Why Do Researchers Want Tissue From Aborted Fetuses?...search me o!!

National Institutes of Health

Organ Shortages

The case of diabetes especially illustrates why fetal tissue might be needed: not enough people donate organs after death. There's a procedure called the Edmonton Protocol, in which

pancreatic cells can be transplanted from the bodies of people who have just died.

It's given several hundred patients a break from taking insulin, although the transplant eventually fails in almost everyone and they must return to taking insulin. Diabetes researchers complain it's very difficult to get the pancreas cells they need, because there is such a shortage of donated organs. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, more than 123,000 Americans are waiting for an organ transplant.

So what scientists are working on is to create batches of cells, or even whole organs, in the labs. Supporters of stem cell research say all different kinds of stem cells are needed for this work until the best method for producing these regenerative tissues can be found.

"Given the enormous potential of stem cells to the development of new therapies for the most devastating diseases, it is important to simultaneously pursue all lines of promising research," the National Institutes of Health

says on its website.

Profit or Helping Medicine?

The activists, who belong to a little-known group called the Center for Medical Progress, say they made the video to show that Planned Parenthood sells organs and tissues from abortions. Planned Parenthood denies it.

"I want to be really clear: The allegation that Planned Parenthood profits in any way from tissue donation is not true," Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards says in a statement released Wednesday.

Just this week a team at the University of California San Francisco

published a study showing that 95 percent of women who had abortions did not regret it. Planned Parenthood said if a woman has decided to have an abortion, then donating the tissue otherwise bound for an incinerator at least helps medical science.

"I thank those women and families who have chosen tissue donation at some point in their lives," Richards said. "Your commitment to lifesaving research, developing treatments for diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, is important and compassionate, and it should be respected – not attacked."

The full

two-hour-long video shows the activists, who are posing as staffers from a biotechnology company seeking fetal tissue, wining and dining Dr. Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. They discuss how to obtain tissue from aborted fetuses.

Nucatola can be heard

repeatedly denying the tissue is being sold. "This is not a new revenue stream the affiliates are looking at. This is a way to offer the patient the service that they want, do good for the medical community," she says.

Nonetheless, politicians say the video raises serious questions.

"I could talk about the video but I think I'd vomit trying to talk about it. Disgusting," Boehner told reporters Wednesday.

Boehner says Congress will investigate. After a similar scandal in 1999, Congress passed a law banning the sale of fetal tissue or body parts, although such tissue may be freely donated.

Legal Battles

Embryonic stem cells were every bit as controversial as fetal stem cells for years. Some must be made

using cloning technology, while others are made using discarded embryos from fertility clinics. In 2012, after years of legal battles and fights in Congress, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could pay for research using these cells.

But researchers are looking for less controversial and potentially better sources for these cells, anyway. They understand the distaste for using cells from aborted fetuses and even from IVF clinic leftovers. That's why there's so much work to create so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), which would be made using a little piece of a patient's skin, for instance.

These mature cells can be tricked chemically or genetically into reverting to an immature state that resembles fetal or embryonic stem cells, then directed to

develop into liver, or muscle, or nerve, or other desired tissue type.

This work with pluripotent stem cells has eclipsed much of the work dose using fetal tissue.