Medical research using human embryos and fetuses is highly controversial in the United States. Scientists say embryonic and fetal cells could one day lead to revolutionary cures, but political and ethical debates have slowed progress in this country. China, however, is surging ahead. Scientists there are developing experimental therapies in the laboratory and moving them quickly into hospitals. Today we have the third installment in our four-part series on stem cell research. The World's Mary Kay Magistad reports from Beijing.
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It's feeding time at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. In a gleaming laboratory, lab technicians put their gloved hands inside sterilized glass cubes. They use long tubes to "feed" nutrients to human stem cells, which they're growing in Petri dishes.
Dr. Zhao Chunhua directs the stem cell research program here. He's now running China's first officially approved study of stem cells as a therapy for human subjects - in this case, leukemia patients. But he believes leukemia is just one in a long list of diseases that will one day be treatable with stem cells:
Zhao: "Including the heart, liver, diabetes, and bone marrow transplantation and even in some auto-immune diseases."
Dr. Zhao spent six years at the University of Minnesota. He returned to Beijing, in part, because he felt there were greater opportunities in China for advancing his research. Here, he has worked with stem cells from embryos, fetuses and adults:
Zhao: "In the United States, I don't think it is very easy to have access to work with fetal tissues. In China, we have spent a lot of effort and time on stem cells. And what is most important, both the Chinese government and public share the same opinion on stem cell research. Both of them support it."
The Chinese government has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in stem-cell research, making China a world leader. Stephen Minger runs the Stem Cell Biology Lab at King's College in London. He recently went to China to assess the country's stem-cell research program.
Minger: "We were just flabbergasted by what we saw. World class research centers, amazing infrastructure, committed large amounts of government support. I think they are going to be a dominant force in this field. They're just driving very hard."
Many of the stem cell researchers who are driving so hard in China have years of experience of research in the United States. Dr. Cao Yilin spent six years at the University of Michigan and at Harvard Medical School. He picked up techniques he's now using to make new tissue and shin. He's using stem cells to engineer various body parts and tissues.
Cao: "Skin, cartilage, tendons, corneas, vessels, and so on. In the future, if this is successful, I think it's a very good way for people with organ and tissue loss."
Growing major organs, like hearts and livers, will still take time, Cao says, but it's a goal at his Tissue Engineering Research Center in Shanghai. The new center cost $260 million. Seventy percent of that money came from the government. Thirty percent is from private investors, who see great profit potential here.
Besides all the money being thrown at stem cell research in China, lax regulations also help speed research from the lab to the clinic. Critics would say, it helps rush new techniques to the clinic before they're known to be safe and effective.
This is Beijing's West Hill Hospital, the workplace of Dr. Huang Hongyun. He trained at Rutgers University, where he helped develop a technique to treat paralysis in rats. He's now offering that therapy to human patients. He takes cells from the nose area of fetuses and injects them into the brains of patients with Lou Gehrig's disease, and into the spine of patients with spinal injuries.
Huang says the cells generate new neurons, and repair the damaged areas. He says he's done 600 such operations, many of them on Americans and Europeans. He claims that 70 percent of his spinal cord injury patients have improved as a result, and that the operations have stopped the inevitable decline in some of his patients with Lou Gehrig's disease.
Huang: "We started doing this work two years ago. Right now, two years have passed, some patients still keep function stable or even better than before."
One of Huang's patients is Karin Sederek. She's a blond Californian who says she used to be athletic, until a car accident two and a half years ago left her paralyzed. She'd already had two operations in the United States to try to restore movement, without much success. Then she heard about Dr. Huang.
Sederek: "My husband found out over the internet that this was available. So we made up our minds to go ahead with this, and I'm very happy we did. I was constantly in pain, and there is no pain now. My hands - I couldn't control them at all. I couldn't close my hands. But it is better now."
She opens and closes her hand, and then raises her arm above her head, something she says she couldn't do before her operation. She only wishes she hadn't had to travel to the other side of the world to get this operation.
Sederek: "In the United States, if it takes another 10 years or 40 years, I don't have that time. I want it now, whatever there is. And I think it is really a shame that they are holding it back."
There are reasons why this operation is not yet performed in the United States. Dr. Huang's therapy is highly controversial. Western scientists say he hasn't done the rigorous studies necessary to prove the technique works.
And then there's the issue of where he gets the cells - from aborted second trimester fetuses. In the United States, fetal cell research is, at the very least, politically controversial. But in China's Confucian culture, human life is seen to begin at birth, not at conception, and Dr. Huang believes it's unethical not to use aborted fetuses and embryos for medical work.
Huang: "My opinion is if some country's law allows to do abortion, that means they must have embryos and fetuses. If this fetus or embryo can be used for human health, but we don't use it, just throw it away, which is better, use it or throw it away? Ethically, which is correct?"
Huang may be on the Wild West end of the medical research spectrum in China. But he, like Zhao and Cao, are part of his country's swift advance in the field of regenerative medicine, including stem cell research. Chinese officials hope their investment in the field will pay off not just in medical advances, but also in prestige. No scientist working in mainland China has yet won a Nobel Prize. The government hopes that China's work with stem cells will bring it that honor, as a sign that China has arrived as a scientific superpower.
