Research's Precious Gift How much stem cells might help Three-and-a-half years ago, my mother died of Parkinson's disease. I watched her long, slow death. As a result, for millions of people like me, the debate over stem cell research is not some icy abstraction. Honorable men and women are now expressing strong opinions on the subject. They want the Bush administration to end all funding of research into the uses of stem cells extracted from discarded in vitro human embryos. They question the ethics of creating embryos in laboratories for use in experiments. They insist that all unions of seed and egg that result in living cells are the equivalent of human lives. Many argue that religious dogma must take precedence over the secular possibilities of science. I'm sorry to disagree. I saw what Parkinson's did to my mother. Robbing her of her dignity and pride. Erasing speech and memory. If scientists can prevent this in other human beings, then the federal government must fund the research. Every single case is personal, not abstract. Anne Devlin Hamill had been a small woman of enormous energy, will and decency. I was her oldest son, the only one who remembers her with brown hair. She went gray early: raising her seven children during Depression and war and their aftermath, helping put food on our table, buying us the books we needed. She always worked to supplement the money my father earned in a factory. She was a nurse's aide at Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn. She was a cashier at the RKO Prospect and the RKO Albee. She worked for years at Metropolitan Life and, after a brief retirement (the kids all gone), she went back to work at OTB. She worked and she worked. Until she could work no longer. Always Had the Time In memory, she's always in motion: cleaning the house, cooking, dressing for work, checking homework, hurrying off to the Prospect or the F train. Somehow, she found time to feed birds that visited from the Brooklyn skies, since her favorite saint was Francis of Assisi. She found time to read. She found time, on her days off, to take us to Manhattan, to show us Harlem and Chinatown and the ruin of the Normandie at its pier on the North River. She found time to weep for ordinary Japanese when the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima. She found time to impart moral lessons about the evils of bigotry and intolerance (for she had seen too much of it as a Catholic in Belfast). She found time to laugh. She found time to sing. She never found time for self-pity. Then, in the final years, after all the work and all the struggles, the Parkinson's came. Her hands began to tremble involuntarily. The strong immigrant's body, shaped by work, began refusing to do what she wanted it to do. She could not easily get from bedroom to bathroom. Holes began to open in her powerful memory. She wore a wounded, baffled look on her face. Harvesting embryonic stem cells could bring about the end of any number of diseases. Doctors explained that she had Parkinson's, which meant that certain cells in her brain had begun to commit suicide. The doctors didn't know why this happens to so many human beings, but much research was underway. The causes would be found, we were told, and some cure would be fashioned. Not now. Not yet. Tears of Frustration The doctors urged us to move her to a nursing home, and she was taken to the Carmel Richmond home on Staten Island. My sister lived a mile away. The nuns and nurses were kind. The doctors were humane and professional. But each time I visited, she had gone deeper into nothingness. For a while, I could trigger memory with references from the old neighborhood. "Whatever happened to Aggie Lenihan?" I would ask, and she would smile in a sweet way, "Good soul, good soul." "Remember the trips to the Normandie, Mom?" "Yes. Yes. It burned. Fell on its side." Six weeks later, shifting from bed to wheelchair and back again, she couldn't remember Aggie Lenihan or the Normandie. I could see her struggling sometimes, her mouth twitching as she tried to form certain words: the names of people and places she had loved in her long American life. Her eyes would well with tears. Tears of frustration, not self-pity. I would sit beside her on the edge of the bed, and hug her, and try, in the gray silence, to comfort her the way she had comforted me when I was a child. Sometimes, very softly, I would sing songs she loved: "White Cliffs of Dover" or "The Last Time I Saw Paris." In that room, even "Don't Fence Me In" became a dirge. After a while, she couldn't remember my name. Or the names of her other children. If two or more of us were there at the same time, we would identify ourselves, and joke around, and bring her ice cream or a cold drink. She would smile at the sound of our laughter. Sometimes she would mumble blurred, scrambled sentences, and we would try to decode them and talk with her. Or she would stare across the room and see what was not there. Sometimes she saw my father, who had died at 80, more than 10 years earlier. Or a beloved cat. She mumbled her greetings. O, Billy, she'd say to my father. Come here, Zsa Zsa. And once she whispered to me about her need to get up and feed the birds. Hope for Others Death was a merciful anti-climax, since the woman we knew and loved had ceased to exist in all important ways when her brain cells began to kill themselves. It was no comfort to know that millions of other human beings were engaged in the same terrible ritual of farewell. But now there is solid scientific evidence that soon — very soon — we could see the end of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, along with some forms of diabetes, heart disease and other human afflictions, including spinal column damage. By "tweaking" unformed, embryonic cells into neurons, and implanting them into affected parts of the body, the researchers believe they can grow new cells to replace those that have died. This would be an astounding medical revolution. The scientists need more research, of course, and research costs money. Private enterprise simply can't carry the entire burden. There is plenty of federal money for research into the unnecessary missile defense system; each test costs $1million. If we can spend that kind of money on imaginary wars with imaginary enemies, we can spend many more millions to improve the lives of people who are right here, in the real world. If George W. Bush folds on this, to coddle political favor with religious groups, he'll be committing one of the worst assaults on human intelligence since the persecution of Galileo. Even such Republicans as Nancy Reagan, Strom Thurmond and Orrin Hatch are urging Bush to do the right thing. The revolutionary breakthrough in stem cell research has come too late for my mother, and millions like her. But there must be many people out there who want to sing the old songs right up to the end, and call their children by their names and find time to follow the urgings of St. Francis to feed the birds. They must not be denied.