Vatican official hopes new amniotic stem-cell research proves correct

Published: 2007-01-09

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Vatican's top health care official expressed hope that U.S. researchers would be proven correct in asserting they could obtain medically useful stem cells from amniotic fluid. Mexican Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, told Vatican Radio Jan. 8 there would be no ethical problem with using cells from amniotic fluid as long as the procedure did not place the pregnant woman or her baby in danger. "The ethical problem" with stem-cell research, he said, always has surrounded cells obtained by destroying human embryos. In a study reported Jan. 7, scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston said the amniotic fluid surrounding a child in the womb can be the source of medically useful stem cells. The U.S. research, Cardinal Lozano told the Italian newspaper La Stampa, "is a discovery for which we can rejoice. I congratulate the researchers who have demonstrated how it is possible to make medical progress without damaging embryos."

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