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INFO/ Human Genetics Alert
December 05, 2001
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Contents
1. Senate Declines
to Take Up Proposed Cloning Moratorium
2. Sweden Research
Body Calls for Human Embryo Cloning
3. The Weaknesses
of Science for Profit
4. Embryo clone leads
to fall-out
5. Environmentalists
Stand with Conservatives on Cloning
6. Women Who Donate
Eggs To Infertile Couples Earn a Reward -- But
Pay a Price
7. Cloning and Stem
Cells Not Good Business -Expert
December 4, 2001
Senate Declines to Take Up Proposed Cloning Moratorium
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 Despite entreaties from President
Bush to ban any type
of cloning, either for reproduction or research, the
Senate today refused to
take up a Republican measure to impose a six-month moratorium
on the
technology.
The measure was rushed to the Senate floor in response
to an announcement
last week by a Massachusetts biotechnology company that
it had created the
first cloned human embryos, not to make babies but to
develop tissues for
treating disease. All the embryos died, but the experiment
revived the
cloning controversy, which had been dormant since the
Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks.
The bill failed overwhelmingly on a procedural motion,
in part because it
was bundled with another contentious but unrelated measure
that would have
allowed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge. Republican
leaders had hoped to force a vote on the issues by packaging
them into an
amendment to an unrelated bill governing retirement benefits
for railroad
workers.
The strategy failed when the maneuvering became so complicated
that even its
supporters ended up voting against it for various reasons.
Of 95 senators
present, 94 voted to prevent the oil drilling and cloning
bills from coming
up for a vote. The lone exception was Senator George
F. Allen, Republican of
Virginia.
The Republican leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, vowed
during the debate to
bring both bills up again. "These issues are not going
to go away," he
warned.
It now appears unlikely that the Senate will enact cloning
legislation this
year. But the issue is expected to come up next year,
and already the Senate
has scheduled hearings on cloning. The first is set for
Tuesday; Mike West,
president of Advanced Cell Technology, the Massachusetts
biotechnology
company that conducted the recent cloning experiment,
is scheduled to be the
lead witness.
The cloning bill would have put into place, for six months,
legislation
identical to a bill adopted by the House of Representatives
in July. The
House measure, which President Bush supports, would ban
cloning for either
reproduction or research, and would outlaw the sale of
treatments developed
from cloning.
Senator Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican who is the
Senate's leading
opponent of cloning, argued that the moratorium should
be put in place while
the Senate debated a permanent ban. He called it "a very
modest step."
There is widespread agreement among lawmakers that human
cloning the
making of babies that are genetic replicas of adults
is immoral and should
be outlawed. But the question of cloning for research,
also called
therapeutic cloning, is, for many lawmakers, more complicated.
At the same time, the issue is tangled up with another
controversy, that of
stem cell research. Stem cells are primordial cells that
can grow into any
type of tissue in the body, and scientists say they hold
great promise for
treating and curing disease. But in order to realize
the full promise of
stem cells, researchers will have to create cells that
will be compatible
with patients' own immune systems. One way to do this,
experts say, is
through therapeutic cloning.
"I don't see any problem in banning human cloning," said
Senator Barbara
Boxer, Democrat of California. "I think we'd get 100
to 0 on that one." But,
she added, "Why would we want to stop and derail stem
cell research?"
But Mr. Brownback urged his colleagues not to mix cloning
with stem cell
research. "Some have said this is about stem cells,"
Mr. Brownback said.
"It's not about stem cells. This is about cloning. This
is about taking a
human individual and creating him by a cloned technology
similar to that
used to create Dolly the sheep."
Mr. Brownback's bill draws support from across the political
spectrum,
including environmental groups, abortion opponents, women's
advocates and
Christian fundamentalists. But advocates for patients,
as well as the
biotechnology industry, are strongly in support of therapeutic
cloning, and
therefore oppose the Brownback legislation.
Daniel Perry, executive director of the Alliance for
Aging Research, a
patient's group, said today that the bill "would set
a very dangerous
precedent of bringing the police powers of the federal
government into the
laboratories." He added, "We need a lot fuller debate
on this."
