Questioning the wisdom of the late Susan Solomon

Susan L. Solomon died on September 8th after a battle with ovarian cancer. You probably won’t know her name. I didn’t.

But something in her Wall Street Journal obituary stirred memories of old and riveting debates.

When she was 18, Solomon married the drummer for the Sixties band Country Joe and the Fish, who played Woodstock. But that is not the story.

After divorcing the drummer, she went to law school, became a big wheel at the Sony Corporation and other companies, and ended up founding a charity dedicated to embryonic stem cell research, eventually raising almost half a billion dollars for that purpose.

Susan Solomon placed herself in the middle of a national debate over embryonic stem cell research.

You may remember the emotional and often fractious debate about embryonic stem cells. It roiled our political culture back during the Bush administration. For instance, practically every speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that nominated Catholic John Kerry spoke about the desperate need for treatments and cures promised from embryonic stem cells. For example, Ron Reagan, the youngest son of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, focused his speech on embryonic stem cell research, concluding: “Whatever else you do come Nov. 2, I urge you, please, cast a vote for embryonic stem cell research.”

Anyone with moral qualms about killing human embryos for their body parts, that is, stem cells, was called “anti-science.” That may have been when that epithet was first coined.

Advocates of embryo-destructive research made certain rather outlandish claims.

In 2006, my wife Cathy and I were invited to run the final days of a statewide referendum on human cloning in Missouri. Proposed as an addition to the Missouri Constitution, Amendment 2 purported to ensure that Missouri patients would “have access to any therapies and cures and allow Missouri researchers to conduct any research permitted under federal law.” It also called for the banning of human cloning or attempted cloning.

The embryonic stem cell debate was then and is now replete with massive deceptions. In this case, that there is a difference between “reproductive cloning” and “therapeutic cloning.” “Reproductive cloning” was, they said, the deliberate creation of embryos that would be allowed to grow into toddlers. On the other hand, “therapeutic cloning” was acceptable because it created a human embryo and then allowed for her destruction to get at her stem cells.

And then there were the promises of treatments and cures. The primary talking point of the embryo-destruction crowd was there were a plethora of treatments and cures if only we could get at the stem cells of these tiny human beings.

Embryonic stem cells are “pluripotent,” that is, they have not yet become specific organs and can therefore become almost anything in the human body. This means they can be used to cure parts of the body that are damaged or diseased. In the Wall Street Journal obit of Solomon, it highlights that she helped raise more than $400 million for “stem-cell research aimed at curing such diseases as cancer, diabetes and Parkinson’s.” Micheal J. Fox told members of Congress that “Embryonic stem cell research holds enormous promise.” Others claimed it would cure Alzheimer’s.

So, what is the state of stem cell research?

Well, first, there have been heroic efforts to obtain pluripotent cells without killing the human embryo. This resulted from George Bush’s 2006 decision to end federal funding for the creation of new cell lines from the destruction of embryos. It forced scientists who wanted government funding to get creative. The use of adult stem cells grew from that, as did the development of something called “induced pluripotent stem cells,” where adult stem cells are coaxed into pluripotency. A Japanese doctor won the Nobel Prize for this in 2006.

While adult stem cells have been effective in treating many disorders, and this has been a Godsend for some, those cells are not pluripotent; that is, they cannot turn into anything other than what they are.

Induced pluripotent stem cells seem not to have taken off as first hoped. According to a 2018 article at Nature.com, “The number of ES-cell publications grew rapidly after 2006 and has held pace, at about 2,000 per year since 2012.”

The problem with embryonic stem cells is they are something of a wild child. They tend to die when you work with them or are prone to creating tumors. To date, there appears to have been only one person “cured” of anything using embryonic stem cells, a man who seems to no longer need insulin to treat his diabetes. We shall see if this lasts.

Most papers you find online about stem cell research are about making the cells easier to work with. Some tests are happening on actual patients. They think macular degeneration is a possible candidate for treatment with embryonic stem cells. But for the most part, researchers are trying to find ways to create new “colonies” from existing lines.

In the meantime, the scientists keep making promises, and the deceptions keep coming. For example, the website of the New York Stem Cell Foundation — a foundation which Susan Solomon co-founded — defines embryonic stem cells as “pluripotent stem cells that come from blastocysts – small clumps of five-to-seven-day-old embryo cells – left over from in vitro fertilization treatments that would otherwise be discarded.”

The good news is that they must keep the deception alive in order to proceed. Note they must claim embryonic stem cells only come from discarded embryos from IVF treatments. Of course, this does not change the monstrousness of their experimentations, but at least they feel they must keep the deception alive.

In the Wall Street Journal obit, Solomon is quoted as saying, “I’m really comfortable asking dumb questions.”

Well, here’s one. After killing only God knows how many thousands of little human beings and spending hundreds of millions of dollars that could have been spent in other ways, where are all those treatments and cures that were promised twenty years ago?