|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
| Front Page |
Jerry Zucker, director of Airplane, Ghost, and Rat Race, founded CuresNow with his wife, Janet, and another Hollywood couple, Douglas Wick & Lucy Fisher. This is a complete transcript of my conversation with him. To read an article on CuresNow, go to: Hollywood's Heroes.
Why was CuresNow created? What are its goals?
Well, it was created by two sets of parents, my wife and I and another husband and wife, each of us has a daughter with Type 1 diabetes and we were looking around for what the best possibilities for cures are on the horizon, and talking with doctors and scientists and everything kept point to embryonic stem cell research and we were wanting to really fund that and help it and at some point we realized that it really needed not only to be funded but it needed to be defended because there were people in the government who didn't like it, did not think this research should be done. So we formed CuresNow to help promote this research that would find a cure for not only for diabetes, but for so many other diseases. Cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, Rhett's Syndrome. There are so many others.
What actions is the organization taking to support stem cell research?
Well, at the moment we're trying to defeat a bill which would make a kind of stem cell research, somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is sometimes called therapeutic cloning, illegal. We're trying to defeat that bill now. It's sponsored by a Senator from Kansas, [Sam] Brownback. Before we got involved, it really looked like it was going to pass and we talked to a lot of senators and arranged for senators to meet scientists and made some commercials and so I think we're having a positive affect on the campaign.
Has CureNow seen an increase in support since it started its campaign?
Yes, actually, since we've advised people. That particular bill is what got us into it and started right away, another thing is that people don't really know what this research it, they don't understand it, they don't know what it means and what it involves and there is a lot of misinformation about it. So another thing we want to do is educate people. The more we find that we educate people and the more they know what this research is, the more people join our group and want to be a part of efforts, and donate their time or money to this cause.
How does the organization suggest people around the country advocate for this research?
One thing to do is to spread the word. The best thing is to have everybody be educated as to what this research involves. The other thing they can do is to write their Congressman or Senator. They can send them a letter saying they want this research to go forward. They can talk to their doctors and they can contribute money either to the research or to the effort to keep it legal and funded by the government.
Going back to the Brownback bill, what do you think some of the dangers are if it is passed?
The simple explanation is that [doctors] would take like one of your skin cells and put it into an unfertilized egg. They would take the nucleus of the egg out, they would put this one single cell of your skin into it and that would grow stem cells. Those stem cells, in addition to being used to fight other diseases and grow tissue, to produce islet cells for diabetics, or dopamine neurons for people with MS, or heart tissue, in addition to that, the special thing about this procedure is that it would be an exact match for your DNA, so you wouldn't reject it. One problem with any therapeutic cure where they put something from someone else's body inside you is that your body tends to reject foreign substances. That's why sometimes they have problems with transplants. People have to take a lot of immunosuppressants, which are drugs that suppress your bodies natural reaction to these foreign substances in your body. In this case, because it would be primarily your own genetic material that would have created these stem cells, your body would not reject it. What the Brownback bill wants to do is make that research illegal. It would be illegal for any scientists to do this research, sometimes referred to as cell transfer. If they came up with a cure in another country using this procedure, and you went there to be cured, you would be put in prison when you came back. They would arrest you. That's what the bill says.
Now, how would they know if you actually had it done?
To tell you the truth, I don't think it would ever happen, and this is one of the ironies of the whole situation. If you could imagine somebody coming up with a cure for diabetes or cancer, everybody would want to use it. No American senator could get re-elected trying to prevent a cure for a major disease to be used by Americans. People are dying. The irony is that that would be unthinkable, but they want to make the research that would bring this cure to us illegal. So part of this bill is there's a ban, what they call importation, bringing any product into the country that has anything to do with somatic cell nuclear transfer. If you bring it into your body, you're violating the law. Now, nobody thinks they would actually enforce that. But it's important to know how severe this bill is and how much these people want to cut off any access to this process.
Now are you and your company mainly focusing on stem cell research or are you looking into other research that might potentially cure diabetes?
As parents of a diabetic child, we're searching everything. But CuresNow is focused at the moment on stem cell research, but within the human embryonic stem cell research, there's a thing called adult stem cells. Adult stem cells also have possibilities and that's not controversial. Even Senator Brownback wants adult stem cell research to go forward. Maybe as a byproduct of all this, in their quest to prevent embryonic stem cell research, they're clambering about we should put more money into adult stem cells. We're mostly interested in embryonic stem cells research. Embryonic, because those stem cells come from embryos, primarily embryos that are discarded from fertility centers that aren't being used. They would be thrown out anyway. They're incredibly tiny and there are no organs, they're just cells. The adult stem cells are found in all our bodies and the adult stem cells can also be hopeful. But they don't have the ability to become so many different kinds of organs and tissues like the embryonic stem cells do.
As parents we're interested in a lot of things, but CuresNow is mostly interested in embryonic stem cells. But we also realized how many people are scared of new science, We want to promote scientific freedom and scientific discovery and help scientists be able to pursue these endeavors more freely.
One thing that I didn't know about, and that I read online, are those Harry and Louise ads. Now I was too young when they came out to remember who they were. But I saw your newly redone one and they were received with a lot of controversy and they didn't really like. I was wondering, why were those two characters chosen for the ads?
They were chosen because there was a campaign against another bill about nine, ten years ago. It was the Clinton Healthcare Bill. In that case, it was the Democrats in power and the Republicans trying to defeat this bill. They decided that the best way to do it was have these two people, actors, whose real names are Harry and Louise, and Harry and Louise were talking about how "yes there is a problem but this bill is the wrong solution". She read up and said "Gee, I've been looking at this Clinton Healthcare Bill and it doesn't make sense". They were very effective ads, they on for over a year [in] 14 different ads. So this couple became very well known particularly in Washington and they were very effective.
So we thought two things. One, they would be very effective spokesmen and but also we would get extra publicity because we didn't have very much money to run ads all over the place. But we could get extra publicity because the news media would catch on to it and it would create a stir because of what these people had done in terms of the Clinton Healthcare policy. It worked, people remembered them and the ads were effective on their own because they separated the reproductive cloning. The bill is about "we don't want cloning" and nobody's for making babies. We're against cloning babies but we're for the research. They tried to put it all together and make it sound like the same thing. So we what we did is separate it. We said "hey, we can be against cloning babies illegal but still do life-saving research".
[Editor's Note: click here to read transcripts of the commercials]
Since you're a big Hollywood director, how has the entertainment community responded to CuresNow?
They've been great. This is our business, so a lot of our friends are in the business and have been very supportive. A lot of people just giving money. Hollywood's been very supportive. But Hollywood is always very generous in general with causes, and funding research for diseases. AIDS was really put on the map because of Hollywood.
When I read that it was you guys I thought it was great because I have read a lot about how they have galas and publicity about AIDS and breast cancer and MS and even gays and lesbians, and diabetes has never really been there. Then I read that you guys were there and I thought good.
We're trying to change that. Unfortunately, we were really just doing diabetes fundraising. We've had premieres to raise money for diabetes, but we've learned that the best thing we can do for diabetes is really push through this research because it's so important. The real big money for any research comes from the government. So our eventual goal is to get the government to put more money into embryonic stem cell research and then obviously keep somatic cell nuclear transfer legal. We're parents of diabetics, so now we're going to make it a Hollywood cause.