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by Gerard M. Nadal, Ph.D.

“If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

So said then-Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards in October 2004 at a campaign in Newton, Iowa in a cynical appeal to people’s desperation for cures from everything from spinal cord injury to juvenile diabetes to Alzheimer’s disease, as he held out embryonic stem cells (ESCs) as the key to their hopes and dreams. It was cruel, and it was predicated on what all in the scientific community knew to be a long shot at best. Edwards struck many as sounding more like a chimeric faith healer or snake oil salesman hawking his wares.

For the people of California, such hype aided them that year on a fiscally ruinous path, as they passed Proposition 71 (California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative), which established the Institute for Regenerative Medicine and endowed it with a mind-boggling $3 billion in research funds mainly for ESC research. The scientists knew that all therapeutic advances to date had been made with the more stable adult stem cells (ASCs), but a $3 billion ESC carrot is irresistible. More so, one of the greatest mysteries of all: the knowledge of how a human being is actually formed.

Embryonic stem cell research was going to be our Rosetta Stone.

The siren call for researchers is the great unknown. Ph.D.s welcome, even crave such challenges as presented by embryonic stem cells. It is such appetite for intellectual adventure that propels us and advances civilization. Occasionally, we get ahead of the ethical debate. No good ever comes of it when we do. The ESC debate is just such an example.

We all knew that an early human embryo’s cells were pluripotent, meaning that each possessed the capacity to become any cell type in the body and had not yet begun down the road of differentiation into certain cell types. We all knew in 2004 that attempts in taming and directing these cells had been futile, with transplants in animals developing hideous tumors called teratomas. We all knew the moral baggage that came with embryo-destructive research. Too many didn’t care. Some of us argued that if an ESC could be walked forward developmentally, then it was just as feasible to determine how to walk an ASC backward. Our thoughts were considered quaint at best, and ridiculed roundly.

We were correct.

The undoing of ESC research has been, in no small measure, the very successful process of taking an adult skin cell and walking it backward through the process of differentiation to an earlier state of pluripotency in what have come to be called Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (IPSCs). These cells are the functional equivalent of their embryo-derived counterparts, having none of the moral baggage associated with the destruction of nascent human life. Recent advances in IPSC animal research has cleared an important hurdle in advancing to human therapeutic research. An improved process of creating IPSCs knocks out one of the genes that causes these cells to become cancerous. Additionally, the successful use of already highly differentiated ASCs has finally broken the wall of forced silence about their success.

The development of over one hundred therapeutic applications using ASCs has relegated ESCs to the margins of serious consideration; the surest indicator being California’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine quietly shifting funding to ASC research. This, after the people of California poured $1 billion down the ESC rat hole. For a state in as precarious a fiscal position as California, where state employees have been issued IOUs, such spending is recklessly extravagant and came with dire warnings.

Enlightened critics, many of whom were pro-life, pointed to the private sector cautioning that the private sector was not investing in this research. This was the surest sign that John Edwards’ cynical prophecy was so much blue sky over the horizon. The private sector invests when it believes a marketable product is within reach. The silence from the private sector was deafening.

But the polemics injected by pro-choice apologists painted pro-lifers as desperados who will say and do anything to halt the pro-choice, “progressive” agenda. It was pro-choice politicians such as Edwards who were using embryo-destructive research as a bulwark to buttress abortion, fearful that sympathy for the embryo in the lab might become contagious and threaten abortion. Tying embryo destruction to therapeutic gold was the tactic employed in corroding potential sympathy for embryonic human life. Pro-choice scientists were complicit, as were a majority of Californians who either bought the lies, or simply blinded themselves to the truth.

The result has been a billion dollar boondoggle, a twenty-first century gold rush that has gone bust. The bitter lesson being learned by ESC researchers, the Institute for Regenerative Medicine and Californians is that blinding oneself to the opposition’s scientific argument simply because they also happen to stand on the opposite side of one’s ethical convictions can be a costly, even ruinous error.

In the case of ESCs, it seems that the babies are having the last, prophetic word: Nascent human life is inviolable, and there is a price to be paid by all who transgress against it.

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Dr. Nadal holds a Ph.D. in molecular microbiology. In addition to teaching for 16 years, he's spent seven years working with homeless teens at Covenant House in Times Square, New York. He is currently pursuing an M.A. in theology through Franciscan University of Steubenville and blogs at http://gerardnadal.com.