Contents
Tuesday December 4 9:53 AM ET
Sweden Research Body Calls for Human Embryo Cloning
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A Swedish group of experts called
on the government on
Tuesday to allow the cloning of human embryos to produce
stem cells for
medical research.
The Research Council, mandated by the government to draw
up ethical
guidelines into research, argued that the moral risks
of this work would be
smaller than the possible medical gains.
The recommendation runs counter to the Council of Europe
convention on human
rights, which opposes the artificial creation of embryos.
Sweden, which has
signed but not yet ratified the convention, has a long
tradition of medical
research and is home to many biotechnology companies.
``The basic question of stem cell research in Sweden
is already answered
with a 'Yes','' Council Chairman Bengt Westerberg told
a news conference.
``When it comes to therapeutic cloning we believe that
the risk of offence
is smaller than the potential to cure diseases.''
Scientists believe that stem cells can be coaxed into
developing many
different kinds of tissue, possibly treating conditions
such as Parkinson's,
diabetes and heart diseases.
Stem cells are a master cell found in an embryo at a
very early stage of its
development, but can also be derived from fully grown
living beings.
U.S. biotechnology firm Advanced Cell Technology said
last Friday it had
cloned a human embryo for the first time ever in a breakthrough
aimed at
mining the embryo for stem cells to treat diseases rather
than creating
human beings.
President Bush ( news
<http://rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/n
ews?p=%22President%20Bush%22&c=&n=20&yn=c&c=news&cs=nw>
- web sites
<http://rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://search.yahoo.com/search/search
?p=George+W.+Bush> ) has called this research morally
wrong and urged
Congress to ban it. Many European countries also oppose
it.
In August Bush said he would allow federally funded research
into the 70 or
so stem cell lines that exist worldwide whose embryos
have already been
destroyed so that there is no chance of life emerging
from them.
Sweden has 19 of these stem cell lines -- a reservoir
of stem cells derived
from a single human embryo.
Contents
December 4, 2001
NY Times
The Weaknesses of Science for Profit
By HAROLD VARMUS
Last week Americans briefly diverted their eyes from
Afghanistan to consider
the announcement by a small New England biotechnology
company that it had
created human embryonic clones. President Bush expressed
grave concern, and
some members of Congress made renewed calls for legislation
to ban the
practice outright. One might think that a cloned human
baby had been born.
In truth, what the investigators did was much less significant,
and it was
undertaken for a different purpose. They attempted to
adopt one step of the
process used for cloning animals the transfer of a
cell nucleus as part
of a strategy to develop human embryonic stem cells.
They removed the nuclei
from several human cells and placed each one in another
cell, an egg cell.
In a very few instances, the reconstructed cell went
through one or two
divisions, generating no more than six cells not enough
to allow the
derivation of stem cell lines.
Many of us in the scientific community criticized the
company's report as
premature because it showed little experimental progress
and advanced no new
ideas. Supporters of medical science lamented the company's
naoveti because
the announcement precipitated an unnecessary political
firestorm and
provoked the threat of new barriers to potentially beneficial
research.
So why did the company make its announcement? Although
its executives
claimed to be excited about the findings and said the
information would
promote educational debate, the actual reasons may be
more self-serving.
Biotechnology companies are dependent on investors, and
investors like
publicity.
Such behavior is, of course, both legal and expected,
but it is one of the
unhealthy aspects of confining certain kinds of research
to the private
sector. Our country is notable for doing this in areas
of ethically
sensitive science. In Britain and most other countries
with major
investments in science, a national decision is made at
the outset about
whether to allow such work to be done at all, regardless
of who pays for it.
In contrast, Americans tend to focus our debate on whether
it is permissible
to use federal funds taxpayers' dollars to finance
the work.
This odd strategy does have the benefit of allowing such
work to proceed in
at least one venue: commercial labs. For example, over
the past two decades,
federal financing for in vitro fertilization as a therapy
for infertility
or as a topic for research has been prohibited. But
this policy has not
kept the private sector from pursuing in vitro fertilization
as a practical
solution to infertility; tens of thousands of new parents
and their babies
have been the beneficiaries.
