Talking Points:
"Draft National Institutes of Health
Guidelines for Research Involving Human
Pluripotent Stem Cells"

[Federal Register, December 2, 1999 --pages 67576-9]


The National Institutes of Health has issued draft guidelines under which, for the first time in history, our federal government will officially approve and regulate the destruction of innocent human life for research purposes. The guidelines instruct researchers in how to harvest versatile "stem cells" from living week-old human embryos, a procedure which kills the embryos. They also establish standards for harvesting similar cells from dead unborn children following induced abortions --a practice that has its own increasingly visible moral problems (see recent news reports on trafficking in fetal body parts), but is in accord with a federal law enacted in 1993. The new moral and legal frontier broached by these guidelines is the destruction of live embryos specifically for federally sponsored research --on the pretext that no one will care anyway, because these are "spare" embryos from fertility clinics that are "in excess of clinical need." Only a large volume of critical comments by taxpayers will convince federal lawmakers that people do care about this moral atrocity.


  1. The NIH Guidelines Demean Human Life

    • These guidelines are not designed to implement current laws and regulations protecting the human embryo from harmful experiments --they are designed to undermine that protection.

    • The guidelines tell researchers to assure parents that their "early human embryos...will not survive" the experiment, but "will be handled respectfully, as is appropriate for all human tissue used in research" (p. 67578). In short, live human embryos are dismissed as mere "tissue" to be destroyed for useful cells.

    • This destruction is justified by, among other things, the prospect that use of the resulting cells may reduce the need to use "laboratory animals" for drug testing (p. 67576). The human embryo ranks lower in status than a laboratory rat.

    • Since 1975, embryos in the womb at this same stage of development (about a week old) have been seen by the federal government as "human subjects" to be protected from harmful research (see 45 CFR §46.201 et seq.). Yet the NIH now decides that the same embryo outside the womb can be exploited and killed as mere "tissue." Even the NIH's own Human Embryo Research Panel in 1994, and President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission in 1999, admitted that this embryo is a developing form of human life that deserves respect.

  2. Evading the Law

    • Since January 1996, federal law has banned federal funding of "research in which a human embryo or human embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for fetuses in utero" under federal human subjects regulations.

    • Relying on a single deeply flawed legal analysis by the General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH guidelines mangle the plain meaning of the federal law, narrowing it to ban only funding of the specific act of destroying the embryo.

    • Through these guidelines, the NIH directs how embryos are obtained for destruction, regulates the process for obtaining consent from the parents, determines which categories of embryos may be destroyed for the federally funded research project, etc. It is crystal clear that the process of destroying the embryo for its stem cells is an integral part of the research project receiving federal funds. The person destroying the embryos can even be the same as the person who then uses the stem cells thus obtained --simply using different funds for the two activities.

    • Embryos are deemed eligible for destructive research if they were originally created for reproductive purposes but are now seen as being "in excess of clinical need" (i.e., are unwanted by the parents). But current federal law on embryo research was clearly designed to extend the same protection to these embryos that is now provided for the unborn child in the womb. That law prohibits any effort to select an unborn child for risky or lethal research because he or she is "unwanted" and slated for a future abortion. That principle is ignored here.

  3. NIH Ignores the Alternatives

    • While claiming to set standards for "human pluripotent stem cells," the guidelines then define "pluripotent" cells as those "derived from early human embryos or fetal tissue" (page 67577). This scientifically questionable semantic device avoids the fact that the benefits claimed for embryonic cells may be pursued using adult stem cells, without violating moral or legal norms.

    • A year ago it was claimed that embryonic cells were necessary for stem cell research because they were unique in their ability to self-renew for long periods and to create tissues and cells of widely differing types. But this claim is well on its way to being discredited. For example, see the December 7 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (muscle tissue producing a wide array of blood cells), July 6 issue of the same journal (long-term culturing and growth of adult stem cells), May 14 issue of Science (bone marrow stem cells producing liver and other tissue) and January 22, 1998 issue of that journal (neural stem cells producing blood cells).

    • Even the NIH Human Embryo Research Panel and the National Bioethics Advisory Commission said human embryos should not be exploited except for vitally important research that cannot otherwise be done. Embryonic stem cell research cannot be shown to meet that test.

  4. These Guidelines Set the Stage for Further Abuses

    • No embryos "created for research purposes" are to be used (p. 67579). But the distinction between "spare" embryos and those specially created for research is easy to evade: Infertility clinics can simply create more embryos at the outset, ostensibly for fertility treatment, so they will have more "spares" left for research. Ironically, the funding separation attempted by these guidelines, requiring the NIH to accept at face value the assurances researchers provide as to how they used private funds to obtain and destroy embryos, make it even less likely that such abuses will be detected or stopped.

    • The guidelines forbid funding of "research in which" stem cells are used to create a new embryo, "research in which" human stem cells are combined with an animal embryo, etc. (p. 67579). But now that the NIH interprets the phrase "research in which" to apply only to funding the specific act itself, the door is left open to federal support for projects involving such abuses.


The NIH Guidelines can be viewed in the December 2 issue of the Federal Register, pages 67576-9, or online at www.nih.gov/news/stemcell/draftguidelines.htm

Comments should be sent by February 22, 2000 to "Stem Cell Guidelines" at:

NIH Office of Science Policy
1 Center Drive
Building 1, Room 218
Bethesda, MD 20892

Fax to: (301) 402-0280
E-mail to: stemcell@mail.nih.gov




__________________________
Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
3211 4th Street, N.E., Washington, DC 20017-1194 (202) 541-3070