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Inevitable By-products of New Medical Discoveries |
By Randolfe Wicker
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights has
included a call for banning human cloning worldwide as part of its first
set of international guidelines on bioethics and the human genome.
The proposed ban, part of a document titled the "Universal
Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights", is being sponsored by
86 countries and will be voted on by the General Assembly during December
1998.
Fortunately, this misnamed "declaration" lacks the force of law.
Noelie Lenoir, president of the bioethics committee of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and a member of
France's highest court, was a key force behind the declaration.
Despite giving lip service to "freedom of research and freedom of
thought" the guidelines opine "practices which are contrary to human
dignity, such as reproductive cloning of human beings, shall not be
permitted."
 "It is not 'contrary to human dignity' for normal, healthy
children to be born or for disabled people to have families," Attorney
Mark Eibert responded. Eibert, a passionate cloning advocate, recently
persuaded Northern California's 2,600 member chapter of Resolve, the
largest of its national network of support groups for infertile people, to
officially endorse cloning once it's perfected as a legitimate option for
treating infertility.
"Repealing reproductive freedom and banning the birth of normal
healthy children is what is 'contrary to human dignity'," Eibert
emphasized.
The same might be said of cloning's implications for same sex
reproduction. Heterosexuality's monopoly on reproduction is now obsolete.
Lenoir admitted biogenic research as "moving too fast and
unpredictably for legislation," noting the recent announcement of
experiments claiming to have combined human skin cells with a cow's egg.
Left unanswered, however, was the New York Times
headline story (November 6, 1998): "Scientists Cultivate Cells at Root of
Human Life", which reported on the success by two researchers, each
working independently at separate institutions, who for the first time had
retrieved and cultivated outside the body the primordial cells at the root
of human life.
These cells, called "stem cells", were taken from the blastocysts
of fertilized eggs and embryos which were due to be discarded.
"Because they can divide indefinitely when grown outside the body
without signs of age that afflict other cells," the Times
reported, "biologists refer to them as immortal."
Stem cells exist only briefly after an egg is fertilized. After
twenty have developed within the egg a process of differentiation
commences transforming nearly all of them into 210 different types of
human cells which become irreversibly committed to their fates as
specialized components of body tissue.
Unlike "immortal" stem cells cultivated outside the body, the 210
varieties of specialized cells become mortal as they become one of the
body's mature cell types. Nearly all mature cells lose most of their
ability to grow and divide. There are a few exceptions, some like skin and
intestinal lining cells can be cultured and divide about fifty times
before dying.
The possible medical benefits of stem cell cultivation and
manipulation are almost incomprehensible. A cure for many degenerative
diseases, including AIDS, is now feasible. Even the normal aging process
could be slowed down.
"Many technical problems remain to be resolved," the New York
Times report noted. "The art of directing embryonic cells down
specific pathways is in its infancy. But heart muscle cells have been
grown from mouse embryonic stem cells and successfully integrated with the
heart tissue of a living mouse."
The researchers responsible for this latest medical miracle, Dr.
James A. Thomson at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Dr. John
Gearhart at Johns Hopkins medical school in Baltimore, Maryland, were
privately financed by the Geron Corporation of Menlo Park, California, a
biotechnology company that specializes in anti-aging research.
What an elixir it must have been at Geron corporate headquarters, a
business dedicated to such anti-aging research, to see a front page essay
in the New York Times' weekly Science Times
section (November 11, 1998) entitled: "Immortality of a Sort, Beckons to
Biologists" which continued on to page 2 under the heading: "Experts See
Immortality in Endlessly Dividing Cells."
Since Geron had funded the research, it had secured exclusive
licenses to use the cells, under patents held by the researchers'
universities.
However, political opposition to anything dealing with embryos
appears to be nearly as immortal as, well, the stem cells themselves.
Even though the stem cells in both studies were retrieved from
embryos destined to be discarded and with the consent of the couples who
had created them, the theologians, bioethicists, Right to Life extremists,
and other assorted bioLuddites were ready for this newest battle in their
fierce Holy War to protect every human embryo on the face of Mother Earth.
