It looked like Maryland legislators had stepped back from their support of embryonic stem cell research by striking the word "embryo" and replacing it with the nonspecific phrase "certain material" in a 2006 bill meant to fund such work.
But looks can be deceiving. "We substituted language that really meant the same thing," said former Sen. Paula C. Hollinger, a Baltimore County Democrat who sponsored the much-amended bill, which likely wouldn't have passed had the loaded word "embryo" remained. "It was changed to get votes. ... It was a big win."
Business leaders, researchers, lawmakers and others dealing with controversial aspects of stem cell science know that building consensus means carefully crafting messages, as it does with so many other polarizing topics, such as abortion and war.
That has led both supporters and opponents of various stem cell work to wield often ambiguous - or particularly pointed - words in the hopes it will help sell certain messages to one another and the public.
Some said it can mean the difference in getting funding for a project, investors to back a young company or politicians to make something a law. Others say it's just misleading.
Those on opposite sides of the issues generally acknowledge the spin - using words like "adoption" to talk about saving embryos from being used in research and "breakthrough" to describe incremental advances in embryonic science. But they also say it's necessary with so much at stake.
Stem cells could lead to life-saving treatments as well as jobs and new businesses, many contend. Still, that hasn't been enough to alleviate moral concerns over the destruction of early-stage embryonic cells or using later-stage, adult cells taken from aborted fetuses.
It has led to impassioned debate in legislatures and in church basements, in living rooms and boardrooms with people crafting arguments to suit agendas in the hopes they can manipulate emotions - or avoid triggering them.
"It's an age-old political tactic to choose words that advance one's cause and disadvantage one's opponent," said James C. Greenwood, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization in Washington and a congressman from 1993 to 2005. "Words have great impact emotionally and people use them, particularly in the political sphere, accordingly."
But the ethical debate often gets in the way, leading some scientists to relocate to countries with friendlier stem cell climes, investors to shun companies caught up in the fray and bans to be placed on federal funding for certain work.
"There's an awful lot of hype in this field on both sides," said Dale A. Carlson, spokesman for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
His organization was created to help administer $3 billion in stem cell funding grants and loans for the state's businesses and researchers. The first funding round there will focus solely on embryonic projects.
"People like to say embryonic stem cells never cured anything [so the research should be stopped]. Well, my 4-year-old hasn't finished medical school and won a Nobel Prize yet. Should I stop educating her?" Carlson said. "Clearly their objective is to starve the field of research until it fades away."
Viewpoints
Critics of such work say it destroys life by killing embryos that might have otherwise become children, using words like "baby," "embryo adoption" and "immoral" to describe the science.
Proponents use labels such as "innovation" and "cure" and say the embryonic cells under discussion could lead to saving lives.
The word games also play out on the adult stem cell side of the industry, which often is praised for a seeming lack of controversy, but derided because they're supposedly less adaptable than embryonic cells.
Baltimore's Osiris Therapeutics is fond of pointing out how much closer to commercialization their adult bone marrow cells are and that they're taken from grown-up volunteers, not embryos.
Adult stem cell researchers also tout the fact that embryonic cells have yet to prove their promise in human clinical trials and have been shown to produce tumors in testing.
"There's a great degree of ignorance generally with regard to stem cell science and stem cell technology, a great degree of emotionality attached to the coverage," said Martin McGlynn, chief executive of StemCells Inc. in California. "It just further fuels the flames."
McGlynn's company works with adult stem cells, the kind taken from fetuses, but he acknowledges it takes some digging to learn this. On its Web site's home page, StemCells Inc. says it is using "cells derived from adult (i.e. non-embryonic) brain tissue."
"You start off with more general descriptors. As you go deeper and deeper into the Web site ... it really peels the onion," McGlynn said, adding that it was not an effort to mislead or avoid controversy.
Many in the industry said that much of the stem cell science controversy comes from an inextricable link to the abortion debate.
Abortion supporters label themselves the less controversial pro-choice. Abortion foes add unscientific terms like "partial birth" to legislation to conjure baby images. Stem cells draw similar linguistic acrobatics.
"What we picture when we think of an embryo is a little person with fingers and toes and what it really is, is cells up to a certain point, a very early point in division that aren't recognizable as anything like a baby," said Patricia Alt, a health science professor at Towson University who has published an article on the evolution of Maryland's stem cell legislation.
That's the image embryonic stem cell opponents want people to see, which led lawmakers on a long road of editing in order to pass Maryland's Stem Cell Research Act, which allocated $15 million in state funds for stem cell research
Key to the passage was the replacement of the words "human embryo" with "certain material," Alt said. "[Lawmakers] deliberately changed the wording so they could get it passed. ... I thought that was pretty clever."
But some say that's part of the problem.
Source of confusion
Science speaks in very specific terms, but media and politicians speak generally, which leads to confusion and misperceptions.
Many still believe embryonic stem cell research has something to do with abortion and fetuses, which it doesn't. And some adult stem cells, which are thought to be morally acceptable, are derived from fetuses.
"Most people don't know zilch about what's going on with stem cells," said John Naughton, a retiree from Silver Spring who's a proponent of adult stem cells and opponent of embryonic ones for ethical reasons.
He got caught up in the stem cell issue in 2001, when President Bush banned federal funding for new embryonic lines. He started researching on the Internet, spending hours collecting information. But it wasn't until two years ago that he was inspired to take action.
That's when Hollinger told The Washington Post that embryonic stem cell work is "is such promising research - it seems like there's a new breakthrough every day."
"We certainly don't have one of those every day," said Naughton, who has since sent dozens of letters to Hollinger and other local politicians refuting her statement. He believes adult stem cells are under publicized, and embryonic cells are over hyped.
"There's a hoax going on here and that's not good," Naughton said. "People are not being informed about the progress with the adult and pregnancy-related stem cells."
Hollinger, a registered nurse, said she stands by her statement.
"I think there are so many areas of ethical debate, whether it's organ transplants or birth control or embryonic stem cells research. ... This is just another one in the mix," Hollinger said. "There's always value in debate, and there's always something to be learned."
At Neuralstem Inc. in Rockville, scientists are working to develop its own fetal stem cell research into treatments for central nervous system diseases.
They're up front about the fetal nature of their cells, mostly because they want people to understand how the cells function in a specialized way, unlike embryonic cells, which can be morphed into many types of cells.
But on the whole, says chief executive Richard Garr, the debate is just semantics and doesn't affect him or his business one way or the other.
"These people are just playing games with themselves," Garr said. "Just because I say all tomatoes are green and you finally agree to it, doesn't mean there was any substance to the discussion we had."
tricia.bishop@baltsun.com