An article appearing in last Friday's Daily detailed the new Tissue Research Center being established at Tufts through the hard work of Professor David Kaplan and many others in the Biological and Chemical Engineering department and the generous support of the National Institutes of Health. The article correctly states that the Center is "the first facility of its kind in the world," but goes on to claim that it "has put the University at the forefront of both tissue cell research and the controversy surrounding it," due to the fact that "Center researchers will be working stem cells."
A letter to the editor in Tuesday's paper pointed out a positive statement in Friday's article on stem cells and went on to discuss the ethical problems with stem cell research. However, while Boston is indeed at the forefront of the stem cell controversy, Tufts fortunately is not.
Not to disappoint a campus hungry for causes to inspire student activism, but the national stem cell debate is centered on embryonic stem cells, and only then because of their connection to the national divide over reproductive rights and morality. The Tufts Center, based on my own understanding, will focus on research that furthers our ability to produce viable tissues in bioreactors that can be implanted into humans, as well as research into related instrumental designs and procedures for surgeons and biomedical engineers. Some of this research will likely employ recombinant DNA techniques and other cutting-edge technology with somewhat dubious ethical and environmental impacts.
But these do not trespass into the politically charged embryonic stem cell domain.
The lab will likely work at some point with somatic stem cells, which are found primarily, but not exclusively, in bone marrow tissue. But these stem cells are not nearly as promising as the Bush administration presents them to be.
Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Leon Kass visited campus for the Snyder Lecture Series and implied that somatic stem cells were a viable alternative to embryonic stem cells because they could be induced to behave in nearly identical fashions. It is too early to make any definitive statements on stem cells as much more research is needed, but what we do know at this point suggests that Dr. Kass and the broader conservative claims about the promise of somatic stem cells is not true. In any event, there is no controversy involving research with these cells, and hopefully the Center will help advance the state of knowledge on them.
If you do want to rail against the immorality of stem cell research, I suggest hopping on the Red Line and heading over to Harvard, where a brand new embryonic stem cell lab is slated to begin construction. This lab, unlike the Tufts Tissue Center, is completely privately funded. NIH money is crucial for the construction and operation of Tufts' endeavor. These funds come with federal restrictions on the type of research done at the Center, including a ban on all but a handful of existing embryonic stem cell lines. The Harvard lab, since it is privately funded, will have no such restrictions.
I am by no means criticizing the writer of Friday's article. The topic was well conceived and the importance of biomedical research tends not to be sufficiently covered by the mainstream media. But there is a thin line to tread when writing on technical issues in order to both accurately present a topic and have it be both accessible and interesting to the everyday reader.
Justin Carlson is a junior majoring in biotechnology and international relations
