Severely brain-damaged and apparently unresponsive patients may be conscious, British researchers have discovered. In a startling study published in the journal Science, brain imaging techniques detected clear signs of awareness in a woman who was in a vegetative state after a motor vehicle accident. When she was asked to imagine herself playing tennis and walking through her house, the motor control areas of her brain flared up. "If you put her scans together with the other 12 volunteers tested, you cannot tell which is the patient's," Dr Adrian Owen, of the UK Medical Research Council, told the New York Times.
Scientists are divided on the significance of these findings. First of all, most experts told the media that this woman's injuries were far less severe than Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who died last year. Wary of arousing false hopes of recovery amongst relatives, they stressed that they could not generalise from a single intriguing case. Dr Nicholas Schiff, of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, said that it was not clear "whether we'll see this in one out of 100 vegetative patients, or one out of 1,000, or ever again." A French scientist who reviewed the study for Science said that the results are "not totally convincing of consciousness".
However, the article has certainly rattled the notion that all "vegetative" patients are unconscious. "One always hesitates to make a lot out of a single case, but what this study shows me is that there may be more going on in terms of patients' self-awareness than we can learn at the bedside," Dr. James Bernat, a professor of neurology at the Dartmouth Medical School, told the Times. "Even though we might assume some patients are not aware, I think we should always talk to them, always explain what's going on, always make them comfortable, because maybe they are there, inside, aware of everything."
Neuroscientist Dr Narender Ramnani at Royal Holloway University of London, told the Daily Mail that, "This adds weight to the view that she, and perhaps many other patients like her, might be quite capable of decision-making and have a rich and complex internal life," he said. The case raises important ethical questions, he added. "Given that such patients might be conscious and capable of making their own decisions, is it acceptable for others to terminate their lives without the consent of these patients?" ~
AP, Sept 8;
New York Times, Sept 7; Daily Mail, Sept 8
A company accused of misleading the media and the public with claims of creating "ethical" embryonic stem cells was hammered by politicians, the media and bioethicists this week. Journalists who probed the credentials of Advanced Cell Technology found that its share price spiked 500% in two days in the wake of the publication of a paper in the prestigious journal Nature. The company also announced that had raised US$13.5 million from its existing investors.
The controversy prompted Robert Bazell, the chief science and health correspondent of NBC News, to write: "In the world of biotechnology, hype and hyperbole are the norms. Most companies lack products so they are constantly scrounging for money to stay in business. There is a saying in biotech that before companies have something to sell 'news flow drives valuations'. So headlines, even if the claims prove groundless, can push up the stock price long enough -- or nudge deals forward -- to keep the company on life support. But even in this smelly landscape Advanced Cell Technology stands out."
The lead author of the article, Dr Robert Lanza, also appeared before a Senate subcommittee hearing where he was castigated by two politicians who strongly support embryonic stem cell research. "It's a big black eye if scientists are making false and inaccurate representations," said one of them, Senator Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania. And in his blog, the editor of the American Journal of Bioethics, Glenn McGee, commented ruefully, "If there is a school to teach scientists how to screw up the pursuit of PR, ACT has the professor on retainer." ~ blog.bioethics.net, Sept 6; Washington Post, Sept 7; Wall Street Journal, Sept 6; MSNBC.com, Aug 29
A campaigner for prisoners' welfare in the UK has called for voluntary euthanasia for prisoners. Mark Leech, a former prisoner and the editor of the Prisons Handbook, was commenting on the attempted suicide of child murderer Ian Huntley in a British jail.
Mr Leech said that he would favour a system of assisted suicide like the one offered by the Swiss organisation Dignitas in Zurich. "There will have to be checks and balances. I would like to see a high court judge involved. The court would have to be convinced he knew exactly what he was doing, that his mental state was fine, his decision was irreversible, that this was his life and this was what he wanted to do," he said. "We have one life, it is our own life and prisoners should be able to end it with dignity if that is what they want."
Although voluntary euthanasia for prisoners is not a popular cause, it was mooted by Australian activist Dr Philip Nitschke in his recent book Killing Me Softly as the "last frontier in prison reform". ~ London Mirror, Sept 7, Killing Me Softly, p 88.
Last week Dr Nitschke told a right-to-die conference in Toronto that members of his euthanasia group Exit have finally developed a simple manufacturing process for a lethal barbiturate which can be used to commit suicide. It is being tested for contaminants and should be ready for distribution by the end of the month. ~ Canada.com, Sept 9;
A British doctor has claimed that his team is only two years away from being able to transplant a womb so that women who lack a uterus can have the experience of having children. Dr Richard Smith, of Hammersmith Hospital, says that the transplant would be temporary, as otherwise the woman would be obliged to take immunosuppressant drugs to prevent rejection of the uterus for the rest of her life. This is not a new idea, but up to now, it has not succeeded. In 2002, doctors in Saudi Arabia carried out a womb transplant, but its blood supply failed.
Although this news may have given heart to the 15,000 women in Britain who lack a uterus, the science editor for the London Times, Mark Henderson, derided it as "junk science". "Bold predictions about experimental medical technologies are always best handled with care," he said. "They often suit both journalists and scientists, who can enter into a kind of tacit conspiracy; swift timetables for human trials make good headlines and catch the attention of research funders. But they are regularly shown up as guesswork later."
