WASHINGTON, Reuters [WS] via NewsEdge Corporation : Depending on who is talking, they are either the best new hope for fighting disease or the moral equivalent of lampshades made from human skin.

A year ago hardly anyone had heard of embryonic stem cells -- master cells that can give rise to any kind of cell in the body, from brain cells to liver cells. But researchers began reporting in November on experiments that showed the cells might be a rich source of new tissue for treating a range of diseases from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, in which brain cells are destroyed, to juvenile diabetes, in which the body's immune system mistakenly nibbles away at crucial pancreatic cells.

The discoveries have sparked a debate that involves patients, politicians, scientists and theologians -- with no clear dividing line and with all sides believing they are fighting for a moral cause and for the future of humankind.

When the first studies were published, researchers, health officials and patients' groups were delighted. Here was a way to circumvent the problems surrounding organ transplants, which require patients to take strong immune-suppressing drugs, even assuming the organs are available. Ten people die every day in the United States while waiting for an organ.

``The promise of this research for the treatment of diabetes, for Parkinson's ... is just extraordinary,'' U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala told a congressional committee in February.

The cells come from embryos left over from attempts to create test-tube (IVF) babies. It would also be possible to use cloning technology to create embryos from which cells could be taken. California-based Geron recently bought Roslin Bio-Med, a spinoff from the institute in Scotland where Dolly the sheep was cloned, with an eye to this.

U.S. LAW INTERFERES WITH PLANS

But there is a 4-year-old U.S. law that forbids using federal funds for the deliberate destruction of or experimentation on human embryos. So the research has been funded by private companies so far.

National Institutes of Health director Dr. Harold Varmus says there are ways around this law such as using cells extracted from embryos by private companies. The manipulation of the embryos would not have been done using federal funds so their use would be legal, he argues.

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission, made up of scientists, patients' advocates, ethicists and philosophers, says this research holds so much promise that Congress should rescind the ban in part. Its recommendations are still being worked out but commission head Harold Shapiro, president of Princeton University, said the group would probably endorse the use of tissue from IVF leftovers but not anything more.

``I think what the current draft says and what I think the committee will say is that it is unprepared at the moment for federal funds to be used to create so-called research embryos -- that is embryos created for which the sole purpose is research,'' Shapiro said in a telephone interview.

Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, say they will push to change the law. But opponents urge Congress to hold firm or even strengthen the law to ban any experimentation on human embryonic stem cells.

``We believe that research being proposed by the NIH on human embryonic stem cells is immoral, illegal and unnecessary,'' Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback said. He is backing a group sponsored by the Centre for Bioethics and Human Dignity in Bannockburn, Illinois, that maintains there is no justification for using human embryos in the laboratory -- even those left over from IVF attempts and slated for destruction.

'A LIVING MEMBER OF THE HUMAN SPECIES'

``What is being destroyed is a living member of the human species,'' Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, a professor of medicine and medical ethics at Georgetown University, told a news conference called by the group. He thinks the ban should be extended to private research as well.

Some members likened the use of embryonic stem cells to the creation in Nazi Germany of lampshades made out of human skin. Groups such as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Family Research Council, which oppose abortion and argue that human life begins at conception, have joined the lobby.

But other religious-based groups support the research and both sides say its opponents are not solely ``pro-life'' groups.

``We do not need to take the traditional pro-life view to take the view that we should not be spending tax dollars on the abuse of the human embryo,'' said Nigel Cameron, who chairs the advisory board at the Centre for Bioethics and Human Dignity.

``You can be anti-abortion, you can have a high regard for the value of human life, without locking yourself into this kind of extreme commitment saying that the embryo is a person from conception,'' Ronald Cole Turner, a United Church of Christ minister at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, said.

``The Western religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- and to some degree the Eastern religions absolutely, totally agree that healing is not just a good thing but that it is morally incumbent upon us,'' he said by telephone.

JUST A BALL OF CELLS

Many scientists say the embryos employed are very primitive -- just a ball of cells. They are not implanted in a womb and could never become a living human being.

But opponents say there is another source of stem cells, those taken from circulation in the body, and there is no need to use embryonic stem cells. Stem cells are often taken from bone marrow to regenerate the immune system, for example.

Adults keep some of these cells in their body, probably for repair after accidents or disease. But there are so few that scientists who want to use them have to search for them and then grow them into large enough numbers.

A few teams have found them recently and reprogrammed them. Like all cells they have a genetic blueprint for the organism in their nuclei and it has been possible to reactivate it.

Bryon Peterson and University of Pittsburgh colleagues found that bone marrow stem cells transplanted into rats moved to their livers and helped repair them. Dr. Evan Snyder and a Harvard team used neural stem cells from aborted or miscarried foetuses to replace damaged brain cells in newborn mice.

Tiny Baltimore biotech company Osiris Therapeutics coaxed stem cells from human bone marrow into growing into fat, bone tissue and cartilage. And Angelo Vescovi of the National Neurological Institute in Milan, Italy, got stem cells from the brain to produce blood cells in mice.

TOO EARLY TO KNOW

Scientists such as John Gearhart of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore say they have to investigate all sources of stem cells. ``I feel that we are too early in this game to determine which approach will be better,'' he said.

While stem cells are also taken from aborted or miscarried foetuses, Varmus said it was not clear whether they are as good as stem cells from early embryos. ``We just don't know the answer to that,'' he said in a telephone interview.

``Early embryos are made in excess of clinical need, stored in perpetuity ... and if those cells can be used to benefit our friends and relatives who are disabled and sick, in my view we should be using them,'' Varmus said.

Scientists also say it would be better if the government oversees and funds such research keeping ethical considerations in mind, while some ethicists and patients' groups say it would be immoral to block such avenues of research.

``We must come up with a public policy that says we will not hold that person in a wheelchair hostage to our moral concerns about tissues that will otherwise be destroyed,'' Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Centre for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

A new lobbying group, the Patients' Coalition for Urgent Research (CURE), released a survey of 1,000 adults in May that showed 74 percent supported human stem cell research, even when the cells came from embryos. The group includes patients such as Michelle Puczynski of Toledo, Ohio, who argue forcefully for stem cell research.

``If they don't do this they are taking lives away from people, and they are pretty much taking my life away, too,'' said Puczynski, 15, who has juvenile diabetes. (GERN.O) (OSRS.O)