The therapeutic promise of pluripotency and its political use in the Italian stem cell debate

Stem cell research is considered one of the most promising branches of contemporary biomedicine. The capacity to develop into almost any cell type of the mature organism—pluripotency—is associated with human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and is regarded as having great therapeutic potential. Harvesting stem cells destroys the human embryo, however; so research on embryonic stem cells has provoked controversies. In some countries such as Italy, the use of human embryos for research and therapeutic purposes is strictly forbidden. The Italian restrictive regulation has been explained by structural–cultural factors such as religion, but a better explanation lies in the policy dramaturgies deployed in the Italian debate. It was a struggle between two research trajectories—research on hESCs and on adult stem cells—for monopoly over the most credible therapeutic promise. Each was linked to different views of the Italian social order; each was epistemically legitimized by discourses on pluripotency and on the therapeutic potential of different stem cell types. Catholic actors articulated epistemic discourses on the therapeutic promises of different stem cell sources. The battle to define the social order—between a secular and a confessional view—became a struggle between two research trajectories for monopoly over the most credible therapeutic promise. The restrictive regulatory framework resulted from successfully transforming a policy dramaturgy into a new regulatory order. Thus structural–cultural variables such as religiosity matter only through the agency of institutional actors in local political cultures.