By Julie Godfrey Miller
Superior Catholic Herald
Respect Life Office sponsors biotechnology workshop
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AMERY -- Biotechnology was the subject of a workshop held by the Respect Life Office of the Diocese of Superior at St. Joseph Parish Center in Amery, Sept. 29. About 50 people attended, including several young religious education students.
In her introduction to the workshop, Jo Cizek, director of the Respect Life Office, said, "It sounds like genetics 101, without a final exam."
Speaker Anthony Jilek explained stem cells, gene therapy and cloning in a way that made the complex, scientific concepts understandable to the audience of nonscientists.
Jilek, a retired professor from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, holds a bachelor's degree in agricultural education from UW-RF and a master's and doctorate from the University of Florida in genetics and animal breeding. He and his wife, Anne, are active members of St. Bridget Parish in River Falls.
Jilek defined biotechnology as the application of biological knowledge to practical needs, and explained that he would talk about the scientific approach to the subject. "If you understand the scientific, you can easily understand the moral and ethical part."
The first use of biotechnology was the domestication of animals, when some were selected for characteristics that made them more adaptable to life with humans, he said. Current uses include artificial insemination, invitro fertilization, gene therapy and cloning.
He went back to basics and explained the different types of cells.
Current therapies rely on transplants, which usually means the patient has to wait for someone to die. Then the immune system has to be destroyed with chemicals so the body won't reject the foreign tissue. The patient will then be susceptible to infections for the rest of his or her life.
Stem cells are immature cells, which have not yet differentiated into a particular kind of cell.
There are three types of stem cells. The first is embryonic. When stem cells are taken from an embryo, the embryo dies.
The second type is adult stem cells. These are undifferentiated cells found among the cells in tissue of an adult. These cells can be taken from the patient, cultured and concentrated, and injected back into the person, or can be used to grow a tissue to be transplanted into that patient. An example is heart tissue. Jilek said there currently is no effective therapy for chronic heart disease, but adult stem cells can repair heart muscle.
The third type is cord blood stem cells, mainly used to replace blood cells destroyed by chemotherapy.
There are pluses and minuses to the use of each of these three types, Jilek said.
Embryonic cells are easy to harvest and can turn into any type of cell, however, the process kills the embryo. There is also the danger that the wrong kind of cells will grow (for example, lung tissue growing in the heart). These cells also have the same disadvantage as tissue transplants--the immune system of the
person who receives the tissue has to be suppressed to keep the body from rejecting the tissue.
Adult stem cells do not involve taking a human life and have the advantage of producing a specific kind of tissue, so there is no danger of getting the wrong kind. That is also one of the disadvantages, Jilek said. They can't develop into all kinds of tissue. They are also difficult to harvest, he said. Since the cells or tissue grown from the cells are placed back into the body they came from, there are no problems with rejection.
Cord blood stem cells are easy to collect. (One member of the audience, who had cord blood collected when one of her children was born, commented on the high cost of the process to the parents and the additional yearly cost of storing it.) The disadvantage of cord blood cells is that they can only be used to treat the person they came from, or perhaps a very close relative, although that would require immune suppression.
Jilek also explained cloning. Identical twins, he said, are natural clones, coming from a single cell that split. There are genetically identical.
Cells from an embryo can be split in the lab and then stimulated to continue to grow. That is one method of cloning.
Jilek said the sheep, Dolly, was cloned using a different method--transplanting the nucleus of a cell into an egg taken from another donor, which had its nucleus removed. When it began dividing, it was implanted into a surrogate mother sheep. Since Dolly's initial cell came from an adult sheep, she was genetically old before her time and died of pre-mature aging. Jilek said that's why people want to take the cells from an embryo or a very young person.
Cloning can also be accomplished by fragmenting DNA and inserting it into a plasmid from bacteria, so the DNA multiplies. This technique is currently used to produce human insulin and the BST (bovine growth hormone) used in the dairy industry.
In his conclusion, Jilek summed up the moral aspect of the subject; The Catholic Church only opposes technology that kills a human being; life begins at conception; use of embryonic cells kills the embryo.
There was also a presentation by Mary Holmes, who is the coordinator in the diocese's Respect Life Office for Project Rachel, the church's ministry to those who have had abortions, and also others who are affected by a woman's decision to have an abortion. Holmes stressed that God forgives anyone who is truly sorry.
Mary Ball of St. Francis Xavier Parish in Merrill gave a presentation on creating a culture of life in a parish. She gave examples of the things her parish has done over the years to get people involved in pro-life.
© Superior Catholic Herald, 2007