Strange Bedfellows on Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Wow! Nancy Reagan in this Blog!?! As John Dos Passos said (according to my old prof, Bob Richards — not the pole vaulter — in the course: "Individualism in America" at the University of Denver): It is all a matter of whose ox is being gored. Nancy Reagan is an Althzeimer's widow; her husband — still alive — is dead to her, for all purposes. Mrs. Reagan has taken on W. If you want bad science, listen to W. If you want bad anything, listen to W. Nancy Reagan has joined Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) in this fight. W has sold his soul to the Protestant Right. I feel kinship with Mrs. Reagan. My 85-year-old mother has lost the sight in her left eye due to the worst type of Macular Degeneration. She has been transformed into a frail, frightened, old lady. She lives with the possibility that she will awaken (as she did with the left eye) with a black blob in her remaining sighted eye. Will unrestricted stem cell research help her? No. But, it might help me. Macular Degeneration likely is hereditary. My optometrist proclaimed that he saw signs of MD during my last eye exam. I wonder if W would change his position on stem cell research if Bush I (Poppy) or Barbara woke up blind with an incurable eye disease with present technology? Nah. W is nothing, if not stupid.

Speaking of stupidity, W has gathered all of the dumbass governors he knew as peers into his administration. Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services? Tom Ridge, Secretary of Homeland Security? My hope: Bush will name Governor Goodhair (Perry) as Secretary of Agriculture. Goodhair went to Texas A&M. Surprise, surprise. Goodhair is going to call another special session of the Legislature to take up redistricting. He has the intellect to join W. If this be (fair & balanced) treason, make the most of it.

[x Modern Maturity]

Nancy’s Stand

As Alzheimer’s ravages her husband’s mind, the former first lady wages a stealth campaign to open the gates of stem cell research

By Wil S. Hylton

Most people don't think of Nancy Reagan as a rabble-rouser. Few would put her in the category of fiery first ladies, with Hillary and Eleanor and Abigail. She was always more of the demure type, subdued in the shadow of her husband. We picture her at the '81 inauguration, poised beside her Ronnie in a little red Adolfo suit, with her shoulders pricked up, her face tilted deferentially downward, smiling with her mouth closed. That was the image Nancy projected: silent and mannered, proper and discreet. Even on the occasions when she did speak in public, it was never about an issue of much debate. Who among us doesn't support breast cancer research? Who objects when children "just say no" to drugs? Certainly nobody on either side of the Congressional aisle—and her public agenda seemed careful to avoid controversy.

So it came as some surprise when the former first lady threw her weight into the political battle over stem cell research two years ago, positioning herself in favor of experiments on human embryos and against the Bush Administration's severe regulation of them. Suddenly, Mrs. R had a voice of her own, and it wasn't reciting the party line. In fact, by rejecting the argument that embryos have a right to life, she even seemed to challenge her husband's opposition to abortion. Not that she was eager to say anything so brash in front of a television camera; on the contrary, as she conveyed to me recently through a spokesperson, she doesn't have the time or inclination for public grandstanding. Her life is consumed these days by the care of her husband, whose Alzheimer's has become so severe that he no longer seems to recognize her.

Still, somewhere between his shadow and the spotlight, Mrs. Reagan planted her feet and took a stand, and in a series of carefully placed phone calls and high-level meetings, she has promoted her case relentlessly, pressuring lawmakers to enact legislation that would encourage embryonic stem cell research. By doing so, activists say, she has quickly become one of the most important sub rosa advocates of the science.

"Mrs. Reagan's support demonstrates that this issue is not about ideology, but about helping find cures and treatments," says Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), who has been a vocal proponent of the research.

Those who oppose the research are somewhat disheartened by the former first lady's commitment. "It's unfortunate that Mrs. Reagan feels this way," says Tara Seyfer of the Culture of Life Foundation. "It's inconsistent with the things that she and her husband have stood for."

But a closer look at Mrs. Reagan's life reveals a pattern of backstage maneuvering, sometimes for causes that were more liberal than you might expect. During her husband's administration, in particular, she wielded an unseen power that rivaled the influence of even the most active first ladies. From her position at the president's side, she encouraged major cabinet and staff changes, including the departures of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and CIA Director William Casey. She encouraged him to install more moderate thinkers in the brain trust and controlled critical decisions about the administration's schedule and public relations, reportedly placing a three-month moratorium on her husband's public appearances during the Iran-Contra scandal. In many ways, she also functioned as the president's most intimate counsel, providing, as he once wrote, "the light of understanding to [my] darkened, obtuse mind." And if her quiet wisdom gave Mr. Reagan a safe haven from the political arena, he gave her access to it, providing her with a back door for her opinions to enter the public sphere. As she revealed in her 1989 autobiography, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan (Random House), "For eight years I was sleeping with the president, and if that doesn't give you special access, I don't know what does! I gave Ronnie my best advice whenever he asked for it, and sometimes when he didn't." Now that access is gone, however. With Mr. Reagan's departure from the national stage, Mrs. Reagan can no longer rely on his natural eloquence to convey her point of view to the public. So it may have been inevitable that, one day, fired up by an opinion and eager to express it, she would reach out to elected officials, reentering the national conversation and securing a place once again to influence public policy. Especially if she believed that her influence might save others from her husband's plight.