Thus the policy achieves two goals: it does not offend
taxpayers who oppose
the use of federal money to support work that violates
their ethical
standards, yet it allows researchers to pursue innovation
on the frontiers
of science so long as it's privately financed.
On the other hand, because this policy prevents academic
investigators from
studying in vitro fertilization with funds from the National
Institutes of
Health, it compromises efforts to learn the fundamental
principles of
fertilization and to improve the basic technology. Moreover,
it leaves the
field largely in the hands of the for-profit sector
where commercial
realities must be considered along with scientific progress,
where full
disclosure is not the norm, and where oversight is limited.
Last week's episode further illustrates the importance
of involving
federally financed scientists in work that is permitted
in the private
sector. The "nuclear transfer" strategy pursued by the
company in question
is not intended to produce cloned human beings ("reproductive
cloning"), a
goal that nearly all agree is unacceptable. But the approach
is excluded
from federal financing by a provision in the N.I.H.'s
annual appropriations
bill, and federal money could not even be used to study
any resulting stem
cells, since President Bush's Aug. 9 directive prevents
the use of federal
funds for research into any stem cells not already in
existence at the time
of his speech.
Still, stem cells made by nuclear transfer could have
substantial advantages
over existing stem cell lines for studying basic processes
of human
development. This is an aspect of the work more likely
to be pursued by
academic scientists than by those working in industry,
because its
commercial uses are much less certain, although extraordinary
discoveries
might be made.
Nuclear transfer has more obvious value, both economic
and medical, as a
method to make stem cells for therapy: such cells would
not be rejected if
returned to the original donor of the cell nucleus (or
to others with a
similar genetic makeup). This is one of the potentially
viable means to
overcome immune barriers to cell- based therapies for
a variety of dire
diseases.
Such research is vital not just to biotechnology companies
and their
investors, but to the nation as a whole. By structuring
our system so that
only those with private funds or a commercial motive
do this pioneering
work, we curb our full capacity to expand our scientific
understanding.
Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate in medicine, is president
of Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and former director of
the National Institutes
of Health.
Contents
Monday, 3 December, 2001, 15:57 GMT
Embryo clone leads to fall-out
One of the editorial advisors to the online science journal
that published
details of the "world's first human embryo clones" says
he is resigning from
his position.
John Gearhart, one of the scientists to pioneer research
into human
embryonic stems cells, said his decision to step down
was prompted by
concerns over openness and integrity.
The Johns Hopkins University researcher claimed important
data were missing
from the online paper featured in e-biomed: The Journal
Of Regenerative
Medicine, and that the experiment was in his judgement
a failure and should
not have been published.
The company behind the clone research, Advanced Cell
Technology, defended
its work again at a conference over the weekend, and
even released new
information on work it had done on monkey embryo clones.
Michael West, chief executive officer of ACT, said the
company's researchers
had made monkey eggs start dividing like embryos even
though they had not
been fertilized by sperm or activated by the transfer
of genetic material
from another cell.
This process, known as parthenogenesis, was one of the
techniques ACT said
it used to make its human clones detailed in e-biomed.
'Very embarrassed'
John Gearhart led one of the two teams which in 1998
announced that human
embryonic stem cells had been isolated and cultured in
the lab for the first
time.
Recently, Professor Gearhart has been advising the US
Senate on stem cell
legislation.
He said he tried to find out which experts had reviewed
the ACT paper
published on 25 November, but claimed the editor would
not tell him.
"I feel very embarrassed and very chagrined by this publication,"
he told
the BBC. "I thought that by staying on the editorial
board I could at least
find out what happened; but clearly that's not the case,
so probably the
best thing to do is to remove myself."
He said the openness of peer review was especially important
in this case,
as the journal's editorial advisory board also contained
scientists from
Advanced Cell Technology.
Like many other observers, Professor Gearhart said he
had concerns over the
way the research was presented to the public.
