President Obama strikes me as a studious fellow, hence my most recent e-mail to www.whitehouse.gov/contact asking him to bone up on stem cell research before he just goes ahead and commits any stimulus money or tax dollars to it.

I asked him to do some heavy reading on the subject with a focus on two recent news announcements and see if he could come up with a reasoned explanation of his apparently fervent support for embryonic stem cell research.

The first story, which broke shortly after the inauguration, outlined the Food and Drug Administration’s reversal on the use of embryonic stem cells and approved their use for human trial.

The FDA gave a California biotechnology company – Geron Corp. – permission to conduct the first-ever human trial for a treatment derived from the cells. Even as this news was released, prominent neuroscientists, including Evan Snyder who heads up the so-called “Manhattan project” of stem cell research at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in San Diego, were warning that the research Geron wants to do may not be ready for humans.

“There’s a lot of debate among spinal cord researchers that the pre-clinical data itself doesn’t justify the clinical trial,” said Snyder, a leading advocate for embryonic research.

Snyder’s quotes on the Geron project appeared Jan. 29 on lifenews.com as did excerpts from earlier stories in which prominent professors and researchers – Jerry Silver of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland and bioethicist Wesley J. Smith, an admittedly vocal adult stem cell advocate – expressed concerns about Geron’s procedures. Geron seemed to be moving ahead too quickly they said. More tests were needed on animals before the company moved on to human beings.

The second story concerned a study published online Jan. 30 and in the March issue of The Lancet Neurology, which points out once again what supporters of adult stem cell research have known all along: adult stem cells continue to outpace their embryonic counterparts by successfully treating patients with a variety of diseases and conditions.

This study reveals the use of adult stem cells from bone marrow is helping multiple sclerosis patients with transplants from their own immune stem cells.

Three years after treatment, the study shows 17 of 21 early stage patients involved saw improvement and none of the patients involved saw their MS conditions worsen during the follow-up time period.

“This is the first study to actually show reversal of disability,” said Dr. Robert Burt, the lead researcher on a team from Northwestern University. Burt conducted the study using hematopoietic or blood-forming stem cells extracted from a patient’s own bone marrow.

“This is the first time we have turned the tide on this disease,” he said.

Bloomberg News quoted Edwin McClure, a 24-year-old graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, an early-stage patient treated in the study as saying he hasn’t needed drugs since the treatment.

“It’s a blessing,” he told Bloomberg. “My disease has been halted.”

Burt acknowledged that the adult stem cells don’t help patients with more advanced MS but do help when given at the earliest onset of the disease.

lifenews.com reports that he is now putting together a larger study with more patients from the US as well as Canada and Brazil.

“If the results of today’s study are borne out in the new one,” he said, “I think we can really change the way this disease is approached,” Burt said.

Reading these reports, I thought of my own mother who succumbed to another neurological nightmare – Lou Gherig’s disease – in 1997.

The chimera of embryonic stem cells was being floated even in those days and fund raisers were working hard to raise millions for embryonic research while, or so it seemed, they downplayed any support for adult stem cell research.

But here again, it seems that adult stem cells – engineered from bone marrow – are showing some success.

Scientists at UW-Madison reported last September that this very early stage research has successfully slowed the progression of ALS in rats.

Unlike embryonic research to date, these adult stem cells at least offer a glimmer of hope down the line. President Obama needs to know about that so I’m going to keep e-mailing him. I have the feeling I won’t be alone.

Lois Rogers is features editor of The Monitor and can be reached at [email protected].