This morning, I was at the Council meeting held at the Hamilton Crowne Plaza in Washington, D.C. Today the members heard from Dr. Hans Schöler Director for Cell and Developmental Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine. A top-flight stem cell biologist, Sch ö ler was invited t o update the Council on the latest scientific inroads regarding non-embryo destructive stem cell research.

Dr. Sch ö ler came across immediately as an honest scientist with little ego-and no political agenda. (I was fortunate enough to personally confirm these impressions over lunch with Dr. Schöler). Oven an hour-long presentation he shared any number of fascinating developments. He was not optimistic about the prospects of so-called "therapeutic cloning" as an avenue for therapies and cures. Successful cloning in primates continues to be problematic, although not insurmountable. But he confirmed something I wrote about back in May, namely that many scientists acknowledge that there are equally viable alternatives that do not involve cloning, which will well prove to be more cost effective and, best of all, ethically uncontroversial. Hence, their continued research into the possibility of reprogramming normal body cells (called somatic cells) to a state of pluripotency.

Much progress has been made here of late using animal cells and it is suspected that stem cell scientists are hard at it trying to make it work with human cells. Dr. Sch ö ler described a number of current approaches to reprogramming, including direct application of reprogramming factors to somatic cells, and the fusing of somatic cells to embryonic stem cells which would then do the job of reprogramming the somatic cells. The latter approach of course, were it to be attempted with in humans using the existing lines of human embryonic stem cells, would not be uncontroversial.

He also spoke at length about progress in the method known as altered nuclear transfer which proposes to use the same technique as used in cloning (somatic cell nuclear transfer) but with the precise objective of producing a biological artifact which is not an embryo (the exact opposite of what cloners seek to do).

Asked where he would put his money if he were a betting man, in terms of which proposal might be the surest and quickest to satisfying both scientists and those who object to embryo-destructive research, Schöler said he would put his money on all of the proposals he spoke of. When pushed, however, he said in no uncertain terms that ANT at present looks like the most promising. He also pointed out that his own lab, among other endeavors, is working to take multipotent stem cells from human umbilical cord blood and use factors to make them pluripotent (entirely ethically uncontroversial). He also pointed out-to the amusement of the Council and observers-that the later people would wait to clone themselves, the worse off their clone will be. Our DNA, as it turns out, degenerates over time. Moral of the story: if you are going to clone yourself, do so before you turn 40!

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Fr. Thomas Berg is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.