Cloning researchers seem to have a knack for coming up with embarrassing surprises. First the South Korean government ended up with egg on its face for pinning its dream of becoming a major biotech player on the fraudulent experiments of Hwang Woo-suk. Now the German government has come under fire for giving its most prestigious scientific prize to the wrong man.
It turns out that Professor Ian Wilmut, internationally famed as the creator of the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, played second fiddle in the landmark experiment. This has emerged in an improbable venue, an employment tribunal where Wilmut is being accused of racial harassing and bullying an Asian colleague, Prim Singh.
He was asked by a lawyer whether the statement "I did not create Dolly" was accurate and was forced to reply, "Yes". Sixty-six per cent of the credit, said Wilmut, should go to another colleague, Professor Keith Campbell; he had only had a supervisory role. Indeed, according to the Guardian, Wilmut's handling of the Dolly affair may have been behind Campbell's decision to quit the Roslin Institute a year later.
Apart from damaging the stellar reputation of the Scottish scientist, the revelation shocked the Frankfurt-based Paul Ehrlich Foundation which garlanded Wilmut with a £70,000 prize for cloning Dolly last year. The award was bitterly criticised at the time because Wilmut's research would have been illegal in Germany. According to the newspaper Scotland on Sunday, the foundation might even strip him of the award. Professor Wilmut has since gone on to become one of the leading advocates of cloning human embryos in the UK.
Admittedly, who gets credit for a discovery can ultimately be a question of office politics in highly competitive research institutes with many scientists and technicians. As one scientist told the Guardian, "You have a hierarchy of employment and you need the job. They dictate the rest." ~ Guardian, Mar 11; Scotland on Sunday, Mar 12
UK WOMAN DENIED ACCESS TO FROZEN EMBRYOS
The fate of frozen embryos hit page one in Britain last week with a sobbing woman begging her former boyfriend to allow their 5-year-old IVF embryos to be implanted in her womb. Natallie Evans accused Howard Johnston of despicable pettiness after she lost her appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. "He knew what he was going into when we first went into IVF," she said. "He chose to become a father the day we created embryos. He's being very mean. He's stopping me becoming a mother." After a battle with ovarian cancer, she can no longer have children.
But Mr Johnston, who broke up with Ms Evans about four years ago, looks at the situation differently: "I did not want a child of mine growing up not knowing who I was and in an environment I have no control over." In Strasbourg, the judges expressed "great sympathy" for Ms Evans's plight, but stated that the male donor's rights were no less worthy of protection than the female's.
In an op-ed in the London Telegraph a doctor, Max Pemberton, observed that the headline-grabbing battle reminded him once again of our unreasonable obsession with our genetic heritage. He suggested that Ms Evans adopt a child: "Have we not mistaken the overwhelming desire to bring up a child and share in its life with the intellectual concept of genetic heritage?"
The case was a dramatic example of the additional complication that IVF has introduced into already tangled contemporary relationships. Both Ms Evans, who has been married twice before, and Mr Johnston have now re-partnered. ~ London Telegraph, Mar 8, 13
IRISH TUG-OF-WAR OVER MORE EMBRYOS
And across the Irish Sea in Dublin, a divorced couple is locked in a custody battle over embryos also created and frozen in 2001. A former wife wants to have the embryos implanted; her husband, now in a new relationship, refuses. The unnamed couple, who have already had one child from these embryos, originally agreed that joint consent was needed on all decisions relating to the embryos. Now that they have fallen out, the embryos are in limbo.
Resolving the deadlock will be tricky. No Irish statute covers the fate of IVF embryos and the Irish constitution guarantees the right to life of unborn children. "These embryos are joint property of the couple, although even using the word property is unsavoury," says Frank Martin, a law lecturer at University College Cork. "Irish and English laws differ in that we have a written constitution, which makes this case distinctly Irish. The issue then is to determine if the embryo is synonymous with the unborn, and judges are going to be faced with this linguistic difficulty."
Last year a government commission recommended radical changes to Irish reproductive law, including the legalisation of surrogacy, IVF for same-sex couples, and no legal protection for IVF embryos, but the government is unlikely to deal with these controversial proposals before next year's general election. ~ London Times, Mar 12
FORCE-FEEDING OF GITMO DETAINEES DENOUNCED
The force-feeding of Guantanamo Bay detainees has again come under attack by doctors. In a widely publicised letter in the British journal The Lancet, 263 doctors from seven countries claimed that force-feeding and the use of restraint chairs are specifically forbidden by the World Medical Association's code of ethics. They also question whether the American Medical Association is taking seriously allegations of torture by its own members.
The details of what is happening at Guantanamo Bay is not known. The military admits that six detainees are on a hunger strike and that three of them are being force-fed. Of the 490 terrorist suspects who have been held there for four years without indictments, as many as 130 went on a hunger strike in September, but by January this had fallen to six.
Their lawyers accuse the military of brutal treatment in administering the force-feeding, a charge which the Pentagon denies. The policy of the department is unchanged, and it is to support the preservation of life by appropriate clinical means and to do that in a humane manner," a spokesman said.
