Tufts' new Tissue Center and Research Lab, the first facility of its kind in the world, has put the University at the forefront of both tissue cell research and the controversy surrounding it.
Center researchers will be working stem cells, which have promised progress in curing health problems such as torn tendons, juvenile diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease.
Stem cells have recently become a hot political issue - voters in California will soon decide whether to support a $3 billion federal spending bill to support such research.
The measure has been opposed by a bloc of largely religious voters on the grounds that ending the normal development of cloned human embryos to extract stem cells is morally unacceptable.
Tufts researchers at the Tissue Center will skirt the issue by using an uncontroversial form of stem cells derived from bone marrow, not human embryos.
"It's not an issue that the center is dealing with yet," Center Director David Kaplan said.
According to Kaplan, not all stem-cell usage is limited by the federal government - stem cells derived from adult bone marrow are generally free of moral argument.
"Human adult bone marrow provides an alternative source of cells to understand and study tissue development in the laboratory," Kaplan said.
Adult bone marrow stem cell research is permitted by the federal government and can be federally funded. The Tufts Tissue Center received funding for equipment and labor through a grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH).
Certain strains of embryonic stem cells, developed before the Bush administration imposed its ban on discoveries of new stem cell strains, are also legal and eligible for federal funding.
Were the center to begin using the legal embryonic stem cells, a reapplication for their grant would be necessary.
Kaplan could not say whether the center would ever use approved or unapproved embryonic stem cells, but said much more research was required a before moral consensus could form on the issue.
"There is still too little understood about the differences between embryonic and adult stem cells and research to have good answers." Kaplan said.
He also said that the current administration's ban severely impeded such research.
President George W. Bush opposes federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and Senator John Kerry supports it.
Stem-cell research has also become a rallying cause for celebrities including the late Christopher Reeve, Nancy Reagan, and Michael J. Fox, whose lives have been touched by diseases or accidents that stem cells may have the potential to cure.
But some critics say the entire biotechnology field is a slippery slope in terms of moral legitimacy. Their concerns have catapulted the issue to the forefront of the national consciousness.
Tufts Chaplain Father David O'Leary said important ethical questions in the field of bioethics have yet to be answered or even really addressed.
"Technology has to stop at some point," O'Leary said. "Just because we have the technology doesn't mean we should use it. At what point does technology say we don't want to go there - these questions still being raised on a local, national, and international level."
According to a Catholic Church-sanctioned pamphlet titled "Voting for the Serious Catholic" distributed to churches nationwide, Catholics must avoid, when at all possible, voting for a candidate supporting any one of five "non-negotiable" issues.
Embryonic stem cell research is included, as are abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, and gay marriage, described as elements of "intrinsically evil policy."
"Respect for the dignity of the human being excludes all experimental manipulation or exploitation of the human embryo," the pamphlet says. "Adult stem cells can be obtained without doing harm to the adults from whom they come. Thus there is no valid medical argument in favor of using embryonic stem cells."
Aside from bone marrow stem cells and those cloned in laboratories, stem cells can also be derived from embryos obtained from In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) clinics.
Lionel McPherson, lecturer on ethics in the Department of Philosophy, said leftover embryos in IVF clinics would stay unused regardless. "Tens of thousands of human embryos are left over from the process of IVF and are being discarded," he said. "Of course, this could be taken as a reason why IVF is also ethically objectionable."
Religious groups and conservative voters have not rendered assisted fertility measures a politically divisive issue, however.