In 1995, conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives banned
all Federal funding for research involving embryos. This ban has been
attached to Congressional appropriations for the last three years.
Underlying the new debate over providing Federal funding for this
new promising stem cell research are worries that the cloning of human
beings would become inevitable.
The Times noted that the new cells "may well reawaken
fears of human cloning" but reported most experts now believe "human
cloning is more likely to end up as a rare treatment offered in fertility
clinics, no different from others like in-vitro fertilization and egg
donation in that they were first bitterly denounced and are now regarded
as routine."
Drs. Thomson and Gearhart, the Geron Corporation executives, and
even Dr. Michael West who claimed one of his Advanced Cell Technology
researchers had successfully inserted some human skin cells into a cow egg
and gotten them to divide several times, virtually fell over one another
in their rush to declare that they 'HAD NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER IN HUMAN
CLONING!"
Dr. West, when asked during a speech to NBAC "how he would prevent
the technique from being misused, such as in cloning a person, even
suggested that the cloning of humans should be made a crime.
Dr. West said a patent application had been filed on the human/cow
egg process. However, he maintained no further work had been done and that
his company had concentrated instead "on the more immediately practical
field of cow cloning."
Dr. West's announcement was greeted skeptically by some scientists
because it had not been documented, duplicated or been published as a
study in any scientific journal.
But those guardians of the public's morals and welfare, the off
balance and overwhelmed by the implications of cultivating stem cells—now
faced issues beyond imagining. Dr. West had apparently thrown them a real
curve ball, complicating a complex debate even more.
Dr. West maintained the human cells had virtually totally taken
over the cow's egg and appeared to have started producing human stem cells
within it. These cells had been photographed. After scrutinizing those
pictures, other scientists said, "they looked like they could indeed be
human stem cells."
But, they had some grave and serious doubts the cow egg's
mitochondria and some cow proteins would certainly remain, thereby
creating a human/cow hybrid cell which, however human it might appear to
be, would have to be at least part cow.
Dr. West argued that the cow egg was a disposable entity, something
that could only serve as a temporary incubator for the human-appearing
stem cells within. Furthermore, he believed, the mitochondria of the cow's
egg would be insufficient to bring the embryo to term.
Also, Dr. West noted, the researcher had used his own cells in the
experiment, exercising the same rights of personhood he would use in
choosing to give himself an injection.
"I want to be very open and level with everyone," Dr. West declared
in an attempt to explain the reason he had announced his findings. "We
need to get the ethicists to talk about it so as to encourage a rational
response to these new technologies.
"Even though a hybrid would be in the form of cells, not a whole
organism," the Times report mused, "the concept of
half-human creatures arouses deep-seated anxiety, as is evident from the
unfriendly powers ascribed to werewolves, centaurs, mermaids, Minotaurs
and other characters of myth and folklore."
Indeed, the knotty perplexities of the "mainly human-part-cow"
controversy caught President Bill Clinton's attention. He asked his
National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) to tackle the issue at its
Miami meeting the next week and to report back to him.
NBAC responded to the President's concerns, assuring him there was
nothing new about cells fused from different eggs. Dr. Shaprio, the
president of Princeton University and NBAC's chairman wrote that "if the
embryonic cells are not capable of developing into an embryo, then we do
not believe that totally new ethical issues arise."
Like everyone else, NBAC, which had recommended a ban on the
cloning of human beings for several years, ignored the fact that the
successful pursuit of medical treatments using stem cells would perfect
the techniques of nuclear transfer between cells. "Nuclear transfer"
between cells is the basic technique used in cloning.
Geron's vice-president listed embryonic stem cells as potential
sources for a number of novel treatments during a meeting held by a U.S.
Senate committee on December 2, 1998.
His projected treatments included the following:
 Randolfe Wicker Clone Rights United Front 506 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 (212) 929-3632 (212) 255-1439 (201) 656-3280 Related Stories from the GayToday Archive: Of Cloning Mice and Men |
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