POLITICS / Environmentalists oppose human genetic engineering
A special issue of the World Watch Institute's journal has highlighted the strong opposition of the green movement to human genetic engineering. "This isn't a fight about saving whales, or the last rain forests, or even the health of people living today," says the editor of World Watch magazine, Ed Ayres. "The question is whether we can save ourselves from ourselves, to know and respect what we do not know, and to put the brakes on potentially dangerous forms of human genetic engineering."

Among the issues raised by World Watch are the possible return of racist eugenics, heightened discrimination, drugs which could be used to control dissent, turning babies into commodities, widening economic inequality, the destruction of a democratic ethos, and the creation of new terror weapons. ~ Press release, July RETURN TO TOP

IVF / Mix-ups common, says scientist
Errors are common in UK fertility clinics, but doctors are covering up the extent of the problem to allay public fears, says a leading British scientist. Dr Sammy Lee, scientific consultant to the Portland Hospital for Women and Children in London, told The Scotsman newspaper: "Every day, someone somewhere in the UK is inadvertently messing up." Dr Lee's remarks followed the recent birth of black twins to a white couple after IVF treatment, which was said to be the first mistake of its kind in Britain.

Dr Lee said that doctors had closed ranks to portray the error as a one-off, but mistakes occurred regularly at IVF clinics. "I am aware of the wrong embryos being transferred to the wrong patients at several NHS (National Health Service) units during the past ten years. I have also confidentially been told about a number of cases where the wrong sperm were used to inseminate eggs. I know dishes have been dropped and people forget to top up liquid nitrogen freezers. Eggs are damaged, particularly during sperm injection; eggs and embryos sometimes are inadvertently placed in the wrong dish. Eggs and embryos are lost in transit as they are moved from dish to dish."

Dr Lee said that the problems stemmed from weaknesses in the recruitment and training of embryologists. "The IVF laboratory is not the place to train a rookie, as so often happens. Many have entered human embryology immediately or soon after graduation." A spokesperson for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the government body which licenses clinics in Britain, said that Dr Lee was being "unnecessarily alarmist". ~ The Scotsman, July 24 RETURN TO TOP

ETHICISTS / Call for disclosure of corporate funding sources
Many bioethicists have financial ties to the companies whose ethics they evaluate, says the Centre for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), an American group. "This is a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse," says CSPI head Michael F. Jacobson. "I fear that professional ethicists may lose sight of right and wrong as they try to make their opinions more palatable to corporate sponsors."

As an example, the CPSI cited the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics, which is developing a code of ethics for the agricultural biotech industry funded by giant companies like Dow, DuPont and Monsanto. Biomedical companies have also given at least US$2 million to bioethics centres and offered contracts to academic researchers, according to the magazine U.S. News & World Report.

"The problem with ethics consultants is that they look like watchdogs but can be used like show dogs," says Carl Elliott, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota. "No matter how outrageous a corporate policy, no matter how troubling a headline in the morning paper, it will be softened by the knowledge that the corporation in question has consulted with a team of ethics experts."

The CPSI has written to more than 125 bioethics organisations and journals to urge them to disclose possible conflicts of interests and to reject papers whose objectivity is compromised by conflicts of interest. ~ CPSI website, The Scientist, July 22 RETURN TO TOP

BUSINESS / Shaky finances put therapeutic cloning firms at risk
The few major biotechnology firms which are conducting human cloning research in the US and the UK are on such shaky financial ground that the lack of funding may "accomplish what moral objections have so far been unable to do", says the Financial Times.

California-based Geron Corporation has laid off 30% of its staff and has only enough assets to finance two more years of operations. PPL Therapeutics, the British company which created Dolly the sheep, has had to sell its pig-cloning technology because it could not finance additional research. The staff of Advanced Cell Technology, which announced late last year that it had cloned human embryos, are financing some of the research themselves. Large-scale therapeutic cloning research may not be feasible because of the cost and difficult of obtaining the human eggs required for research, says the Times. ~ kaisernetwork, July 19; Financial Times, July 18 RETURN TO TOP

REGENERATIVE MEDICINE / Kickstarting silent genes
Instead of using stem cells to regrow organs and repair damaged tissue, some American researchers are trying to find the secret of how to regenerate tissue. A Boston-based company, Hydra Bioscience, has raised US$9.3 million in venture capital and recruited a leading biotech entrepreneur to develop drugs and proteins which could coax cells into dedifferentiating and redevelop into specialised tissue.

