Miller's Crossing

"Realistically, clinically when will you be able to go in and say, "All right, turn it back, Doc'? The answer is going to be another good decade or two. But that's not very long, if you think about it."

Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." -- John 11:25

These people appear to prefer death and heaven to a not-too-happy lifetime. -- Miller Quarles

One of the biggest gripes from Quarles, West and other advocates of stem cell research and therapeutic cloning is the lack of funding available for such work.

These investigations have been highly controversial, entailing the destruction of human embryos and fiddling with the genetic building blocks of life. Congress bans federal funding for investigations using human embryos, a blackout that essentially has balkanized the research to the private sector.

Advanced Cell Technology has raised eyebrows by using interspecies cloning to obtain stem cells. Researchers there have found they can create an embryo by taking an ordinary human skin cell and implanting it in a cow's egg that has had its DNA removed.

Within the medical community there are scientists who have serious doubts about both the ethics and the science of such experiments.

Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology at New York Medical College, says the sanguine musings of some stem cell researchers are creating a lot of false hopes. The idea of replacing organs and cells as if they were car parts is unrealistic, he says, because the human body can take only so much surgery. And attacking aging at the source by extending peoples' telomeres is not without its serious risks too. He says telomerase, the enzyme that would increase divisions in healthy cells, also is responsible for the out-of-control division of cancer cells.

"How many generations of experiments will we be asked to go through with people getting higher rates of cancer?" he asks. "To propose doing experiments on developing humans to see how they turn out, and wait a couple of generations to see if you've gotten your desired effect without increased cancer rates or something -- it's crazy."

Researchers in at least one lab have shown they can use telomerase to make human cells "immortal" without causing cancer, Fossel says. Nevertheless, West acknowledges that the research remains controversial for a variety of reasons.

But he argues that many objections are rooted in semantics, with people getting riled up over words like "embryo" and "cloning." He says the life form from which stem cells are derived is not so much an embryo as a "pre-embryonic" cluster of cells.

Regarding cloning, West says the form of the technology he advocates is "therapeutic," not "reproductive." His scientists are creating cells, not babies. And using cows' eggs is a cheaper and more humane method than using human eggs, and won't result in a monster hybrid species, he says.

"Despite the concern that we're making minotaurs and mermaids -- half-human, half-cow -- we remove the genetic information from the cow," he says.

What galls West more than anything is the argument that all these experiments are being done for no discernible purpose. "Well, how about curing heart disease? How about curing Parkinson's or a kid who's got renal failure [or] letting Christopher Reeve walk again? These are very legitimate purposes that we are trying to develop these technologies for," he says.

He estimates that there are only about 100 scientists working on stem cell and cloning research to extend human life, and calls that amount "pitifully and tragically small."

"There's no federal funding available yet. Little biotech companies can barely make a dent," he says.

But West and other proponents of the revolutionary technologies had reason to cheer last month when the National Institutes of Health issued guidelines for research on stem cells, under which scientists will be eligible for federal funds. That development came on the heels of the British government's announcement that it would support some forms of human cloning to treat disease, reflecting a shift in attitude by policy-makers toward the technology.

But West does not dare hazard a guess about what all of this will mean for Miller Quarles.

"The Berlin Wall's coming down -- we've solved the aging of cells," he says. "So when will we see an effect on human life span? I guess what I'm really comfortable saying is that I believe we will see a measurable effect on human life span in the lifetime of people now living. What are Miller's chances? I just don't have a crystal ball that's clear enough to predict that."

For his part, Quarles anxiously watches the action from the sidelines, applauding the breakthroughs and excoriating any kind of feet-dragging by bureaucrats. He feels he doesn't have time to wait out the debates on the ethical nuances of these brave new technologies. Watching friends like Purl Vickers buckle under the tide of age forces him into sober assessments of his own chances to live on indefinitely. He wants action now.