Pen and Paper Revolutionaries: The Subversive Business of Stem Cell Research

For Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences Douglas A. Melton, innovative medical research is about more than furthering the cause of science. It’s personal.

When Melton’s two children were diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, it altered the course of his research—ultimately, it would change Melton’s life. Since the diagnoses, Melton has become one of Harvard’s most public academics. In 1999, he testified before the Senate, making a personal plea for approval of stem-cell research. This November, he developed a semi-subversive program to push his research forward despite government embargos. And in March, Harvard announced Melton would be co-director of a multi-million dollar center for stem cell research based at the University.

Since he learned of his childrens’ affliction 14 years ago, Melton and his team have focused their work on using stem cells, tissue extracted from frozen human embryos, to develop a cure for diabetes. But prohibitions laid down by the Bush administration three years ago narrowed their research to a set of only 15 approved lines, which Melton has criticized as limited in quality and diversity.

After years of struggling to innovate within the limited set, Melton decided to take matters into his own hands. Government provisions only apply if scientists use federal money to do their research. Working with money lent by private donors—including Harvard University, the government of Singapore and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation—Melton built his own supply of stem cells. In a two year process, he procured a set of 17 cell lines from a Boston in-vitro fertilization clinic, which extracted the tissue from discarded embryos whose donors gave written consent.

The vanguard project has potentially enormous implications.  “It’s a very rare circumstance when you can ask the most fundamental and interesting questions in the lab and have them matter to the lay public.  It’s a special opportunity,” Dr. Jayaraj Rajagopal who works in Melton’s lab, said in an email. As a scientific tool, the cell lines, which Melton has made available to the scientific community at no charge, can be valuable to researchers in a number of fields. As a political statement, Melton is defying the Bush administration’s rules of bioethics.

While the embryonic cells, unique in their biological simplicity, are particularly useful to scientists, they have raised a number of bioethical and religious concerns. Anyone who experiments with Melton’s cells will have to do so without government funding—and will have to combat fierce ethical contestation as well. “It’s been extraordinary to watch the science progressing in the face of enormous political obstacles,” Rajagopal wrote.

But Melton remains unfazed. He maintains that his 17 lines are not enough. “The number [of stem cells] needed is far greater than that which is available,” he says in a press release from the Molecular and Cellular Biology department. “We need stem cells that represent the full genetic diversity of the population. I’ll be sorry if this is the end of our efforts. My hope is that this is just the beginning.”