I, and others, know firsthand the need to study stem cells

Every morning I buy a cup of Earl Gray tea from a Georgia woman whose son is dying a preventable death. Her 20-year-old son is awaiting a kidney transplant. Years ago she gave him one of her own kidneys, but now it too has failed. Some days she appears certain a second organ donation is imminent. More often than not, however, she tosses her arms up in a long-suffering way that suggests their lives have ground to a halt.

Recently, she admitted that her son’s condition had become so perilous that he might not even be strong enough to withstand transplantation. How could society allow her son to die? If they could only get to know him, to see the glint in his eyes and witness firsthand his sense of comedic timing, surely someone would feel compelled to consider donating a kidney. I didn’t tell her that I knew exactly what she was going through, that once upon a time I too faced a preventable death.

In 1996 and 2001 I underwent liver transplants after lengthy bouts with autoimmune hepatitis and PSC, respectively. I was fortunate. Many Americans awaiting organ and bone marrow donations, especially African-Americans, are not.

For this reason alone, President Barack Obama’s recent decision to reverse the previous administration’s ban limiting the amount of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research is a clear victory for both the medical communities and the countless number of families who will benefit from stem cell research.

For the more than 100,000 Americans awaiting organ donation (almost a third are African-Americans), their lives suspended in a state of uncertainty and vulnerability, the lack of organ and tissue donors is more than a national disgrace. It’s a death sentence. Every day nearly 20 Americans die because there is a chronic shortage of organs.

But the answer is not to simply find 20 additional donors. Instead, we need to foster medical research that, as Obama insists, marries “sound scientific data with our own moral imperatives.” If saving lives is not your business, then whose is it?

Neither of my transplants came quickly. On average, I waited two years for each donor — two years in which I lingered just this side of death. And while researchers insist that embryonic stem cell research is still in its infancy, and a long way off from benefiting those awaiting transplants, Obama’s decision to “restore our nation’s commitment to scientific research” could, one day, lessen human suffering.

Recently, an article in the British medical journal The Lancet announced that a team of international doctors performed a pioneering and successful windpipe transplant on a young Colombian woman. A donated trachea was re-engineered using the woman’s own stem cells — extracted from her bone marrow — thus eliminating the need for immunosuppressant drugs. This biological and transformative structure renewed hopes that manufactured organs might revolutionize the concept of traditional transplantation. Now that stem cell research will be better funded, perhaps science can succeed where human generosity has failed. Perhaps no one else will face a preventable death.

While controversy over the source of stems cells — particularly those from embryos — has impeded research and fueled debates, those suffering from life-threatening illnesses continue to face preventable deaths. Earlier generations certainly balked at the notion of traditional organ transplants, which have long suffered from comparisons to Frankenstein-type medicine. Yet, without doctors and researchers willing to force our imaginations by redrawing medical boundaries, future generations, like the 20-year-old whose life has sputtered and stalled, will fall victim to more than just their respective illnesses.

• Kim Lute is an associate producer at CNN International in Atlanta.