Although the enormous difficulty of ensuring an adequate blood supply may be overcome, ethical hurdles remain. Any problems could harm a foetus and result in stillbirth, miscarriage, or serious medical problems in the infant. ~ Times, Sept 5, Sept 9
A fertility expert in the UK has urged career women to freeze their eggs if they want to have children later in life. Dr Gillian Lockwood, of Midland Fertility Services, one of the few clinics in the UK to offer egg freezing facilities, says that if women in their 30s set eggs aside, it will be easier for them to conceive later on.
The older you are, the more difficult it becomes to get pregnant and the greater the chance of a miscarriage or abnormality," she told the London Times. "It's the age of the egg, not the age of the womb, which determines the miscarriage rate. Women in their thirties should be encouraged to consider freezing their eggs," she said.
"The last thing I want to do is to discourage any young woman who wants to be a mother from starting a family because she thinks technology will save her," she said. "But it's important that she knows this technology is available."
The suggestion was dismissed by Josephine Quintavalle, of the lobby group Comment on Reproductive Ethics. "We should stop finding these absurd solutions for society's problems," she said. "If society isn't ideal, then we should change it, not force women to buy into such risky and unreliable ways of dealing with the problem of when to have children."
In any case, egg freezing is an uncertain business. Only a handful of children have been born from the procedure. Further complicating the debate is a new study by Dr Jacky Boivin, of Cardiff University, which suggests that older IVF mothers suffer more from depression and stress. They are also more likely to quarrel with their partners. Older fathers also tend to be less affectionate. ~ London Times, Sept 7; BBC, Sept 7; Sunday Herald, Sept 3
Another promising method of producing embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos is being studied at Michigan State University. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor José Cibelli says that his team has identified 66 genes which may be responsible for reprogramming an adult cell in the cloning process.
When an adult cell is fused with an egg, the egg somehow manages to shut down the genes which specify it as a certain kind of tissue. Then it activates the genes which turn the cell into an embryo. What Cibelli is searching for is a way of creating stem cells by reintroducing these genes into cells of normal tissue. This would make it unnecessary to obtain eggs for the cloning process or to destroy embryos. Cibelli used to work with the controversial company Advanced Cell Technology, but left the company several years ago to work in Michigan. ~ Lansing State Journal, Sept 7;
Science Daily, Sept 6
Human embryonic stem cells could be ideal for drug testing, say Israeli scientists. Karl Skorecki and Maty Tzukerman, of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, have found that injecting them into the hind legs of lab mice provides a platform for testing anti-cancer drugs in human tissue. In a study published in the April issue of Cancer Research, they described how the cells developed -- as expected -- into teratomas. Then they injected lab-grown cancer cells into the teratoma and these spread through the human tissue. They have already found one drug which is effective in cancers in ordinary mice, but not on the mice with human tissue.
Since a teratoma contains the entire "panoply of human cell types in a semi-organised fashion", a range of drugs can be tested, days Dr Skorecki. "There are many uses of human embryonic stem cells as an experimental platform without ever injecting them into a human being," he said. "This is just one example."
"Long before embryonic stem cells are going to be used in clinical regenerative medicine, which is where all of the hope and some of the hype is, I think there is an opportunity to use embryonic stem cells for drug testing," he told Seed magazine. ~ Seed, Apr 27 (Note: we overlooked this article when it was published)
Israel: The Israeli ministry of health has authorised IVF for a lesbian couple in which one of the partners will serve as a surrogate mother for an embryo created with her partner's egg and donated sperm. The couple, who have been together for more than 10 years, said that they were creating a child common to both of them for "ideological reasons". The ministry said that its decision did not constitute a precedent and that future requests from lesbian couples would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. ~ ynetnews.com, Sept 7
Stem cell sports doping: Sports administrators are preparing for a new frontier in sports doping using stem cells. "There's a spin-off technology from stem cells that could produce super athletes," says Paul Griffiths, of CryoGenesis International, a cord blood bank. However, stem cell experts say that such technologies are years away. "If you inject more stem cells into a healthy muscle, it might not necessarily do a lot," said Dr Robin Lovell-Badge, of the UK National Institute for Medical Research. ~ AP, Sept 7
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Severely brain-damaged and apparently unresponsive patients may be conscious, British researchers have discovered. In a startling study published in the journal Science, brain imaging techniques detected clear signs of awareness in a woman who was in a vegetative state after a motor vehicle accident. When she was asked to imagine herself playing tennis and walking through her house, the motor control areas of her brain flared up. "If you put her scans together with the other 12 volunteers tested, you cannot tell which is the patient's," Dr Adrian Owen, of the UK Medical Research Council, told the New York Times.
A company accused of misleading the media and the public with claims of creating "ethical" embryonic stem cells was hammered by politicians, the media and bioethicists this week. Journalists who probed the credentials of Advanced Cell Technology found that its share price spiked 500% in two days in the wake of the publication of a paper in the prestigious journal Nature. The company also announced that had raised US$13.5 million from its existing investors.
A campaigner for prisoners' welfare in the UK has called for voluntary euthanasia for prisoners. Mark Leech, a former prisoner and the editor of the Prisons Handbook, was commenting on the attempted suicide of child murderer Ian Huntley in a British jail.