So what is it about stem cells that got Mrs. Reagan so excited? Their nearly boundless potential to heal.

In broad strokes, it works like this: Your whole body is made up of cells. Think of them as building materials. You have many types of them, like bricks, and lumber, and drywall. That is, the cells that make up your skin are different from the cells that make up your bones, which are different from the cells in your lungs, and so on. Now imagine that the cells in one part of your body are damaged. Doesn't matter how they got that way. Doesn't matter if it's cancer or a car accident. Let's just say they need to be replaced. Unfortunately, there's no obvious place to get new cells. You can't just go to the hardware store and stock up. What you have to do, instead, is make some new cells. That's where your stem cells come in. Think of your stem cells as a source of raw materials—the timber that becomes lumber or the clay that becomes a brick. They can be found right next to your other cells, buried in your tissues, but they are not like your other cells because they can replicate and make new cells. Scientists are researching ways to extract a stem cell, put it into a culture, replicate it several times until there's a larger mass of new cells, and then transplant those new cells back into your body to replace the damaged ones. Because the cells are duplicates of your own, they will be a perfect genetic match and will transplant without risk of rejection.

Simple, right? A big catch: There's a limit to the number of cells you can generate that way. You see, most adult stem cells can double only a few times in culture. So if you don't need a lot of new cells, you're in good shape. You just start with a few stem cells and get going. But if you need, say, a few thousand new cells, or a million, or a billion (the number required for, say, a major organ repair), well, you're out of luck. That's when you just might need embryonic stem cells.

What differentiates an embryonic stem cell from an adult stem cell is pretty straightforward: The embryonic stem cell is extracted from an embryo, usually about five days old. This is done for two reasons: Number one, embryonic stem cells can reproduce indefinitely, so you can make as many spare bricks or two-by-fours as you want. You just put the embryonic cells into a culture and wait until you have enough new cells. You've got an unlimited supply, so you never have to worry about running out. Needless to say, scientists like the sound of that. Just like everybody else in the universe, they'd rather have an unlimited resource than a limited one. But the second reason embryonic stem cells are harvested is even more compelling: An embryonic stem cell is capable of turning into any other type of cell. So, whereas a stem cell taken from your skin could be used to make new skin cells, you couldn't use those same stem cells to produce, say, new brain cells. You'd have to get brain tissue to do that, but the adult brain stem cells are too rare to make that practical. Or you could just make new brain cells from an embryonic stem cell. Or new spinal cord cells. Or virtually any other type of cells. They wouldn't be your own cells because you're not an embryo anymore, so there'd be a higher chance of transplant rejection—but as with other transplants, the benefits might outweigh the risks. Scientists don't yet know how to instruct embryonic stem cells to turn into one cell type or another, but they're getting closer.

The reason embryonic stem cells are so much more flexible than adult cells is that they haven't yet become any particular cell type. In other words, they are young and easy to manipulate, while adult stem cells are older and more set in their ways. So you could, at least hypothetically, use an embryonic stem cell to repair a damaged cornea, a spinal-cord injury like Christopher Reeve's, or even a brain disease like Parkinson's or Huntington's or Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's. Anytime cells have been damaged or destroyed, embryonic stem cells offer the hope of generating new, flawless replacements.

In the summer of 2002, this distinction between embryonic and adult stem cells was so clear, and the advantage of using embryonic cells so obvious, that the debate over stem cell research was rarely a matter of scientific disagreement. For the most part, scientists from all political perspectives could agree that embryonic stem cells were a vastly superior research tool. The debate was focused instead on whether it was morally acceptable to use them. After all, although it's possible to remove some types of adult stem cell without causing any significant damage to the donor, embryos are so small and so vulnerable that taking a mere 30 stem cells from them is taking nearly half of their total mass. As such, it's guaranteed to kill them. Needless to say, this raises the stakes of the debate. Anybody who believes that an embryo is a human being isn't likely to approve of killing one. On the other hand, people who support the research point out that embryonic stem cells are taken from embryos left over from in vitro fertilization, so they would have been killed anyway. As Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, a prominent Republican supporter of the research, puts it, a discarded embryo is "not on its way to life."

