Last weekend, I attended a lecture given by Douglas Melton, the director of Harvard University’s Stem Cell Institute. Stem cells are the medical equivalent of the philosophers’ stone, especially those in human embryos which spontaneously differentiate themselves into heart, brain, liver and other cells that make up the body. The stem cells we possess as adults are still miraculous (they produce blood and regenerate muscle and skin) but are much more limited in their abilities.
The holy grail of stem cell research is the cure of diseases caused by degeneration of parts of the body that lack stem cells: diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s (the brain), ALS or multiple sclerosis (the nerves), cardiovascular disease (the heart) or diabetes (the pancreas). Since cancer cells are a kind of evil twin of stem cells, understanding one will probably lead to a cure for the other. These goals seem out of reach for now, but a realistic goal today is the development of drugs that slow down the onset of these diseases.
The field is seeing some exciting breakthroughs. A couple of years ago, a Japanese research team found a way of reprogramming skin stem cells, making them capable of the same protean feats as embryonic cells. That suggests a major ethical obstacle to stem cell research might be mitigated: the need to experiment on live human embryos or foetal tissue from abortions. The fact that this is currently necessary makes me queasy, but in response to my question, Melton pointed out that there are currently 350,000 frozen embryos from IVF treatments earmarked for destruction in the US, of which Harvard has used only 800.
That Japanese breakthrough now seems eclipsed by the latest line of stem cell enquiry, so-called ‘young blood’ research. To much fanfare, a member of Melton’s team, Amy Wagers, published an article in Nature last January purporting to show something astonishing: that old mice, when stitched together to young mice so that they shared the same blood system, recovered from injuries at the same rate as young mice did.
As an active 44-year old who notices his sports injuries healing much more slowly than they did in his youth, the implications are profound. Perhaps the vampires were really onto something after all (Melton hastened to point out that the aim would be to isolate a chemical in young blood that could be turned into a drug, rather than inject the stuff into people).
Unfortunately, my excitement was dampened somewhat when I discovered that Wagers and two out of three of her co-authors had retracted their Nature paper last week as a result of uncovering flaws in the data. We will just have to wait while others either verify or disprove their findings.
The Harvard researchers’ embarrassing about-turn should remind us not to be too credulous in jumping on the stem cell bandwagon. And Melton himself was critical of companies that provide a scientifically unproven service freezing the blood of parents’ newborn children for a fee of thousands of dollars. An early attempt to implant stem cells into the brains of Parkinson’s patients backfired badly.
Yet I would bet that the underlying science of stem cell research is strong enough to eventually deliver the holy grail that is expected from it. I can’t tell whether Glaxo Smith Kline, which invested $25 million in Harvard’s institute, will make a good return on its investment (I don’t own the stock), but at some point this will be life-changing.
When I founded and ran Life & Pensions magazine, I became aware of the financial importance of medical breakthroughs, such as anti-cholesterol drugs or statins. While the industry debates revolved around accounting changes or market performance, these drugs did more than anything to kill off the final salary pension scheme. Today, the demonstrators paralysing France for the right to become economically unproductive at 60 show just how unprepared many societies are for changes like these.
The impact of stem cell research will go much deeper. The human body’s degeneration with age will be assaulted from all sides by new treatments, ultimately vanquishing the tragic mental degradation whose long-term care consequences were an unforeseen side-effect of increased longevity. Before we expect it, we are going to see 100-year olds that are much closer in health, ability and taxpaying potential to 30-year olds today. Yet the culture and institutions of our society are not remotely prepared for these changes and we should be thinking about it a lot more.
