From the front page of Saturday's Wall Street Journal:

One morning in April, Dr. Donald Landry, the interim chairman of Columbia University's department of medicine, boarded a 3 a.m. train from New York to Washington, D.C. He was there for an unfamiliar kind of meeting: Though he's neither a political insider nor a stem-cell specialist, Dr. Landry was in the capital to tell two dozen U.S. Senate staffers how he proposed to sidestep the ethical concerns that have largely blocked stem-cell research. Back at home later that day, Dr. Landry and his two teenage sons watched on C-Span as senators debated the merits of a plan the doctor had hatched during off-hours musing a few years earlier.

"It was surreal," says Dr. Landry.

Dr. Landry's unlikely brush with national policy making culminates a personal journey that began years before, when the devout Catholic grappled with an ethical dilemma. As a man of faith, he believed harvesting stem cells from a human embryo was an immoral destruction of life. As a doctor, he believed stem-cell advances could save lives.

His solution -- which involved extracting stem cells from dead embryos rather than live ones -- turned out to be persuasive, and it has led to a new avenue of research. It will also figure prominently in a conflict that is likely to come to a head in coming weeks: President George W. Bush is expected to veto a bill that would provide government funding for research using stem cells derived from living embryos that are unused by fertility clinics. Instead, the White House has signaled that it prefers legislation that incorporates Dr. Landry's proposal, among others.

The doctor has been to the White House to discuss his stem-cell approach, and is due for another visit in coming days. The state of New York has provided $1 million to help Dr. Landry, 53, kick-start his own experiments at Columbia. "The destruction of nascent human life is something that society should be wary of," Dr. Landry says. "I think I've found a potentially simple answer to the problem."

Dr. Landry's answer has drawn fire from other scientists. Harold Varmus, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1989 and is president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, says the approach is scientifically dubious. The bill that includes the Landry proposal, he says, is an effort to "provide political cover for people who want it both ways -- to say they voted for stem cells, but without offending their political base."

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Life Ethics • Science & Technology • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic

1. Tikvah wrote: “His solution—which involved extracting stem cells from dead embryos rather than live ones ...” Being quite ignorant of such things, I am wondering what the source of the dead embryos might be. Could someone enlighten me please. Thanx, T June 18, 11:57 am | [comment link]

2. MikeS wrote: Being even more ignorant of such things than Tikvah, I wonder what the difference is between the dead embryo and the live one after the stem cells have been “extracted”? Isn’t this merely kicking the debate down the block?  Isn’t this also a powerful suggestion to let unused/unwanted/unneeded embryos die so they can be used for “research”? Which probably takes us back to the original debate about whether or not this is an ethical use of human embryos.  It also again raises the question whether or not this is worthy of having government resources allocated to the proposal including the finite time of my legislative representatives who must decide how to address this issue. June 18, 12:26 pm | [comment link]

3. Irenaeus wrote: “Isn’t this merely kicking the debate down the block?” I don’t know the science at issueu here. But the article describes Dr. Landry and his faith at considerable length. Based on that description, it seems unlikely that he would devote himself to some shallow subterfuge. June 18, 11:10 pm | [comment link]

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