Ben Carson Conducted Research on Fetal Tissue — And Defends It
Dr. Ben Carson at last week’s Republican Presidential Debate. (Photo: Getty Images)
Along with his fellow candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, Dr. Ben Carson has been plenty vocal about his opposition to fetal tissue donation and the kind of research that can result from it.
Just last month, the former neurosurgeon told Fox News that the kinds of medical advances made using fetal tissue are “nothing that can’t be done without fetal tissue.” Carson also has not been shy about his belief that a fetus terminated in the early part of the second trimester is a human being, telling Fox’s Megyn Kelly, “At 17 weeks you’ve got a nice little nose and little fingers and the hands and the heart’s beating and it can respond to environmental stimulus,” Carson said. “How can you believe that that’s an irrelevant mass of cells?”
But on Wednesday, a physician by the name of Dr. Jen Gunter posted on her blog images of a paper published in 1992 by Carson on his work done utilizing fetal tissue — from a 17-week old fetus, no less.
Writes Gunter on her blog:
How does one explain this given Carson’s stand on fetal tissue research? Perhaps Dr. Carson feels that only his work delivered the goods and all other researchers have produced inconsequential work, an Ebola vaccine clearly not of merit by Carson’s logic. Could he think his own research was useless? However, if it was non contributory to the field why was it published?… Might he feel that fetal tissue research was ok then, but not now? Using that logic we must have learned everything about medicine by 1992 and now we’re just working out the kinks while waiting for the cure for Alzheimer’s, HIV, and Parkinson’s to drop from the heavens.
As a neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson knows full well that fetal tissue is essential for medical research. His discipline would have a hard time being were it is today without that kind of work. What is even more egregious than dismissing the multitude of researchers whose work allowed him to become a neurosurgeon is the hypocrisy of actually having done that research himself while spouting off about its supposed worthlessness.
In an interview Thursday with The Washington Post, Carson called the revelation “desperate,” and ignorant of the way medical research was carried out.
“You have to look at the intent,” Carson said. “To willfully ignore evidence that you have for some ideological reason is wrong. If you’re killing babies and taking the tissue, that’s a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it.”
Asked if fetal tissue research should be banned, or if it was immoral, Carson said no. He added that he still favored defunding Planned Parenthood, but would not call for the end of fetal tissue research itself, so long as the fetal tissue was available.
Related: Understanding Fetal Tissue Donation — and Why It’s Such a Divisive Topic
The discovery of Carson’s past involvement in fetal tissue donation — and seeming belief of its importance to on-going medical research — comes on the heels of a piece in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, which was published on Thursday, on the importance of fetal tissue research by R. Alta Charo, JD, the Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin School of Law.
Charo writes:
A closer look at the ethics of fetal tissue research, however, reveals a duty to use this precious resource in the hope of finding new preventive and therapeutic interventions for devastating diseases. Virtually every person in this country has benefited from research using fetal tissue. Every child who’s been spared the risks and misery of chickenpox, rubella, or polio can thank the Nobel Prize recipients and other scientists who used such tissue in research yielding the vaccines that protect us (and give even the unvaccinated the benefit of herd immunity).
This work has been going on for nearly a century, and the vaccines it produced have been in use nearly as long. Any discussion of the ethics of fetal tissue research must begin with its unimpeachable claim to have saved the lives and health of millions of people.
She also points to The 1988 Fetal Tissue Transplantation Panel, which was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, finding that research use of fetal remains is, in fact, ethical — a decision that has influenced the use of fetal tissue in biomedical advances over the past decades.
Charo concludes that the attack on fetal tissue research and Planned Parenthood is “a betrayal of the people whose lives could be saved by the research and a violation of that most fundamental duty of medicine and health policy, the duty of care.”
Read This Next: Why Women Do (and Don’t) Choose Fetal Tissue Donation After Abortion
