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More than 100 anti-abortionists, led by a conservative US senator, last week released a statement arguing that research on human embryonic stem cells is scientifically unnecessary and urging Congress to fund alternatives.

The statement came as debate on the issue heated up in Washington in anticipation of the release this month of a report from the National Bioethics Advisory Commission. The commission is expected to recommend that the government should fund both the derivation of stem cells from embryos — which needs the embryos to be destroyed — and the use of the cells in research.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is also due soon to issue guidelines for the investigators it funds. The NIH has already said it will fund research on stem cells, but not their derivation from human embryos (see Nature 397, 185 & 399, 292; 1999).

The group that signed last week's statement included Frank Young, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), C. Everett Koop, a former surgeon general, and Edmund Pellegrino, director of the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

The statement was coordinated by the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity in Bannockburn, Illinois. It was released at a press conference at which Senator Sam Brownback (Republican, Kansas) said that research on human embryonic stem cells is “immoral, illegal and unnecessary”.

Brownback and the signatories to the statement contend that research on stem cells and their derivation from human embryos violates a federal law forbidding research in which embryos are destroyed or discarded. They said that recent research showing that stem cells isolated from adult tissues can give rise to differentiated cells removes the need for research on embryonic stem cells.

Young, who served as FDA commissioner under President Ronald Reagan, compared the development of cell and tissue therapies from embryonic stem cells to the making of saddles from human skins by Nazi Germans. He predicted “a backlash of the American people” if federal funding for the work proceeds. Fear of such a backlash has made corporate America “very apprehensive” about funding the research, he claimed.

But John Gearhart, a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, says it is unproven that stem cells from adult tissue can generate all the tissues of the body.

“Clearly, embryonic stem cells produce more types of cells than the [stem] cells obtained from adult tissue,” says Gearhart. “We should leave our options open” by pursuing embryonic stem-cell research. Gearhart announced last November that he had isolated stem cells using germline cells from aborted fetuses (see Nature 396, 104; 1998).