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the Stem Cell Page time and ignorance are the enemies |
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Speaking of stem cells, how ‘bout that Bob Gibson? |
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October 3, 2006
Growing up in St. Louis, I loved the Cardinals. My home town has a great baseball tradition dating back over 100 years. On the same day Custer was “last standing,” the predecessor team to the Cardinals was playing a baseball game.
I was lucky to watch the great Stan “the man” Musial. I marveled as every starting infielder of the 1963 National League All-Star team was a Cardinal. I cheered the World Series championships of the 1960’s and 1980’s. I saw Mark McGwire shatter the home run record in that historic race with Sammy Sosa. More recently, I’ve been amazed at the most prolific offensive commencement of any baseball career, that of Albert Pujols.
But of all those great Cardinal performances, for me none stands out more than the 1968 season of Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson. He started 34 games. He completed 28 of them and an unbelievable 13 were shutouts. During one stretch he won 15 consecutive games, and over that entire year his opponents earned an average of only 1.12 runs per nine innings he pitched. It is generally considered the finest single season of pitching in modern baseball. Sportscaster Tim McCarver, who used to catch Gibson, once said, “Bob Gibson is the luckiest pitcher in baseball. He’s always pitching when the other team doesn’t score any runs.”
I often mention this to younger baseball fans and urge them to look it up. When they see the statistics, they’re always as amazed at their discovery as I was to see it when it happened. I remember pointing this out to my friend, Jeff McCaffrey. (Jeff was an athlete at the Air Force Academy until an accident caused his spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed.) Jeff is a pretty knowledgeable and enthusiastic sports fan.
I explained to him that what made Gibson great was a combination of pinpoint control, competitiveness and the right tools - a blazing fastball, a great slider, and a curve ball that would break from “2 o’clock to 8,” leaving batters dislodged from their cleats.
It’s obvious that having the complete arsenal of those pitches is what made him so effective. If Gibson only had a fastball, hitters would have knocked him around like an average Joe. No “one-pitch Charlie” can be effective for long. Oh, they might occasionally strike somebody out, but it’s really impossible to compete at the major league level that way.
I know what you’re thinking: “Thanks for the walk down your personal memory lane, but what does that have to do with stem cell research?”
Bear with me...
A recent trio of coordinated European studies, two in Germany and one in Norway, concluded that adult stem cell treatment (from bone marrow) did not provide more than a negligible therapeutic benefit for patients with heart disease. The Associated Press carried the story about the findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine…
In each study, stem cells were infused into the heart through a cardiac catheterization. A tiny balloon momentarily blocked regular blood flow into the heart and stem cells were injected in an attempt to give them a couple of minutes to try to take root. Success was measured by changes in the amount of blood pumped out with each heartbeat.
Norwegian researchers gave bone marrow stem cells to 50 patients who’d had heart attacks the previous week and compared them to a similar group who received no such cells. There was no significant improvement six months later.
German researchers gave stem cell infusions to 101 patients who had suffered a heart attack in the previous week. Another 103 heart attack survivors were given sham infusions. After four months, heart function improved 5.5 percentage points in those who received cell therapy and 3 points in the placebo group.
Another study in Germany focused on patients who had had heart attacks at least three months earlier — on average more than six years previously. Researchers gave 28 patients an infusion of bone marrow stem cells, 24 an infusion of stem cells from circulating blood and 23 no infusions. Three months after treatment, bone marrow recipients had a 3 percentage point gain in pumping ability compared with the others.
AP also carried reaction to the NEJM report…
“The optimal cell type has not been discovered yet,” said Dr. Kenneth Chien, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cardiovascular Research Center, who had no role in the studies. Chien said experiments in various laboratories over the past 15 years suggest embryonic stem cells show they can turn into beating cardiac muscle, though it has not been tried in human patients. “This is an area worthy of further pursuit,” he said.
AP wrapped up its article with…
In a commentary in the medical journal, a deputy editor, Dr. Robert Schwartz, lamented that dozens of companies promise cures that involve adult or cord-blood stem cells, though there’s no clear proof that this works. “These three clinical trials probably will not stop the exploitation of patients,” Schwartz wrote.
This is but another example of the need to have more than one pitch in the repertoire. This is the big leagues - and then some - but it’s not a game. For many, like McCaffrey, it could mean the difference between getting out of that wheel chair sooner or having to wait while vital research is postponed. For others, like my brother Tom, it could literally be the difference between life and death.
Sadly, our federal government has made a shift in the allocation of funding at the National Institutes of Health. In years past, they were handed a lump sum and the scientists would pour through the applications, giving funding to those projects which they believed showed the greatest promise. But under the Bush administration, the scientists of NIH no longer completely control the destiny of funding allocations. For the first time, it is directed not solely by scientists but also by politicians, as proxies fueled by religious conservatives.
This has resulted in relatively miniscule sums allocated to human embryonic stem cell research. This chart demonstrates the point:
The January 11, 2006 CRS report on stem cell research to Congress summarizes the problem in the concluding paragraph:
The Bush policy authorizes federal funding for some embryonic stem cell research. The President’s Council [on bioethics] does not take a position on the issue [of embryonic stem cell research], but notes the pros and cons and stresses that there is a “difference between prohibiting embryo research and refraining from funding it.”
This is precisely the “out” provided for embryonic stem cell opponents: They won’t “prohibit” it. They just won’t provide sufficient funding. (The paltry 4% of the stem cell research budget of 2005 is there in black and white for all to see.)
In other words, “We’ll let our pitchers throw curve balls and sliders, so long as they throw fastballs 96 times out of 100.”
So much for that 1968 season. And with rules like that, what would have become of Dizzy Dean, Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, Juan Marichal, Nolan Ryan or Roger Clemens? They’d have been average Joes all – and nobody would remember them because the art of pitching would have been forever diminished.
Similarly, our medical researchers need all the “pitches” in their arsenals to fight disease. They need embryonic stem cells. They need adult stem cells and they need SCNT as well. They need them all to be competitive. They need them all to win.
And wouldn’t a shutout be great?
- Jeff Eisen
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