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Then he added, "This idea of the destruction of multiple embryos being a problem … is complete nonsense. And I think that if you talk to any scientist for or against stem cells, they're going to tell you that's the case. … You only need a couple, and they will service the research community—that's hundreds and hundreds of scientists—for 20 to 30 years."

According to Phil Schwartz, director of a National Institutes of Health Human Embryonic Stem-Cell Culture training course that I attended, establishing a successful stem-cell line is a very difficult thing to do. In order to create 17 privately funded lines at Harvard University last year, 286 embryos were destroyed. And if no new lines are necessary, what was the point of Proposition 71?

Keirstead downplayed the promise of adult stem-cell research, saying, "Getting the tissue is difficult, their efficacy is limited, many of the results have been challenged, [and] the diseases you can apply them to are very, very few." When I mentioned the work of Carlos Lima, a Portuguese scientist who has reported success in treating paralyzed patients by injecting stem-cell-like olfactory glia cells into their spinal cords, Keirstead denounced Lima's research as "controversial" and "unethical."

He said Lima had taken biopsies of his subjects' spinal cords during surgery. This would "never, ever be allowed in North America" because one of the tenets of ethical research is to do no harm to the research subject.

Did he miss the irony?

Next I asked him about the findings of Evan Snyder, a researcher at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, who days before our conversation reported that neural stem cells have a homing capacity that causes them to target brain tumors. Again, Keirstead's logic lapsed. "It's not done in humans. That's done in rats and mice." Just like Keirstead's own research.

The conversation moved to cloning. I asked whether women would be exploited to collect their eggs for what he calls the "mach two" phase of embryonic stem-cell research. In it, human embryos will be created to provide "custom stem cells" as "research tools." He said, "That is absolutely hogwash." And yet, a couple weeks later, Schwartz showed me an advertisement he had pulled from an in-flight magazine offering women cash for their eggs to be used in "somatic cell nuclear transfer." Such nomenclature is designed to promote the science of "therapeutic" cloning without the unpleasant implications.

Our conversation intensified after I asked Keirstead if he ever has any doubts about his work. That's when he proposed the burning-room analogy and launched into an exuberant sales pitch. It began, "I think the use of these cells is an ethical and responsible thing to do. … It's beautiful. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing, and how can we sleep if we don't use it?" Next he described a litany of difficulties faced by people in wheelchairs, and told me the story of a quadriplegic coworker's hellish weekend, which she spent lying in her own waste because of a home health aide scheduling mix up.

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October 2005, Vol. 49, No. 10