On a Thursday afternoon earlier this year, Willy Lensch sat at his desk in the “nonpresidential” section of a seventh-floor laboratory at Children’s Hospital Boston and watched in dismay as one of the recent congressional debates about embryonic stem cell research streamed into his laptop. Employing the arch rhetoric that has typified stem cell politics since 1998, some members of Congress denounced the research because it requires the destruction of human embryos. Others trumpeted “alternative” techniques that promise the creation of embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. Stem cell scientists like Lensch have heard it all before, and it never feels comfortable. “You feel the heat working on stem cells,” he said. “I’ve been working in labs for 20 years, and this is a different deal.”
While conservatives in Congress took turns echoing George W. Bush’s opposition to destroying human embryos for research, Lensch’s colleague Paul Lerou stepped into a small room behind a heavy black curtain to check up on a line of nonpresidential embryonic stem cells. These human cells were ineligible for federal research funds because they had been created after President Bush’s August 9, 2001, announcement freezing the number of government-approved stem cell lines. Every piece of equipment in the “nonpresidential suite”—the incubator, the microscopes, the boxes of gloves, and even the wastebaskets—carried a warning sticker reading “NP,” a brand intended to keep it separate from the items that are for federally funded hands only.
Lerou maneuvered the nonpresidential plastic dish under a nonpresidential microscope and adjusted the focus. “So that’s them,” he said, pointing out some of the nonpresidential embryonic stem cells that have been created and distributed among researchers since 2001.
When you glimpse these human cells in the lab, they make about as much of an impression as a black-and-white TV in the age of streaming video. Clumps of the cells floated, like wet pieces of dandruff, in a little plastic dish containing a fluid that looked a bit like watered-down pink mouthwash. Under magnification, each patch of the cells had a smooth, blobby surface. Yet each little scrap contained hundreds of cells that had the potential to grow into 200 distinct human tissues: heart tissue, neural tissue, liver, kidney, bone, muscle, and of particular interest in this laboratory, blood.
“And, like, that’s what all the fuss is about?” Lerou asked rhetorically.
