Australasian Bioethics Information
SPECIAL ISSUE: the age of clones dawns
"FOETAL REDUCTION" / Mother aborts one of her twins
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST / Drug companies sponsor media awards
INJECTING ROOMS / Overdoses in injecting room "high"
ETHICS / Australian for preimplantation diagnosis
IN BRIEF / Bracks backs down on lesbian IVF
SPECIAL ISSUE: the age of clones dawns
The bioethics news of the week was that a small US biotechnology company has created the first cloned human. Using the same technology which resulted in Dolly the sheep, Advanced Cell Technology claimed that several of 71 manipulated human eggs grew to four and six cells. ACT described its work as groundbreaking progress towards "therapeutic cloning", "a potentially limitless source of immune-compatible cells for tissue engineering and transplantation medicine". It hopes to create remedies for disorders ranging from damaged spinal cords to Alzheimer's and diabetes. ACT said that it did not intend to attempt "reproductive cloning" as the risks to the child and the mother are too great.RETURN TO TOP
The embryos were produced only a few weeks ago and ACT hastily published the news in a new and relatively unknown on-line scientific journal. Media exclusives were arranged with U.S. News & World Report and Scientific American and ACT's CEO Michael West did the round of TV talk shows. However, a former member of ACT's own ethics committee called the announcement "nothing but hype" and said that "they are doing science by press release". Many scientists observed that the news, from a strictly technical viewpoint, was unimpressive. Biologist Douglas Melton, of Harvard Medical School, branded it "a failed, dysfunctional experiment".
The creator of Dolly, Professor Ian Wilmut, said that "the fact that the company is announcing this now suggests it needs the publicity for refinancing". However, the real reason behind ACT's hurried revelation may have been to put pressure on the US Congress to allow the creation of cloned embryos. Currently the procedure is legal in the US as long as federal funds are not used. However, President George W. Bush had planned to outlaw cloning of any kind before the September 11 attacks and he is likely to revive the proposed legislation. ACT's CEO used his world-wide media exposure to contend that stem cells carved out of cloned embryos are essential to make new remedies for deadly diseases -- a view disputed by many scientists.RETURN TO TOP
The American clones were more a moral than a scientific breakthrough. For the first time, there was documentary proof that embryonic human beings had been created as research material and then destroyed. The announcement provoked a chorus of condemnation around the world. President Bush said "we should not, as a society, grow life to destroy it. And that's exactly what's taking place." The president of the environmental group Friends of the Earth called it a "grotesque manipulation of nature". A spokesman for the Melbourne Catholic Church, Father Anthony Fisher, said, "embryonic human beings are being treated like lab rats, mere 'cells' or products to be used at will by others. And it is all being veiled with deceitful language and extravagant promises."
In addition to criticising the quality of the research, some scientists said that embryonic stem cells were not essential to obtain new cures. Dr Peter Schofield, of the Australian Society for Medical Research, observed that stem cells could be gathered "from non-embryo sources". "As scientists, none of us can live in isolation from the broader community which shares moral and ethical concerns about embryos," he said.RETURN TO TOP
Although ACT denied that it planned to bring any cloned embryos to term as infant human beings, its chief ethical adviser, Ronald Green, left the door open. "This concern [about human clones] presumes that reproductive cloning is and always will be ethically wrong," he wrote in Scientific American.RETURN TO TOP
Overlooked in the excitement over human clones was news that techniques for cloning cows have improved rapidly. Both Advanced Cell Technology and a Wisconsin company, Infigen, Inc. have announced that the cloned cattle which have survived to adulthood appear to be normal in every way. ACT says that the survival rate is nearly as good as for cattle conceived with accepted IVF techniques. (However, these claims are disputed by scientists who say that detailed genetic studies are needed to see whether the surviving animals are truly health. Rudolph Jaenisch, a cloning expert at MIT, says that all adult clones probably have subtle defects.)
A report in the Los Angeles Times observes that improving survival rates for animals could force opponents of human cloning to fall back on arguments that it is immoral or unnatural rather than unsafe. "The battle against cloning so far has been won on safety concerns," says bioethicist Arthur Caplan. "If you start to diminish the safety concerns, then the ethics will have to carry that much more weight." -- Los Angeles Times, Nov 23; New York Times, Nov 23RETURN TO TOP
"FOETAL REDUCTION" / Mother aborts one of her twins
A Melbourne mother carrying IVF twins aborted one of them because she feared that she could not cope with both children. She had one child already and only wanted one more. Details of the case emerged after a visiting US expert in killing foetuses of multiple pregnancies, or "foetal reduction", suggested that all parents of twins should consider aborting one of them. "Sometimes you have to do very unpleasant things in order to get a good outcome," said Professor Mark Evans, from Philadelphia. -- Mercury, Nov 28RETURN TO TOP
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST / Drug companies sponsor media awards
Bulletin journalist Melissa Sweet has declared that she will no longer participate in drug company-sponsored media awards. "With compelling evidence to show that close ties with industry can influence doctors' behaviour, there's no reason to expect journalists would be any different." She complained in the British Medical Journal that the Australian Museum had established a "Pfizer Eureka Prize for health and medical research journalism". A prize sponsored by a major drug company could compromise journalists' ability to report medical affairs objectively, she suggested. -- British Medical Journal, Nov 24
The new head of the American Medical Association, a group which represents 290,000 doctors, is the leader of a powerful trade group representing over-the-counter drug and dietary supplement makers. The appointment of ENT specialist Michael D. Maves appears to conflict with long-held AMA policies on controversial products, on mandatory reporting of potential illnesses related to products, and on pre-screening of dietary supplements for safety and effectiveness. The director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group, Sidney Wolfe, was horrified. "We're going back to the 19th Century, where snake oil and medicine are synonymous." -- Washington Post, Nov 20RETURN TO TOP
INJECTING ROOMS / Overdoses in injecting room "high"
Australia's first supervised injecting centre has had to deal with four times as many drug overdoes as similar centres overseas. In its first six months, the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Sydney's Kings Cross registered 1,503 users, who visited the centre 11,273 times. Of these visits, there were 87 overdoses. "We would have expected to manage 22; in fact we've managed four times as many," medical director Ingrid van Beek told a national symposium on drugs. -- AAP, Nov 28
The West Australian government has decided against injecting rooms because drug use in Perth is not as concentrated as in other cities. This was the only one of 45 suggestions made by a drugs summit in August to be rejected by the State government. -- AAP, Nov 27RETURN TO TOP
ETHICS / Australian backs preimplantation diagnosis
Creating and selecting embryos to create children for the sake of their stem cells is ethically unobjectionable, argues Julian Savulescu, from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne, in the British Medical Journal. The catchphrase "never use people as a means but always treat them as an end" is "difficult to sustain", Savulescu says. "Provided that parents love their child, there is little problem with that child benefiting others." In any case, he observes, "selection of children on a much grander scale is already commonplace" to detect and destroy unborn children with genetic defects. -- British Medical Journal, Nov 24RETURN TO TOP
IN BRIEF / Bracks backs down on lesbian IVF
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Australasian Bioethics Information
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