He said ACT had produced "very preliminary and unconvincing
evidence" to
support its claims.
Brain cells
ACT has rigorously defended its e-biomed paper and, at
a conference
sponsored by the Mary Ann Liebert publishing company
that put out the human
cloning study, revealed new information about its research.
Michael West said company researcher Jose Cibelli had
got eggs taken from
macaque monkeys to divide up to blastocyst size - the
roughly 100 to
150-cell stage of an embryo when stem cells can be extracted.
"We got 14% of them forming blastocysts and rather nice
ones," West told the
conference.
He said Cibelli and colleagues were able to pull cells
out of one of the
blastocysts that looked like embryonic stem cells. "These
cells grow rather
well," West said, adding that the cells were then coaxed
into becoming
neurons.
He claimed the neurons even secreted dopamine and serotonin,
two important
hormones produced in the brain.
The hope is that one day a person's own embryonic stem
cells could be
produced by cloning procedure that used a small snippet
of the individual's
skin.
These stem cells would then be encouraged in the lab
into becoming new brain
cells to repair the damage done by Parkinson's, or to
repair a heart damaged
by heart attack, or to cure diabetes.
However, some critics say such work is unethical because
it involves the
creation and destruction of human embryos. They want
the US Senate to back
legislation already passed in the House of Representatives
that would outlaw
human cloning.
Contents
Environmentalists Stand with Conservatives on Cloning
By Jason Pierce
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
December 03, 2001
Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - Human cloning is not just
a conservative issue
anymore, with one of the nation's primary environmental
activist groups
joining conservatives Friday in calling on the U.S. Senate
to ban cloning.
The alliance between Friends of the Earth and conservatives
already working
to ban cloning could prove to be valuable in persuading
the Senate
Democratic leadership, which oftentimes yields to pressures
from the
environmentalist lobby, to take up the issue.
Dr. Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth,
told Senate
staffers Friday that human embryonic cloning, such as
the successful clone
by Advanced Cell Technologies last weekend, goes against
two cornerstone
principles of environmentalists: respecting nature, and
the precautionary
principle, which can be described with the old adage,
"look before you
leap."
"The fundamental respect for creation and respect for
nature means that you
don't try to put yourself in God's position and reengineer
all of nature,
but that is the disrespect being shown in this case,"
Blackwelder said.
Environmental groups, he added, are educating its members
on the importance
of understanding and respecting nature as well as understanding
"the
interdependence between human beings and the rest of
nature."
"What is going on with cloning is leading us dramatically
back in the
opposite direction, of a total separation from nature
which would then be
discarded and viewed as a disgustful artifact," Blackwelder
said.
Trying to control nature has produced poor results in
the past, he said, and
the cloning of humans is sure to follow suit.
Blackwelder described what he calls "biological pollution."
European birds
that were imported to the United States, such as the
pigeon or Starling,
reproduced so fast that they drove native species away,
he said.
"Biological pollution is different from chemical pollution,
in that chemical
pollution out there is disintegrating, where as biological
is replicating,"
Blackwelder added.
"That is what will be going on when they start engineering
the human race:
you will have inheritable traits with designer babies,
so you have the most
flagrant violations of the precautionary principle, by
arrogant scientists,"
he said.
"Also, the attempt to clone human beings and indeed to
try to engineer all
of life on earth [shows] they want to fundamentally reshape
human beings and
the rest of nature," Blackwelder said.
He warned that once cloning was allowed in any instance,
it is sure to be
abused, which could result in the changing of the human
race forever.
"We are on the cutting edge of a major decision about
the future of human
civilization," Blackwelder said. Cloning places the human
race "on the edge
of the slippery slope that will eventually lead to a
reengineering of all
life."
"If society allows that, we can guarantee that it will
be abused and will be
a serious abuse of women, and fundamentally it will be
a profound change in
nature and in human beings from the way we see them today,"
he said.
Bill Saunders, a senior fellow at the Family Research
Council who has
closely followed the cloning issue, said the fact that
environmentalists
have joined their side is "invaluable."
