A Pox on Stem-Cell Research

An op-ed writer in today's New York Times likens President Bush's "moral" opposition to stem cell research to religious figures in the 18th century who opposed innoculations against small-pox on religious grounds:

The word “smallpox” once implied all the horror of a murderous infection against which people had little remedy. A 19th-century historian called it “the most terrible of all the ministers of death.”

Smallpox’s legacy of misery obsessed the English doctor Edward Jenner. Born in 1749, Jenner spent years hunting for ways to conquer, or at least prevent, the dread disease. He gathered anecdotal evidence from patients and strangers, including milkmaids, who appeared protected from smallpox by their exposure to a related, but milder, infection called cowpox. He also studied the folk medicine practice of inoculation, in which pus from smallpox pustule was rubbed into an opening scratched in the skin of an uninfected person.

Other doctors were also exploring the idea of inoculation, but Jenner went further, conducting experiments in the mid-1790’s. He designed a procedure using fluid from cowpox lesions to inoculate against smallpox. His approach was untested, but Jenner believed it offered the potential to become “essentially beneficial to mankind.”

The religious authorities of Jenner’s day viewed smallpox inoculation as an affront to God and man. A widely published British sermon was titled “The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation.” American clergy warned that inoculation usurped God’s power to decide the beginning and end of life. Only hypocrites would undergo the procedure and still pray to God, one theologian declared.

Jenner responded with a risky demonstration of his idea. In 1796, the doctor persuaded his own servant to allow the man’s 8-year-old son to be inoculated with cowpox material; two months later, Jenner exposed the child to smallpox.

The experiment was a success. Moreover, the child remained immune to smallpox even after the doctor exposed him to it a second time. The doctor himself, however, was reviled. Clerics denounced him as a tool of the devil. Newspapers ridiculed him as “a presumptuous man” overselling his results; one cartoonist portrayed him as a country bumpkin surrounded by patients sprouting cow parts.

Even some of his medical colleagues questioned whether he might have gone too far. In retrospect, one can easily imagine Jenner’s brilliant idea sinking under the combined weight of moral antipathy and scientific disdain.

Instead, the doctor persevered and triumphed. Not by hyping the potential of his ideas, as some stem cell supporters occasionally have done, but by doggedly gathering more evidence based on more inoculations. Fueled by his success, the practice spread, and smallpox rates plummeted. In time, the life-saving merits of inoculation eventually overwhelmed all doubt; the evidence, Jenner wrote, became “too manifest to admit of controversy.”

Let's hope history repeats itself.