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Where Does Francis Collins Stand on Stem-Cell Research?

Katelyn Beaty

President Obama announced last Wednesday his pick of Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the government's biomedical research wing. While a couple news reports have highlighted onlookers' hesitation over Collins's faith, few have examined Collins's views on embryonic stem-cell research, for which President Obama lifted by executive order a ban on federal funding this March.

So what exactly are Collins's views on the ethics of embryonic stem-cell research and when life begins? Below are some comments he has made on the matter in the last few years. See what you can parse out:

In a 2006 interview with Steve Paulson of Salon:
Paulson: Geneticists are sometimes accused of "playing God," especially when it comes to genetic engineering. And there are various thorny bioethical issues. What's your position on stem cell research?

Collins: Stem cells have been discussed for 10 years, and yet I fear that much of that discussion has been more heat than light. First of all, I believe that the product of a sperm and an egg, which is the first cell that goes on to develop a human being, deserves considerable moral consequences. This is an entity that ultimately becomes a human. So I would be opposed to the idea of creating embryos by mixing sperm and eggs together and then experimenting on the outcome of that, purely to understand research questions.

On the other hand, there are hundreds of thousands of such embryos in freezers at in vitro fertilization clinics. In the process of in vitro fertilization, you almost invariably end up with more embryos than you can reimplant safely. The plausibility of those ever being reimplanted in the future - more than a few of them - is extremely low. Is it more ethical to leave them in those freezers forever or throw them away? Or is it more ethical to come up with some sort of use for those embryos that could help people? I think that's not been widely discussed.

In a 2007 interview with Ben Wattenberg of Think Tank, a PBS discussion show:
Collins: Stem cells are really not part of genome research, but they're part of medical research and they're controversial so they tend to, sort of, fall in my lap, too.

Wattenberg: And - what - what is your view of it? That we ought to - proceed on the research?

Collins: So I think one thing we ought to do is, sort of, tone down the rhetoric and try to get our scientific facts straight. So stem cells - there's lots of different kinds of stem cells. The kind that I think many people are most concerned about are the ones that are derived from a human embryo which is produced by a sperm and an egg coming together. The way you and I got here.

There are hundreds of thousands of those embryos currently frozen away in in vitro fertilization clinics. And it is absolutely unrealistic to imagine that anything will happen to those other than they're eventually getting discarded. So as much as I think human embryos deserve moral status, it is hard to see why it's more ethical to throw them away than to take some that are destined for discarding and do something that might help somebody.

Wattenberg:
So - so you would disagree with the current political executive branch view of that. I mean, President Bush is against that.

Collins: I have to be careful here because I am a member of the executive branch as a government employee.

Wattenberg: That's why I'm asking the question.

Collins: But as a scientist - I would say we are currently not making as much progress as we could if we had access to more of these stem cell lines. The ones that are currently available for federal funding is a very limited set and they clearly have flaws that make them hard to use. But you know what? I think that kind of stem cell research is actually not the part that's going to be most interesting.

The part that's really showing the most promise is to take a skin cell from you or me and convince that cell, which has the complete genome, to go back in time and become capable of making a liver cell or a brain cell or a blood cell if you need it to. That reprogramming. That's called semantic cell nuclear transfer in the current mode. And yet people still refer to those products as an embryo. Well, there's no sperm and egg involved here.

And that's where I think we've really gotten muddled. That the distinction between these various types of biology has been all murkified. And people are beginning to argue in very irrational ways based on a lack of understanding what the science says. If we could back off from all of the, sort of, hard edged rhetoric and really say, okay, what is science teaching us, I suspect that the moral dilemmas are not nearly as rough as people think they are.

In a 2001 interview with Agnieszka Tennant of Christianity Today:
Tennant: You once described yourself as "intensely conflicted" in regard to stem-cell research. What's the cause of this conflictedness?

Collins:
It is a classic example of a collision between two very important principles. One is the sanctity of human life and the other is our strong mandate as human beings to alleviate suffering and to treat terrible diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's, and spinal-cord injury. The very promising embryonic stem-cell research might potentially provide remarkable cures for those disorders. We don't know that, but it might. And at the same time, many people feel, I think justifiably, this type of research is taking liberties with the notion of the sanctity of human life, by manipulating cells derived from a human embryo.

--/

Justin Barnard, philosophy professor at Union University, this morning provided a helpful critique of what he sees as Collins's ambiguity about embryonic stem-cell research. The day before Collins was picked, the NIH updated its guidelines for how federal funding can be used for stem-cell research: While NIH funds cannot be used to directly derive stem cells from human embryos, thus destroying them, they can now be used to conduct research on stem cell lines that have already been derived from destroyed human embryos.

Barnard explains why this is problematic: "In effect, the new guidelines provide an incentive to private research entities to obtain so-called 'leftover' embryos from fertility clinics and derive stem cell lines from them in order to obtain NIH research dollars to study the derived lines." He goes on to say this is "effectively outsourcing the destruction of human life."

He ends by asking Collins to "come clean. Either he upholds the dignity of human life or he doesn't. If he does, and he accepts the nomination to head the NIH, then it seems that he is deeply compromised as a professing evangelical Christian. If he does not, then the evangelical community needs to know."

What do you think? Can Collins still be considered a "professing evangelical Christian" while supporting stem-cell research on embryos that are stored at in vitro fertilization clinics and would otherwise be discarded?

Posted by Katelyn Beaty on July 13, 2009 11:10 AM

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