"Washington is about coalition politics, and I honestly
think that cloning
is an issue that cuts across the usual lines," Saunders
said. "I think it
makes it hard to pigeonhole the opposition and to disregard
it, because it
is broader than that.
"Obviously, conservatives don't agree with everything
environmentalists say,
and environmentalists don't agree with everything conservatives
say, but
they are united in opposing cloning, and it makes the
coalition strong," he
said.
Saunders added that when usually opposing groups align
with one another,
people usually think about an issue more and forget about
towing the party
line.
"When you have coalitions that have groups together that
aren't usual
together, people have to stop and think about an issue,
and they just can't
react in a knee-jerk way," he said. "I expect more of
the left-leaning
groups to join as we go along."
Environmentalists Stand with Conservatives on Cloning
By Jason Pierce
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
December 03, 2001
Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - Human cloning is not just
a conservative issue
anymore, with one of the nation's primary environmental
activist groups
joining conservatives Friday in calling on the U.S. Senate
to ban cloning.
The alliance between Friends of the Earth and conservatives
already working
to ban cloning could prove to be valuable in persuading
the Senate
Democratic leadership, which oftentimes yields to pressures
from the
environmentalist lobby, to take up the issue.
Dr. Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth,
told Senate
staffers Friday that human embryonic cloning, such as
the successful clone
by Advanced Cell Technologies last weekend, goes against
two cornerstone
principles of environmentalists: respecting nature, and
the precautionary
principle, which can be described with the old adage,
"look before you
leap."
"The fundamental respect for creation and respect for
nature means that you
don't try to put yourself in God's position and reengineer
all of nature,
but that is the disrespect being shown in this case,"
Blackwelder said.
Environmental groups, he added, are educating its members
on the importance
of understanding and respecting nature as well as understanding
"the
interdependence between human beings and the rest of
nature."
"What is going on with cloning is leading us dramatically
back in the
opposite direction, of a total separation from nature
which would then be
discarded and viewed as a disgustful artifact," Blackwelder
said.
Trying to control nature has produced poor results in
the past, he said, and
the cloning of humans is sure to follow suit.
Blackwelder described what he calls "biological pollution."
European birds
that were imported to the United States, such as the
pigeon or Starling,
reproduced so fast that they drove native species away,
he said.
"Biological pollution is different from chemical pollution,
in that chemical
pollution out there is disintegrating, where as biological
is replicating,"
Blackwelder added.
"That is what will be going on when they start engineering
the human race:
you will have inheritable traits with designer babies,
so you have the most
flagrant violations of the precautionary principle, by
arrogant scientists,"
he said.
"Also, the attempt to clone human beings and indeed to
try to engineer all
of life on earth [shows] they want to fundamentally reshape
human beings and
the rest of nature," Blackwelder said.
He warned that once cloning was allowed in any instance,
it is sure to be
abused, which could result in the changing of the human
race forever.
"We are on the cutting edge of a major decision about
the future of human
civilization," Blackwelder said. Cloning places the human
race "on the edge
of the slippery slope that will eventually lead to a
reengineering of all
life."
"If society allows that, we can guarantee that it will
be abused and will be
a serious abuse of women, and fundamentally it will be
a profound change in
nature and in human beings from the way we see them today,"
he said.
Bill Saunders, a senior fellow at the Family Research
Council who has
closely followed the cloning issue, said the fact that
environmentalists
have joined their side is "invaluable."
"Washington is about coalition politics, and I honestly
think that cloning
is an issue that cuts across the usual lines," Saunders
said. "I think it
makes it hard to pigeonhole the opposition and to disregard
it, because it
is broader than that.
"Obviously, conservatives don't agree with everything
environmentalists say,
and environmentalists don't agree with everything conservatives
say, but
they are united in opposing cloning, and it makes the
coalition strong," he
said.
Saunders added that when usually opposing groups align
with one another,
people usually think about an issue more and forget about
towing the party
line.
