OMAHA — You say tomato. He says retinoic acid gamma receptor agonist.

Oh, my. The mice haven’t a chance against this guy.

Dr. Stephen Rennard would not be so boastful to say he’s smarter than you.

That is something you just kind of figure out.

It might be his office marker board that looks like something out of “Good Will Hunting.”

It might be his Harvard degree in folklore and mythology, or the other one in biochemistry and genetics, or maybe the other one from Baylor in medicine.

Then again it could be his resume. Is yours 62 pages?

But you find commonality. He likes coffee, too.

Coffee breeds conversation, and a conversation is the real reason you came to Omaha.

“People tend to oversimplify issues,” Rennard says. “What stem cell research means is so complex that it does not do well on talk radio.”

It takes an hour of talk radio to get to Rennard’s office on the Nebraska Medical Center campus.

Then an elevator ride to the eighth floor of the Durham Research Center. Our doctor is the one keeping suspenders in fashion. New Balance sneakers carry him across the lab.

A guy might as well have on comfortable shoes when searching for cures to lung disease.

The 57-year-old is as much a teacher as a lab dweller these days. He’s got about 20 students under his guidance.

Americans, Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, a melting pot befriending petri dishes, all trying to climb that ever-steep mountain of making unknowns knowns.

Yes, they use embryonic stem cells on this floor, abiding by the guidelines adopted by President Bush in 2001. Only federally approved stem cell lines find this lab.

It is not disregarded that outside these walls debates carry on about the appropriateness of embryonic stem cell use.

Pro-life groups have picketed against it and talking heads have lost voices arguing for or against.

The arguments against usually carry a tune similar to this: No end justifies destroying embryos. This still equates to murder in the same way abortion does. And what about the slippery slope? Won’t embryonic research just lead us down a path to cloning?

Back on Floor 8, the doctor takes a sip of coffee and says, “What we deal with in the lab has no capability of being a person, anything that you would recognize as a person.”

Rennard says discussions on stem cell research tend to get bogged down at a superficial level.

This is right. This is wrong. Here’s black. Here’s white. Never gray.

But you need the gray.

What about all those gray questions?

Rennard begins to ask them.

“Does a cell have humanity? Well, if fertilized, a lot of people believe it does. Well, what is it that gives a cell humanity? The average human sheds 1,000 cells a day. What’s the difference?

“You can’t clone a person, but suppose someone develops the technology. Say you could make a good person out of the dander you shed.

“What does all that mean from a moral and legal sense? I can’t answer that.”

One thing Rennard does know for certain is that moral frameworks change over time.

Go back a few decades and you’ll find people who felt a heart transplant was morally reprehensible. How can you take someone else’s heart and put it in your body?

“Many people couch their moral base on what they believe as the natural way the world is ordered. So if we change concepts of the world, their whole moral concept is a hazard.

“I don’t buy that concept. Yes, I believe in right and wrong. Whether the world is 5,000 or 6,000 years old or older begs a good question, but what it comes down to is what kinds of things should be done and what shouldn’t.”

Rennard knows well the dissenting arguments of embryonic research. Among the more popular ones is that therapies have only been found thus far with adult stem cells, not embryonic.

A true point, he acknowledges, but not a fair one.

“This is not a very germane critique in that we have to be patient. To say that adult stem cells are proven therapeutically is correct. I think to say that therefore embryonic stem cells shouldn’t be used, that’s really a rationalization for justifying a position you want to make anyway.”

More than 125,000 people die in this country a year from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The ailment is as tongue-twisting as it is pestilent, so most just call it COPD.

Back when Rennard was in med school, it was thought that when emphysema met a person, and that person’s lung tissue was destroyed, it could not be fixed.

Turns out that’s not true, at least in mice and rats.

A few years ago, researchers found that Vitamin A could cause mice to grow lung cells.

The researchers tried it on humans. Didn’t work.

Apparently, although human and mice genomes are quite similar, the mice had a cell the humans didn’t to make this happen.

While adults make some new lung cells, those cells aren’t going to be healthy for people with COPD.

You can’t reconstruct lungs with unhealthy adult cells, and maybe you can’t even do it with healthy adult cells.

Come to think of it, maybe you can’t even do it with embryonic stem cells.

But Rennard is willing to try to find out.

Any researcher will tell you adult cells and embryonic cells are not interchangeable.

Rennard describes an embryonic cell as “a more primitive cell, an earlier kind of precursor that seems to have a great potential to become a differentiating cell.”

At a recent stem cell convention he attended, there was discussion about whether adult cells are really even stem cells at all. A stem cell is capable of indefinite self-renewal. It’s not necessarily clear that all adult stem cells can do that.

“It’s pretty clear that certain kinds of questions are much more appropriately asked with embryonic cells than with adult cells,” Rennard says.

Supporters of stem cell research might also point out that embryonic cells being used in research are taken from in vitro fertilization embryos that will be discarded anyway.

Their point: If you’re going to throw those cells away, why not use them for research that could potentially save lives?

Mix all those details in a petri dish and Rennard could never come up with a reason to have a moral dilemma about embryonic cell research.

“Make no mistake, I take human research very seriously,” he says. “But I don’t see human cells as equivalent of a human being, so that’s not a moral issue for me, just as I don’t have a moral issue with abortion. That doesn’t mean I think it should be done willy-nilly.”

Grinding up a mouse tumor is not much different than making a Smoothie.

Just don’t use the same blender for both.

Rennard is telling about his first assignment as a researcher.

For six months, he spent his days either grinding tumors, extracting tumors or trying to make a cell stick to a petri dish.

It was not sexy work, and as he explains his eventual findings to a reporter who scored a 2.9 GPA in college, he receives only a look of non-understanding.

He simplifies.

“What people need to understand is when you actually have discovered new knowledge, you either get a rush from it or you don’t.”

A young Rennard hadn’t seen himself as a researcher. He went to med school to be a practitioner.

He played that role for a couple years, figuring out along the way that there is a major frustration in this country over health care.

“Most people go to a doctor and think that the doctor can fix them. The truth is, if you got a problem, it’s unlikely a doctor can fix it,” Rennard says. “They can only do something to alleviate it. But very few things can be cured. Some can. But even things that can be cured aren’t cured as well as we’d like them to be cured.”

Research beckoned. Research could maybe break down some of those walls.

Maybe isn’t good enough for you?

Well, that maybe is what drives him to work each day.

Maybe embryonic stem cells will be the key to restoring healthy lungs in a person ready to become lost to emphysema.

Rennard can’t say for certain. He just knows taking away embryonic stem cells from his research eliminates another maybe.

And a researcher needs as many of those maybes as he can get.

“Can I get up in the morning, go to work and not work on embryonic stem cells? Of course. Could I do work as exciting? The answer is no.”

Reach Brian Christopherson at 473-7438 or bchristopherson@journalstar.com.