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TwitThisBonus! Exclusive outtakes from our interview with Christopher Reeve
For more of Christopher Reeve's thoughts on stem cell and spinal cord injury research, we've including the following outtakes from our interview:Don't forget that it's only been a little over a decade that scientists finally agreed that the spinal cord could possibly be repaired, so I think we've come a pretty long way. But I don't think we're doing as well as we could here in the United States. Globally, I'd say we're doing quite well. There's really impressive work going on in Israel, the U.K., Sweden, Singapore, China. Spinal cord injuries know no boundaries. Breakthroughs that will serve Americans may well come from overseas.
I look at things in a pretty logical way and try to keep the emotion out of it. And if you ask a very simple, two-part question of some opponents of embryonic stem cell research, it's incredibly hard to get a straight answer. The question is, Where do the embryonic stem cells that scientists want to study come from? Answer, in vitro fertility clinics. There are 400 of those clinics around the country. There are 185,000 Americans walking around today who were born in those clinics.
The second part of that question is, if you're opposed to the harvesting of embryos from leftovers in those clinics that are going to be discarded as medical waste, do you object to in vitro fertility clinics? And they can't answer that.
It's just very interesting that, as far as I'm aware, there's never been legislation, since 1981, to ban fertility clinics in any state. And yet, people have a problem with taking, with informed consent of the donors, the excess embryos that aren't used. And there are 400,000 fertilized embryos sitting in freezers that will be thrown away as medical waste. They keep them for a brief time as there's a possibility of a sibling. And by the way, you don't need to have a perfect embryo to get embryonic stem cells. It doesn't need to be that viable. Because you're talking about the cells when they're only three to five days old. So this is not like a baby that you're killing.
My main hope for my foundation is to grow it exponentially so that we can continue to fund the cutting edge ideas, the scientists who are ready to move out of the laboratory and into human trials.
But they need help with the first step, which is getting to a phase one trial. A phase one trial demonstrates safety. But many biotech pharmaceuticals don't want to get involved until after phase one, when they know that something might be coming along. "Aha, that's safe. Well, maybe it'll work." So our foundation needs to help with the first push, getting promising therapies out of the lab and into the first phase of FDA trials.
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