Humane alternatives.

AS the Senate prepared to vote on whether to fund research that destroys human embryos, some senators and journalists began to pay attention to newly proposed alternative courses of research. The president's bioethics council, chaired by Leon Kass, has considered four methods of obtaining stem cells that do not involve the destruction of human embryos.

Of those four methods, two have attracted the most interest. Council member and Stanford professor William Hurlbut proposes the creation of biological entities that could serve as sources of stem cells but would not be human organisms. These entities would be disordered growths, lacking the capacity to organize themselves and to direct their own development. Another proposal would "reprogram" somatic cells, such as skin cells, so that they could serve as sources of stem cells. In both cases, it is thought that the stem cells would have very similar properties to stem cells taken from human embryos.

There are practical concerns about these proposals. Hurlbut's proposal would have to be tried on animals before human beings: It would be necessary to establish that the researchers could reliably create non-embryonic entities, as opposed to seriously disabled embryos. It would also have to be established that research would not involve the exploitation of women for their egg cells (a problem that is equally present in stem-cell research involving human cloning). Whether either approach is feasible is not yet known. But in principle, these research strategies deserve support. They could lead us to greater medical knowledge, and to cures, without injustice. If it is possible to yield the therapeutic benefits promised by embryonic-stem-cell research without killing any embryonic human beings, everyone should be able to see the value of following this non-divisive path.

The principled objections that have so far been raised to this research lack merit. First, it is suggested that there is something creepy about deliberately creating disordered growths--tumor, s it were--for research purposes. Second, it is said that creating such growths would put us on a slippery slope to less ethically defensible research. But these objections are typically made by people who believe that it should be legal to create human embryos for research purposes. How can it be permissible to create and then kill human embryos, but not to create and then destroy entities that are not human beings?

Third, it is said that these sources of stem cells are speculative and killing embryos would allow for faster progress. But the therapeutic benefits of embryonic-stem-cell research are speculative, too. If there are no ethical objections to killing human embryos, then by all means we should proceed with it--although even in that case, we might decline to make taxpayers who oppose it complicit in it. If there are, as we believe, sound reasons to uphold the sanctity of human life and the equal right not to be killed of all human organisms, then we should not abandon that principle in haste. If ethical restraints on human experimentation must be cast off as long as people are suffering, then there will be no ethical restraints.

Finally, some conservatives worry that devising methods of getting quasi-embryonic stem cells will cause people to scant the potential of adult-stem-cell research. But research should proceed wherever it ethically can. The new proposals are a creative way around an ethical impasse. If there is enough good will on all sides, we can, as council member Robert P. George has written, "bring to a close--honorably and without rancor--a divisive chapter in our recent history."