The newt, a kind of salamander, is one of nature's regenerative superstars: it can actually regrow whole limbs. Researchers at Hydra want to find out if it is possible for humans to do the same. Regeneration would sidestep the ethical issues which bedevil embryonic stem cell research, they say. It would also be easier to get government approval for drugs which induce the regeneration process than for therapies involving stem cell transplants.

Other scientists are sceptical of the commercial potential of this line of investigation, however, because it will take years to discover the complex sequence of chemicals which govern the pace and direction of regrowth. "It's great science, but where's the business?" commented a researcher from MIT's Whitehead Institute. ~ Boston Globe, July 25 RETURN TO TOP

SUICIDE / Elderly at risk in US
Psychiatrists fear that more older people will take their own lives as the proportion of elderly grows. They already have the highest rate of suicide in the US. Americans 65 and older represent about 13% of the population, but almost 20% of the suicides. The national rate is 11 suicides for every 100,000 people, but the rate for older white men is 33, or 4,655 suicides in 1998. Curiously, the rate for older black women is so small -- only 20 killed themselves in 1998 -- that it is statistically negligible. Psychiatrists have speculated that this could be due to black women's strong ties to social and religious support networks.

The elderly are far more successful at committing suicide, as well. Four older people attempt suicide for each one who succeeds, compared to 200 attempts for every completed suicide amongst young adults. Compounding the problem is the myth that it is normal to feel sad or depressed as one ages. A US specialist in elderly suicide, Dr Yeates Conwell, says that doctors also tend to believe this and do not diagnose treatable depressive illness. ~ AP, July 22 RETURN TO TOP

DRUG INDUSTRY / Drugs needed for neglected diseases
The international relief group Médicins Sans Frontières has launched an initiative to develop drugs to cure the world's most neglected diseases. It has formed a network of non-profit partners around the world which will contract drug companies to develop drugs which have little hope of commercial return.

Although public-private partnerships have developed drugs for AIDS, malaria and TB during the past ten years, many neglected infectious diseases still have no effective, affordable or easy-to-use drug treatment. There is little that can be done for kala-azar, Chagas' disease and sleeping sickness -- largely because patients could never afford the treatment. Out of 1,393 new drugs marketed between 1975 and 1999, only 16 were for neglected diseases, even though these constitute more than 10% of the global disease burden.

Sleeping sickness, which kills thousands in Africa each year, is a good example of the problem. Melarsoprol, which was developed over 50 years ago, can cure the disease. But it kills up to 10% of the people who take it and in some regions drug resistance means that it is ineffective in a third of those who take it. A more effective and less toxic drug, eflornithine, exists but the manufacturer stopped production in 1995 because it was a commercial failure. However, it restarted in the US five years later when it was found to remove women's unwanted facial hair. ~ BMJ, July 27 RETURN TO TOP

EMBRYO SCREENING / Americans uneasy about sex selection
Embryo screening for gender and diseases has become more and more common in the last two years in the US, reports the Los Angeles Times. Now that specialised equipment has become available, about 50 US clinics can sort embryos for sex and more than 100 inherited diseases. The cost is about US$10,000. The Times interviewed one woman who desperately wanted a daughter and another who wanted a boy without the gene for muscular dystrophy.

Dr Jaroslav Marik, of the Tyler Medical Clinic, in Los Angeles, is an enthusiastic defender of embryo sorting, even for gender. "What is medical need?" he asks. "Isn't the right to happiness and health a part of that?" Even other IVF specialists, however, object to this approach. "I went into this [business] to help people with disease. Last time I checked, your gender is not a disease," says Dr Mark Hughes, of Wayne State University in Detroit.

Some IVF doctors believe that embryo screening will also be a way of boosting their success rates, as embryos often have hidden defects in their chromosomes and perish in the womb. However, others say that clinics test no more than 8 of the 23 pairs of chromosomes and that embryos could be damaged in the process of extracting a cell.

Nearly 2,000 embryo-screened babies have been born world-wide since 1992. Germany has banned embryo screening for any reason; the UK allows it only to check for gender-related diseases. Australia is currently a patchwork of different laws, with sex selection legal in NSW, but forbidden in Victoria unless disease is involved. The US has very little regulation of fertility clinics and there are no restrictions on embryo screening. ~ Los Angeles Times, July 23 RETURN TO TOP

IN BRIEF / Baby-selling mother in court; obesity lawsuit