middle-class, very proper, very soft. They like to have tea with politicians. A bunch of amateurs."
Meanwhile, stem cell scientists here work quietly, appalled at the political rancor in the United States.
"People here just don't worry about what you do with a bunch of cells in a petri dish," said Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics for the National Institute for Medical Research in London and an administrator at the stem cell bank.
Pedersen, when asked to account for the difference in attitudes between the two countries, paused for a moment.
"There is a lot of fear about demystification of our own origins, that somehow that will take away from our specialness," he said, explaining that the research would unveil how complex humans arise from simple embryo cells. "For some reason a lot of people would rather stay in ignorance."
But he predicted the Bush policy would soon crumble: "When clinical treatments become available, that are safe and effective, the patients will go wherever that's available. And that's going to be a huge medical and economic force that will have to be dealt with politically. I think it will all take care of itself."
Would he then return to the United States?
"You never know," he said.
By Raja Mishra
To see more of The Boston Globe, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to
boston.com
(c) 2002, The Boston Globe. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. |