It was in this climate of awkward ethical nuance that a rift of passions began to develop in the Republican Party, beginning a few years ago and finding expression in a Senate hearing during April of 2000, when Specter squared off against the more conservative Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas.

"You are taking live human embryos," Brownback protested. "You had the Nazis in World War II saying of these people, 'They are going to be killed. Why do we not experiment on them and find out what happens with these experiments? They are going to die anyway.' "

"But they were living people," Specter insisted.

"These are living embryos!" said Brownback.

Struggling to find some middle ground between the two camps, George W. Bush quickly found himself in a personal and political gantlet. One thing was clear to him: In his heart (as well as his core constituency), there was moral certainty that killing embryos was wrong. On the other hand, he also knew that scientists had already begun to culture cells from embryos. In the cases of those cell colonies, or "cell lines," the damage was already done—the embryos were no longer alive to defend. To Bush, that made the issue more difficult to decide. Was it more important for him to approve the use of those cell lines, so the public could benefit from them? Or should he, as President, set a moral standard and prevent government scientists from using such methods? The decision tore at Bush's conscience, perhaps more than any other issue in his presidency, including war. In the end, he decided that the research was too promising to bypass, and in August of 2001 he granted government-funded scientists the right to work with all existing embryonic cell lines. But he stipulated that they could not develop any new embryonic lines. (At the time, Bush believed there were more than 60 cell lines available for government research—the number has since been revised down to a dozen.)

If it seemed like a fair compromise to many folks, it felt like defeat to many people in Nancy Reagan's camp. Most scientists in favor of embryonic research insist that the existing cell lines aren't nearly adequate to explore the full range of research possibilities. For that, scientists would need hundreds, maybe thousands, of different stem cell lines. Among other things, a larger variety of cell lines would give transplant recipients a better chance of finding a donor with their genetic type.

But even as Mrs. Reagan launched a campaign to change the President's mind, even as she visited the White House last summer, lodging in the Queen's Bedroom and, according to The New York Times, lobbying Chief of Staff Andrew Card for his help on the issue, a group of stem cell scientists in Minnesota was unwittingly working against her. At the Stem Cell Institute at the University of Minnesota, a team of researchers led by Catherine Verfaillie, M.D., announced a critical discovery in June: Working with adult bone-marrow stem cells in mice, they were able to achieve nearly the flexibility of embryonic stem cells. That is, the bone-marrow stem cells divided more than a hundred times, and they could morph into a tremendous variety of cell types, including muscle cells, liver cells, bone cells, cartilage cells, and neurons, or brain cells. Suddenly, Mrs. Reagan's campaign looked a little less necessary. While she remained convinced that all stem cell research should go forward, the discovery was so promising, and made the new bone-marrow cells appear so fruitful, that even some of Mrs. Reagan's supporters were beginning to wonder: If adult stem cells are just as good, then why use embryos at all?


Fortunately for Mrs. Reagan, pressure never got her down. On the contrary, her persistence is legendary, and in earlier years it may even have won her husband's heart. As Ronald Reagan remembered in a letter to her on their 29th wedding anniversary, "Beginning in 1951, Nancy Davis, seeing the plight of a lonely man who didn't know how lonely he really was, determined to rescue him from a completely empty life. Refusing to be rebuffed by a certain amount of stupidity on his part, she ignored his somewhat slow response." Perseverance, then, was the mother of romance.

Perhaps her iron will stemmed from childhood. The only daughter of a soon-to-be-divorced actress, she was born in the early 1920s in New York City (she claims not to know her age) and spent the first two years of her life traveling with her mother to small stages around the country. When the traveling became burdensome, her mother dropped her off at an aunt's house in Maryland, where young Nancy lived for six years, surviving a nearly fatal case of double pneumonia along the way. When her mother finally reclaimed the child, she was engaged to Loyal Davis, a man whom Nancy had never met. The three of them promptly set off for Chicago, where Nancy had no friends and quickly discovered that she didn't like her stepfather very much. (It would be another 20 years before she felt comfortable enough to stop calling him "Dr. Loyal.") After college, Nancy moved to New York, fooled around with stage acting a while, and wound up on a TV show called Broken Dishes. There, she was spotted by a big shot at MGM, who arranged for her to visit California for a screen test.

