John Gearhart Interview (page: 5 / 6) Stem Cell Research	Print Interview

Have you seen your stem cell work, not only as a mean to further research but ultimately to prolong life?

John Gearhart: Yes, I would agree with that. Absolutely. The benefits would be enormous. You'd be able to help a lot of people.

Has getting funding for you research been an important issue?

John Gearhart: Funding is always an important issue in any kind of research endeavor. Initially, for about a five-year period I used institutional funds, endowment funds coming to me as a division director at Hopkins in obstetrics and gynecology.

Towards the end of this we needed funding and we were approached by a corporation to see if we could partner. They have acted appropriately. They have the review boards. The interaction has been, to me, sound both scientifically and ethically. We went forward with this and it was a decision that Hopkins made to go forward, and we've had a very good working relationship with this corporation. So for the last two years we've been funded through corporate support.

Now our work using fetal tissue has always been eligible for federal funding. Always. There has never been a ban on this research federally, but I chose not to go that route simply because I have known many of my colleagues who have applied for federal funding for fetal tissue work whose applications, although not banned, have been sort of put on hold.

The ability to obtain financing much more rapidly through this private side was certainly an incentive to go towards the private side. It was immediately available.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. What do I see for the future? Well, there are two aspects to what I see for the future. I think it's absolutely essential that federal funding be available for this type of work. What has made biomedical research so great in this country has been funding from the public sector. It enables a number of investigators of high caliber, peer reviewed, you know, research applications, et cetera, to have access to these cells and to really make the advances that are necessary to bring this to clinical utilization. We need this. We need it desperately. Secondly, and to me as important, it provides an oversight to the work that I think the public demands. I mean, you know, there's this concept -- or this perception -- that if something is funded only from the private side that there's no regulation, that they're going to do whatever they want to do, et cetera, which isn't exactly true.

No publicly traded company is going to do something stupid in an area that's as sensitive as this. They're just not going to do it, but nonetheless this company has been in full support of having public financing, public oversight.

Harold Varmus, the Director of NIH, has been extremely supportive of getting public funding into this. He sees the same benefits coming: the speed of the work, and having the oversight, which I think would make the public feel that there aren't thousands of investigators going after every bit of fetal tissue that's available. There will be so many of these cell lines established and then they'll become available to investigators. Not only what the priorities would be with this--establishing this research but also the endpoint.

Another ethical argument which is brought up is, "Who is going to benefit from this? How much money is it going to cost for a patient to get access to these cells?"

There is a strong feeling among patients who have any type of disease that drug companies manipulate unfairly what it costs to get access to any type of therapy. Drugs are so expensive people think it's a conspiracy, so there's a feeling that if the private side owns this research and is so deeply involved and there's no public support that they're going to control who is going to have access to the therapies and what costs are going to be involved.

If NIH or the Federal Government comes in there's certainly going to be an oversight of this. I have spent a good deal of my time since our results and Jamie Thompson's results were announced lobbying, meeting with anyone who wanted to talk about supporting the public's role in this.

We have a responsibility as scientists to give you the facts, the implications of our research, but by the same token we feel that the public should be involved, from the standpoint of oversight, funding, the whole works.

There have been some pretty wild reactions to this research, including discussions of cloning humans, designer babies, mixing humans and animals and so on. Could you help us separate the real potential of this research from the fiction?

John Gearhart: Absolutely. I want to preface this with what my experience over the last six months has told me about how the public sees this. In the different forums that I have been in it is clear that to the public all the issues of sequencing the genome, cloning humans, stem cells, assisted reproductive technologies get thrown into the same barrel. They're trying to ferret out where the lines are. Is this all part of the same program? How are these connected? I find myself answering questions in all of these areas although very little of it applies to stem cells.

Another element that leads to this confusion is that at the national level, unlike in Great Britain and other countries, our country doesn't have a policy that applies to most of what's going on. There have been commissions and ad hoc panels to review and make recommendations that would become national policy. Virtually every one of these has been thrown out for political reasons, so we don't have any base of policy to build on. I think this adds to some of the anxiety of what's going on.

How do I see these things tied together? Let's talk about cloning and the stem cell issues. The stem cell work that I am promoting is not involved in any way in cloning.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We are taking cells that can form any kind of a tissue, and we are saying we want to grow these -- learn how to grow them in culture so that we can provide cells for therapy and that they will not be rejected. I mean, it's very straightforward. How did this get involved in cloning? I mean, what was the link? Well, I'm as guilty of this as other investigators. We proposed a number of months ago, when the issue of immune rejection came up, that one of the things we could do would be to take a cell from a patient and through this nuclear transfer -- you know, this is the term that everyone jumps -- that we could take that nucleus out of that cell and establish stem cell lines that have the nucleus in it. Now what is the purpose of this? Well, the purpose is just for the stem cell lines, so that those lines would match the patient so that you could, say, take these cells now that have the same genome as the patient, put them back, no rejection, everything would be fine. There's no interest here in making an embryo in that cloning step. These cells are incapable of making embryos. Embryonic stem cells and embryos are not synonymous. So there's this confusion.

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