When new science ignites a firestorm

[RamboLiberal]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/02/23/BUGD855EQK1.DTL

Doug Melton sighs. For hours, this Harvard molecular embryologist has been toiling in a small personal lab attached to his office in Cambridge, Mass., where he's trying to save the lives of his two children.

Twelve-year-old Sam and 16-year-old Emma have been diagnosed with insulin- dependent diabetes. If Melton's research is successful, they could be spared the organ failure, blindness and heart disease that eventually afflict diabetics -- but only if Melton is allowed to continue his work by lawmakers in Washington, D.C. They worry that his methods might be immoral or dangerous and are threatening to shut down his work.

Melton, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor in the Natural Sciences at Harvard University, studies the mechanisms of how embryonic stem cells form in mice and humans just after an egg is fertilized. These stem cells have the unique ability to grow into any tissue in the body -- whether of a liver, eyeball or skeleton.