A. Politics vs. Science at Science?

Science is one of the world’s most respected and prestigious scholarly journals. Yet, in February 2004 and then again in May 2005, Science was duped into publishing what later proved to be completely fraudulent reports by the South Korean scientist Dr. Woo Suk Hwang. Hwang claimed that his team had produced human embryos by cloning, and had generated from them several viable stem cell lines. Hwang’s reports were widely publicized at the time as a breakthrough in regenerative medicine, and so the revelation of the complete fraudulence of his reports was a major scandal, directly for Hwang, but indirectly for those involved in the publication of those reports. In January 2006, Science issued a formal retraction of both papers, and promised a review of its procedures for evaluating and accepting articles.

We now know that Science laid aside its normal procedure and "fast-tracked" the publication of Hwang’s articles. It is difficult not to conclude that political motivations strongly influenced this decision. The editors hoped that by publicizing Hwang’s success they would help to build the case for overturning President Bush’s embryonic stem-cell funding restrictions. Thus, the editors of Science share some responsibility for what turned out to be a hoax perpetrated on the scientific community and the public at large.

Yet, just as the debate on federal funding of embryo-destructive research again heated up in Congress, Science once more published work that plainly disregarded its established standards of scholarship: a letter (penned by scientists Shane Smith, William Neaves, and Steven Teitelbaum) that sets aside respect for logic and fair argumentation and engages in blatant forms of rhetorical abuse.

Smith, Neaves, and Teitelbaum support federal and state funding of embryo-destructive stem cell research (though Neaves often refers to it vaguely and euphemistically as "early stem cell" research). In their letter, they claim that David Prentice, a former research scientist now working at the Family Research Council, has misled people by stating that adult stem cells have helped in the treatment of 65 different human diseases. The letter was timed to coincide with the debate and vote in the United States Senate on the Bush stem cell funding policy. Dr. Prentice was given no opportunity to publish a response. Indeed, the timing scarcely enabled him to compose, much less publish anywhere, a rebuttal before the Senate floor debate. And, sure enough, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, a leading opponent of expanding embryo-destructive research, read extensively from the letter by Smith, Neaves, and Teitelbaum during the debate in an effort to discredit claims on behalf of adult stem cell research.

Like Dr. Prentice, we oppose embryo-destructive research. Unlike Dr. Prentice, perhaps, we have doubts about whether adult stem cells will provide scientists with all they hope to obtain from embryonic stem cells in biomedical research. That is why we have promoted strategies of obtaining pluripotent stem cells that do not involve the taking of nascent human life, such as altered nuclear transfer (ANT) and the reprogramming of somatic cells. Still, much has been accomplished with adult stem cells, and much more will be accomplished as work in this area continues. Many clinical trials are now in process.

The letter by Neaves and his colleagues begins by saying that “Opponents of research with embryonic stem (ES) cells often claim that adult stem cells provide treatments for 65 human illnesses.” They then assert that the apparent origin of this statement is a list provided by David Prentice. Next they quote Prentice: “Adult stem cells have now helped patients with at least 65 different human diseases. It’s real help for real patients.” However, in supposedly refuting this claim, they say: “In fact, adult stem cell treatments fully tested in all required phases of clinical trials and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are available to treat only nine of the conditions on the Prentice list, not 65 (or 72)” (emphasis supplied). Prentice, however, did not claim that there were 65 human diseases for which there was “FDA-approved adult stem cell treatment generally available.” Plainly, the claim that Neaves and his co-authors refute is not the claim that Prentice made. This is a blatant instance of the classical fallacy Ignoratio Elenchi (also called "irrelevant conclusion": presenting an argument that may actually prove something, but something quite different from what you claim it proves). They have distorted (by exaggeration) Prentice’s claim, refuted the distorted version of the claim, and then impugned Prentice’s integrity for allegedly making it. This is blatant rhetorical abuse.

The authors of the letter provide a table listing the diseases Prentice claims adult stem cells have helped to treat. The authors concede that in nine cases treatment by adult stem cells has been FDA-approved and is generally available. That by itself is an impressive record for adult stem cells. Moreover, in regard to most of the other treatments referred to by Prentice, there are indeed clinical studies reported in peer-reviewed journals showing benefit or improvement for patients, either from adult stem cells used as adjuncts or as direct treatments. (By contrast, to date there are no clinical studies reported in peer-review journals—or anywhere else, so far as we can discover—reporting therapeutic success from human embryonic stem cells, much less any FDA-approved and generally available treatments from embryonic stem cells. But Neaves and his co-authors are strangely quiet about that fact.) The authors of the letter also question some of Prentice’s references, and the type of evidence in some of the cases where Prentice alleges adult stem cells have helped. Prentice has conceded that one of his references was inadequate because it did not meet proper scholarly standards, and he has removed it from his list. So Neaves and his co-authors deserve credit for that correction. Still, their main argument against Prentice is fallacious—and worse. They conclude by saying, “By promoting the falsehood that adult stem cell treatments are already in general use for 65 diseases and injuries, Prentice and those who repeat his claims mislead lay people and cruelly deceive patients.” But, again, Prentice never said that the treatments are in general use. Prentice claimed that adult stem cells helped people with 65 different diseases or injuries: that may or may not be true (though Neaves and his co-authors provide no substantive reason to doubt it), but it is quite a different claim than the one attributed to him by Neaves et al.

These men are scientists, not logicians or philosophers. And perhaps they simply got caught up in the political heat of the moment. However, it is the duty of the editors of a scientific journal to have cooler heads and to hold their contributors to some level of respect for the elementary rules of logic and argumentative integrity, or at least, to insist that they remove rhetorical abuses made for political effect.

