Science lobby groups seduce state premiers

by Michael Cook
first published in the Canberra Times, 1 April 2002

AFTER 40 years of pounding the science-policy beat, American journalist Daniel Greenberg knows all about scientists: "They are the quintessential special interest group, and in effect, they make the oil industry look like a piker," he writes in his recent book Science, Money and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion. Nothing supports his acid assessment better than the promises and threats of the Australian IVF lobby to cajole State and Federal Governments into legalising destructive embryo research. Even ailing car manufacturer Mitsubishi could take lessons from their success in persuading Bob Carr, Peter Beattie and Steve Bracks with talk of brain drains and job losses and visions of immense future profits.

"Precision took second place to propaganda," says Greenberg in his detailed account of how US scientists have protected their budgets. In 1991, for instance, a Nobel-winning physicist told the House Budget Committee that it was a sad sight to see fellow physicists making "false claims that particle physics did everything from magnetic-resonance imaging and the computer revolution to the television screen and sliced bread".

Huckstering on a similar scale has been taking place in Australia in the debate over embryonic stem cells. First of all, if you listen to the Premiers, you might think that remedies for diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and severed spinal columns are just around the corner.

Christopher Reeve, the quadriplegic actor of Superman fame who is campaigning for ESC research, could be walking next year. Never has a crueller promise been made. By the most optimistic estimates, cures for these diseases are many years, even decades, away. Even the website of one of Australia's leading ESC research companies, ES Cell International, says that they are a "long term" proposition. Bob Hawke's promise that no Australian child will be living in poverty will come true before the Premiers' embryos cure Christopher Reeve.

Second, animal studies normally precede human experimentation. While there is considerable debate over the status of the embryo, this in no way justifies a deviation from the usual protocols of accumulating convincing and reproducible evidence from animal models before experimenting on or with humans. So far, even studies with animal ESCs have yielded meagre results.

Third, embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are potentially lethal something the Premiers haven't bothered to tell voters who wouldn't know what a stem cell is. In a Chinese trial of ESCs as a remedy for Parkinson's disease, for instance, a woman died. Her post-mortem showed that the stem cells had grown into a brain teratoma, a horrifying cancerous cyst of bone, hair and skin.

No doubt scientists will find ways to tame the propensity of ESCs to morph insanely into all kinds of tissue. But they still see it as a very serious problem. Fourth, stem cells from embryos are not genetically identical to the tissues of the patient. Somehow the problem of rejection must be overcome. By suppressing the immune system with powerful drugs, it may become possible to repair organs with cells generated from ESCs. But it will not be easy.

Fifth, the public has been told almost nothing about adult stem cells which are currently the most promising road to success. These are found naturally in the body of children and adults and do not require the destruction of embryos. Reports of promising therapies with adult stem cells abound in scientific journals and the popular press.

The American Diabetes Association reported last year that 15 people with serious juvenile diabetes became "insulin free" after adult stem cell transplants. Science magazine has reported that two children born without immune systems ("bubble boy" syndrome) have left their sterile environment and are leading normal lives after bone marrow stem cell treatment.

The New England Journal of Medicine has reported that the vision of several legally blind people improved after their corneas had been reconstructed with corneal stem cells. What are the implications of misrepresentations and omissions for the ethics of destructive research on embryos? The Premiers are effectively endorsing a view that the embryo is no bigger and no more significant than the full stop at the end of this sentence. But outside of the IVF industry, how many scientists would agree with them? If the embryo isn't human, what is it? A wombat? A gazelle? An orang-utan? It must belong to some species. If it's human, why aren't we protecting it? Almost everyone agrees that there could be billions upon billions of dollars in the pot of gold at the end of the biotech rainbow. But this presents dangers for Australia as well as opportunities. In the US, according to Greenberg, ethical standards in science have been eroded through the "pervasive invasion of the money ethic". If the IVF scientists and their political cheer squads have been misleading the public with extravagant promises and spectacular gaps in their stories, can they be trusted with getting the ethics right as well?

Michael Cook is the editor of a bioethics email newsletter, Australasian Bioethics Information.