"When you have coalitions that have groups together that
aren't usual
together, people have to stop and think about an issue,
and they just can't
react in a knee-jerk way," he said. "I expect more of
the left-leaning
groups to join as we go along."
Contents
Ova-Compensating?
Women Who Donate Eggs To Infertile Couples Earn a
Reward -- But Pay a Price
By Martha Frase-Blunt
Special to the Washington Post
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page HE01
"Pay Your Tuition With Eggs," reads one ad in an Ivy
League campus
newspaper. Another promises $50,000 to an "intelligent,
athletic egg donor"
who "must be at least 5-10 and have a 1400 SAT score."
Shantel Balentine just shakes her head in wonder when
she sees such ads. The
32-year-old North Texas woman has never completed college,
but in the
opinion of many fertility specialists, she has ideal
donor characteristics:
maturity, demonstrable fertility -- she is amother of
three -- and an
altruistic motivation. Her academic record, they believe,
is far less
important than these attributes.
"Your heart has to be fully involved," says Balentine,
who is undergoing her
fourth egg donation process. "It can be painful. There
are delays -- cycles
can stretch out for weeks. But I won't walk away. This
couple is counting on
me."
Egg donors can be stereotyped as college students eager
to pay off their
student loans with a sudden windfall, and it's true that
some clinics target
such women. For a student, the lure of easy money for
what may seem to be no
more than a minor surgical procedure can be compelling:
Those Ivy League ads
notwithstanding, a $50,000 payment can't be expected,
but a donor typically
pockets several thousand dollars for having artificially
ripened eggs
extracted from her youthful ovary.
But despite the preferences that many infertile couples
have for the eggs of
younger, better-educated donors, experts cite psychological,
physiological
and even logistical reasons to steer these couples away
from college
students and toward a less-elite group of candidates.
According to Patricia Mendell, a New York psychotherapist
who assesses and
counsels would-be egg donors, these women are as diverse
as any societal
group, except that virtually all are healthy and between
the ages of 18 and
32; many are also organ donors and blood donors.
Mendell has also found that their demographics vary by
geographic area: "Egg
donors in Boston and New York are predominantly students,
because of the
large student population in these cities. In California,
it's split evenly
between childless women and mothers, and in the South,
you'll tend to find
the majority of donors to be young mothers. Besides that,
there is a lot of
diversity when it comes to personalities and backgrounds."
Seeking the Best Eggs
There's no doubt that biologically, very young egg donors
are ideal. But do
they make the best egg donors psychologically? "That's
the question mark,"
says Pamela Madsen, executive director of the American
Infertility
Association, which is based in New York. "Are we . .
. leading them to make
a decision that later in life they may regret? The money
will be spent and,
in the end, she has given up her genetic child forever.
We have to really
care about these women, and the babies that will be born
as a result."
Egg donation has become a popular option for infertile
couples, a group
that's growing in an era where women are waiting longer
-- sometimes too
long -- to conceive their first child. Once a donor has
taken the drugs that
prompt her ovaries to produce eggs, a doctor removes
them by inserting a
needle through her vagina. The eggs are joined with sperm,
typically from
the male partner, in an in vitro fertilization process
and then implanted in
the recipient's uterus. In 1998 -- the most recent year
for which statistics
have been compiled -- the eggs of more than 5,000 donors
reached this stage
at 360 clinics across the country. They produced live
births about 40
percent of the time. (Success rates were lower for the
smaller number of
donor-egg embryos that were frozen before being implanted.)
Competition for egg donors is heated. Clinics and brokers
advertise in print
and on the radio, place flyers in health clubs and even
buy ads on movie
screens, all in an effort to reach a broad swath of the
young female
population. The more egg donors an organization can secure,
the more choices
it can give the recipient couples -- or, sometimes, the
single women -- who
pay the donor's fee. A significant element of the transaction,
after all, is
the couple's ability to select a donor who seems ideal.
Some clinics, including the Genetics & IVF Institute
in Fairfax, allow
casual visitors to their Web sites to read profiles of
prospective donors.
At the Annapolis office of the Center for Surrogate Parenting
and Egg
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