Neaves and his co-authors accuse Prentice of “cruelly deceiving patients.” But in fact Prentice has merely asserted that in the cases he lists some patients were helped. He has not asserted anything about the degree of treatment success in every case. Nor has he claimed that treatments will become completely effective and general available in every case (or even any cases) any time soon. By contrast, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Ron Reagan, during the last presidential campaign, did explicitly make promises of complete cures from embryonic stem cell research to diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. These men really did engage in a form of hyping that cruelly deceived suffering people and their families—and they did it for political gain. Neaves, Smith, and Teitelbaum said not a word in protest. Where were these scientists then?

B. Scientists in Glass Houses

What an irony that Neaves and his co-authors misrepresent Prentice’s main assertion as part of an effort to depict Prentice as misrepresenting studies and references. It adds to the irony that one of the letter’s authors (William Neaves) has a track record of misleading by linguistic sleight of hand and of ignoring scientific data inconvenient to his position. Neaves generally speaks in favor of “early stem cell research,” but what he means by that is what everyone else refers to (and even he and his colleagues in this letter refer to) as “embryonic stem cell research.” This Orwellian doublespeak is designed to divert attention from the fact that the type of stem cell research he advocates involves killing a human embryo at the blastocyst stage to obtain cells from the inner cell mass that can then be converted to embryonic stem cells.

It further adds to the irony that in his testimony before the Missouri Senate in favor of state funding for embryo-destructive research, the only empirical evidence Neaves cited to boost hope in the promise of embryonic stem cells was, not an FDA-approved and generally available treatment, and indeed not even a set of clinical studies on humans, but a single case study on dopaminergic neurons in monkey blastocysts. Neaves said: “Earlier this month, extraordinarily promising results [sic] were published in the Journal of Clinical Investigations by a research team in Japan who showed they could direct the development of dopaminergic neurons from early stem cells [sic] cultured from monkey blastocysts.” (see his testimony, p. 9 at: http://www.kcchamber.com/_FileLibrary/File/GR_lifesci_NeavesTestimony.pdf). Apparently, only FDA-approved studies for thee, but not for me.

Neaves has claimed in various contexts that the human embryo does not become a human being until implantation, because (he argues) the embryo cannot establish a basic body plan until it receives external, maternal signals at implantation, and only then is it a self-directing human organism. According to Neaves, these signaling factors somehow transform what was hitherto a mere bundle of cells into a unitary human organism.

However, there is much dispute among embryologists about whether any such maternal signaling actually occurs. As Hans-Werner Denker observes, it was once assumed that in mammals, in contrast to amphibians and birds, polarity in the early embryo depends upon some external signal, since no clear indications of bilateral symmetry had been found in oocytes, zygotes or early blastocysts (Hans-Werner Denker, “Early Human Development: new data raise important embryological and ethical questions relevant for stem cell research,” Naturwissenschaften, 2004, pp. 21 ff.) But according to Denker this view has been revised in the light of emerging evidence. “[I]ndications have been found that in mammals the axis of bilateral symmetry is indeed determined (although at first in a labile way) by sperm penetration, as in amphibians. Bilateral symmetry can already be detected in the early blastocyst and is not dependent on implantation” (p. 23).

Denker refers specifically to the work of Magdelena Zernicka-Goetz and her colleagues at Cambridge University and that of R.L. Gardner at Oxford University, which shows that polarity exists even at the 2-cell stage. Davor Solter and Takashi Hiiragi of the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in Freiburg (see Gretchen Vogel’s report, “Embryologists Polarized Over Early Cell Fate Determination,” Science, vol. 308, May 6, 2005) argue that in the early embryo (prior to compaction and differentiation into inner cell mass and trophoblast) external factors determine the fate of each cell, rather than an internal polarity. In other words, the older view is being challenged by a newer view, and the issue does not seem to have been definitively settled. However, whichever of the two is true, it is less than honest simply to assert the older view without acknowledging that new research seeming to overturn it has been published by credible scientists from leading universities in major peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Moreover, Neaves is careless with respect to logic. Even if it is the case that polarity does not emerge until a maternal signal is received at implantation, that would not provide any evidence at all that such a signal transformed a bundle of cells into a unitary, multicellular human organism. Just as the lungs begin to breathe at birth only in response to certain external stimuli, so it would make sense (if the older view is true) that differentiation into the rudiments of the distinct body parts (basic bilateral polarity) would begin only in response to some external stimuli. And this is exactly how such signals speculated to occur (perhaps) in mammalian embryos were interpreted by embryology texts that mentioned them. (Moreover, the fact that prior to implantation, from day 1 to day 6, there is complex and coordinated development in the embryo, including compaction, cavitation, and other activities in which the embryo is preparing itself for implantation, the next step in maturation, is conclusive evidence that the human embryo is from day 1 onward a unitary organism, and never a mere bundle of cells.)

Neaves and his colleagues level serious charges against David Prentice for allegedly misrepresenting the therapeutic uses of adult stem cells. Yet they are lobbing stones from a glass house, for Neaves not only treats uncertain, and possibly outdated, theories as definitive, but also advances a specious argument based on those theories.

In 2004 and 2005, Science got duped by Woo Suk Hwang as a result of its editors’ eagerness to help the political cause of overturning President Bush’s embryonic stem cell funding restrictions. Now, just before the vote in the U.S. Senate to overturn those restrictions, Science has published work that its editors would surely have rejected on grounds of intellectual quality and honesty were it not serving a favored cause. Unfortunately, it appears that at Science sometimes political expediency trumps intellectual standards and undermines scientific integrity.

[Robert P. George, a member of EPPC's board of directors, is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. Patrick Lee is professor of bioethics at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.]