The Pentagon also dismisses the ue of ethical codes as a moral cudgel. "Professional organisation declarations by doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc. are not international treaties, they are non-binding and not applicable to sovereign nation-states." ~ The Lancet, Mar 11; Reuters, Mar 10
KOREAN GOVERNMENT USES IVF TO RAISE BIRTH RATE
Alarmed by a birth rate which is amongst the lowest in the world, the South Korean government has decided to turn to IVF. President Roh Moo-hyun recently vowed spend his last two years in office tackling the problems of a rapidly ageing society and a birth rate which has fallen far below replacement level to 1.16. About 16,000 childless couples will now be able to obtain a government subsidy for half the cost of IVF treatment.
An editorial in the Korea Times argues that while promotion of IVF raises no ethical issues, it may not in fact encourage women to bear more children. It recommends that "More emphasis... be given to improving and expanding childcare facilities... so women would not be forced to make unwanted choices between a career and raising children." ~ Korea Times, Mar 8
HWANG FIGHTS TO CLEAR HIS NAME
Disgraced Korean stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk is trying to clear his name by challenging the results of an investigation into his research by Seoul National University. SNU found that he had never really created a true clone in his 2004 paper in Science. But now one of Hwang's associates, Professor Kang Sung-keun at SNU, says that the investigators were wrong. "Although the line seems to have suffered damages or mutations, we are sure that it was established through cloning, and tests prove this," he told the Korea Times. ~ Korea Times, Mar 12
HANDS OFF OUR OVARIES"
Radical feminists and pro-life women have linked arms to create an unlikely coalition against egg harvesting for stem cell research. Hands off our ovaries" will highlight the short and long-term risks involved in egg harvesting and its significance for the health and dignity of women.
"Egg extraction as currently practiced poses inadequately understood, yet clearly significant, risks to women's health. It is unconscionable to encourage young women to take these risks purely for research purposes," says Diane Beeson, a California sociologist.
"Women must quickly come together so that these life -threatening concerns for our health and safety are heard," says Jennifer Lahl, a Christian bioethicist. And Paola Tavella and Alessandra Di Pietro, authors of "Untamed Mothers: Against Techno-rape of the Female Body", comment that "current bio-politics are separating men and women from natural reproduction and are robbing women of their biological tissues for experimental techno-science."
A London Times journalist denounced the coalition for its abhorrent" tactic of undermining public confidence in science. Public morality" -- often dressed in the language of religious fundamentalism -- is holding back scientific progress, something that will impose lasting damage on humanity," wrote Matthew Syed. ~ Hands Off Our Ovaries press release, Mar 8; London Times, Mar 7
BLOGGING BUG BITES
The blogging bug has bitten the bioethics community. The American Journal of Bioethics was the first to launch a blog. blog.bioethics.net is run by Glenn McGee, the editor of AJOB, and Arthur Caplan, who is probably the bioethicist most often cited by the American media, is a frequent contributor, along with occasional guest bloggers. Commentary tends to be caustic, comic, utilitarian, and broad-ranging. It has quickly become a must-read for anyone interested in front-page bioethics.
Now the Hastings Center, a major centre for bioethics discussion and research, has just launched its own blog, Bioethics Forum. It is a bit more staid and formal, but has a diverse range of contributors, including such well-known American bioethicists as Thomas Murray, the president of the Hastings Center, Daniel Callahan and Carl Elliott, as well as an Australian who is a professor of bioethics at Oxford, Julian Savulescu.
The anti-euthanasia campaigner Wesley J. Smith also has his own blog, Secondhand Smoke, which deals with euthanasia, stem cell research, animal liberation and other topics. He keeps an eye on the media's accuracy in reporting on issues related to personhood. The Women's Bioethics Project also sponsors a blog run by Linda Glenn which tackles issues from a feminist perspective.
The striking thing about these blogs is that they highlight quite different bioethics stories in the media: some focus on abortion, others on health care, others on the proper treatment of embryos, others on informed consent and so on. No doubt this reflects the range of views of what bioethics actually is and what it should do.
IN BRIEF: skulduggery; terrorism; Oregon; adult stem cells
Skulduggery -- If artificial reproductive technology is a business, as Debora L. Spar argues in her recent book "The Baby Business", it also has its shady side, as a number of people allegedly defrauded by a Philadelphia man have discovered. The manager of the MidAtlantic Center for Surrogacy, Len Brooks, has been indicted for stealing from his clients. The centre has now closed but as the case makes its way through the courts, Brooks has opened up another in Palm Beach, Florida, which he calls International Surrogacy Consultants. ~ Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar 12
Animal rights activism -- UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has promised that his government will crack down hard on animal rights extremists, calling them "terrorists" who are holding Britain to ransom. The London Sunday Telegraph has revealed that he told industry leaders in a secret meeting late last year that activists would be pursued as vigorously as political terrorists. Some business leaders have apparently threatened to move their operations elsewhere unless the UK deals with the activists as severely as the US has done. ~ London Sunday Telegraph, Mar 12
Oregon -- The latest figures for assisted suicide in Oregon show that the number is nearly unchanged from last year. In 2005, 38 people ended their lives under the 1998 Death with Dignity Act. In 2004 the figure was 37. In January the US Supreme Court ruled that the Bush administration could not prevent Oregon doctors from prescribing lethal prescriptions to patients who asked for them. ~ Washington Post, Mar 10
Adult stem cells -- Partially paralysed rats have recovered movement in their paws after being injected with human nose stem cells, scientists at the University of Louisville in Kentucky report in the latest issue of the journal Stem Cells. The researchers say that clinical studies in humans are still three to ten years away. ~ Courier-Journal, Mar 8