That was her big break. Before she knew it, she had found her way onto the payroll at MGM, alongside such stars as Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor, ritzing through the finest parties with Loretta Young and Vivien Leigh. She had her own dressing room on the studio lot, and when she visited Radio City Music Hall for the premiere of her first starring role, The Next Voice You Hear, her name appeared in giant letters on the marquee over Sixth Avenue. But when her name appeared in a local newspaper in 1949, on a list of Communist sympathizers (thanks to another, more left-leaning actress who happened to share her name), Nancy reached out to the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan. He quickly invited her out on a date so they could discuss the matter. In the following two years, he cleared her name, got her pregnant, and then married her. She gave up acting in the early 1950s to become a full-time mother, but let Ronnie know, in no uncertain terms, that she wasn't about to start cooking or cleaning, which, by her own account, she never did.

Even in the 1960s, when Ronnie's taste for politics took him beyond the Screen Actors Guild into the California governor's mansion, Nancy insisted on being far more than a tagalong wife. As an unnamed source revealed to the author Anne Edwards in the book The Reagans: Portrait of a Marriage (St. Martin's Press, 2003), "Nancy had her own little 'secret service' going. We called it NBI—Nancy's Bureau of Investigation. She was always on the lookout for people who she thought were not giving their all to Reagan, or who she thought were duplicitous, and who she simply did not like or trust."

Later, when she arrived at the White House in 1981, she made an unmistakable mark on those around her. It was an open secret, for example, that she helped orchestrate the resignation of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in 1987, mostly because of his hard-line approach to the Soviet Union. As Colin Powell explained it in his autobiography, My American Journey (Ballantine, 1996), "He still had the President's personal loyalty, but Weinberger's standing with Nancy Reagan, never strong, had continued to slip, no small setback in this Administration. The pragmatic first lady viewed Weinberger, with his unrelenting hostility toward the Soviet Union, as swimming against the tide. In the chronic Weinberger-[Secretary of State George] Shultz feud, she increasingly took Shultz's side—which pained Weinberger. He was enough of a performer to recognize an exit line. He asked the President to relieve him as Secretary of Defense." Similarly, according to Bob Woodward in the book Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (Touchstone, 2000), Mrs. Reagan almost single-handedly (and for unclear reasons) forced the resignation of CIA Director William Casey during the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987. And in her own memoirs, she describes her struggle, and ultimate victory, in removing Donald Regan from the position of chief of staff a few weeks later.

So perhaps it was predictable that, when the Minnesota laboratory announced its success with bone-marrow stem cells, Nancy Reagan would take this latest pressure in stride. Rather than reduce her commitment to the cause of embryonic research, she increased her public visibility and revitalized her campaign, having friends speak to The New York Times for an article last fall, and crafting, this January, a heart-rending letter to Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, describing her loneliness in the face of Mr. Reagan's memory loss and insisting that stem cell research could lead to a cure. "Orrin, there are so many diseases that can be cured, or at least helped, that we can't turn our back on this," she wrote. "We've lost so much time already. I can't bear to lose any more."

Not that Mrs. Reagan's allies are blind to the breakthrough in bone-marrow research. On the contrary, they're enthusiastic about it, and hopeful. But, like many scientists in the field, they would like to see all research avenues fully explored before any are limited. Scientists should be conducting research on all types of stem cells, they say, and on as many varieties and cell lines as possible, so that they can develop therapies and treatments as quickly as possible. It may turn out that adult stem cells are just as good as embryonic stem cells—or even better—but until research proves that, Mrs. Reagan and her supporters don't want to limit the resources available for embryonic research. "This is the bottom line," says Jim Battey, M.D., Ph.D., head of the stem cell taskforce of the National Institutes of Health. "We just don't know the full range of possibility for either type of stem cell. So why limit the options? The safe bet would be to use both types of stem cells until we know exactly what we can do with each of them."

Even pro-life activists admit that the highly flexible, highly predictable embryonic stem cells would still be valuable as a scientific tool, if not for the moral concerns. "Embryonic research is tempting," says the Culture of Life's Seyfer. "It can look like a miracle cure. But we cannot favor the use of human embryonic stem cells, because in order to get them you have to kill an embryo—which is wrong, period."

So as Mrs. Reagan gears up for the next battle in the stem cell war in the face of strong opposition from some in the Senate's Republican leadership, it is worth noting that the former first lady has helped rally a broad coalition of those willing to help the cause, combining liberals like Tom Harkin of Iowa and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts with staunch conservatives like Specter and Hatch. Senators Hatch, Specter, and Harkin are pushing for legislation that would bypass the President's ruling and expand the number of embryonic cell lines available for federally funded research. "With the help of Nancy Reagan, we can pass bipartisan legislation," says Kennedy. "We must not allow misguided fears to deny patients the cures of tomorrow." And if President Bush isn't convinced just yet, if he isn't quite ready to shelve his moral objections and let the science go forward, well, just you wait. It wouldn't be the first time Nancy Reagan has changed a president's mind.

Wil S. Hylton lives in Austin, Texas. He is a contributing editor for GQ.

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