Stem cell saga

The bomb scare threatened to overtake the evening. There was a “suspicious toy” found leaning against the wall of Sinai Temple. Police set up a blockade, cordoning off the streets and summoning the bomb squad. A lady I met on the circuitous walk asked if I was heading towards the temple. “I’m concerned. I have a son,” she said. I tried to reassure her that if it were anything truly serious, they’d evacuate the surrounding buildings. We stopped to chat with LAPD but the officer seemed ill informed. Rachel and I decided to take our chances, but the thought crossed my mind that Dr. Michal Schwartz’s lecture on stem cell research might be the last I ever heard.

As I approached the building, Sinai security performed their routine rummage through my purse, and I was instantly propelled back to normalcy. I walked into a room where a formidable crowd of older adults was assembled, attentively listening to Schwartz’s lecture about rats, brains, the immune system and neurogenesis (the process by which neurons are created).

Schwartz’s groundbreaking research, performed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel requires engineering various defects or injuries in animals and then trying to cure them. Her team induced spinal cord injury in a rat (though she promised the creature felt no pain) and remarkably, it was rehabilitated from complete paralysis to re-gaining the ability to stand and walk. What Schwartz ultimately discovered was that repair was dependent on immunological mechanisms, which are more closely linked to brain activity than previously thought.

Schwartz will soon begin working in a research lab at Cedars-Sinai International Stem Cell Research Institute. The “atmosphere in California” as well as ample funding, permits greater flexibility with these experiments. Schwartz believes the study of stem cells will lead to medical advances that may help slow brain aging and memory loss, enhance repair after trauma and weaken disease progression.

“It takes time but we are starting to convince the people,” she declared, referring to the resistance she’s encountered. Schwartz’s work is not as controversial as say, embryonic stem cell research, which involves the use of human stem cells, typically 5-day-old embryos floating in the fallopian tube that never find their way to the uterus. These are the frozen, discarded embryos—the blasocyst byproducts of in vitro fertilization that couples sign over to science, with a flood of ethical questions in their wake. Schwartz was the first to admit that her discoveries are only applicable to modern medicine insofar as they have been tested on animals; research with humans may well reveal different results. And so the question remains…

What does Jewish halacha (law) say about such scientific research? Is it ethical?

During the Q&A session led by Rabbis David Wolpe and Ahud Sela, RDW was quick to point out that “it is a deeply rooted imperative in the Jewish tradition to heal,“citing the concept of “rapo y’rapeh—you shall surely heal” and the Talmudic section of bava kamma, which outlines the ways in which one who has injured another is responsible for healing them (lucky for the rats).

I have wondered many times, in the tradition of all great scientific and technological advances, how to maintain a healthy balance of inquiry. Too often, discovery has had destructive consequences. E=mc2 became a nuclear bomb. Was the evening’s beginning a strange irony or foreshadowing?

Perhaps more importantly, the question is “when?” When will this science be certain enough to make a difference in someone’s life? When does animal testing mean one less parent descends into the dementia of dying from Alzheimer’s?