The President's Council on Bioethics
1801 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20006
May 10, 2005
The President
The White House
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. President:
I am pleased to present to you Alternative
Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells, a White Paper of
the President's Council on Bioethics.Since the publication of
our report, Monitoring Stem Cell Research, in January of
2004, the Council has continued to ponder and discuss the ethical
challenges posed by human embryonic stem cell research and the
demands of scientists to develop new human embryonic stem cell
lines. While they may well in the future prove to be of considerable
scientific and therapeutic value, new human embryonic stem cell
lines cannot at present be obtained without destroying human embryos.
As a consequence, the worthy goals of increasing scientific knowledge
and developing therapies for grave human illnesses come into conflict
with the strongly held belief of many Americans that human life,
from its earliest stages, deserves our protection and respect.
Seeking to advance biomedical science while upholding
ethical norms, the Council has taken a keen interest in recent
suggestions that science itself might provide a way around this
ethical dilemma. Accordingly, we have been looking into ways of
obtaining pluripotent, genetically stable, and long-lived human
stem cells (the functional equivalent of human embryonic stem
cells) that do not involve creating, destroying, or harming
human embryos. We have found that there are, broadly speaking,
four such possible approaches: stem cells might be obtainable
from dead embryos; from living embryos, by non-destructive biopsy;
from bioengineered embryo-like artifacts; and from reprogrammed
adult somatic cells. In this White Paper, we introduce each of
these four approaches and offer a preliminary analysis of their
strengths and weaknesses, ethical, scientific, and practical.
While different members of the Council assess
the merits of the four proposals differently, the Council shares
the view that the group of proposals here discussed-and others
like them that they may stimulate-deserve the nation's careful
and serious consideration. We offer this White Paper both to enrich
and inform public discussion of the ethical dimensions of stem
cell research and especially to encourage scientists to explore
these and other possible ways to press forward with pluripotent
stem cell research in ways that all Americans can wholeheart-edly
support.
Mr. President, allow me to join my Council colleagues
and our fine staff in thanking you for this opportunity to offer
you and the American people our assistance in the critical efforts
to promote a biomedical science that will simultaneously serve
human needs and preserve human dignity.