Tue, 17 Feb 2004

Therapeutic cloning: milestone or millstone?

At the end of last week, South Korean scientists published a paper describing the cloning of human embryos to obtain cells which they hope can one day be used for the treatment of disease. But what does therapeutic cloning really mean? David Heaf looks at the issues.

London, 17 February (NNA) - On 12 February 2004 the journal Science published a paper by Woo Suk Hwang, of Seoul National University in South Korea, and fourteen others describing the creation of thirty human embryos (strictly “blastocysts”) by injecting genetic material from adult human ovarian cumulus cells into human eggs that had had their own DNA removed. The resulting embryos contained the same DNA as their adult donors and were therefore biological 'clones' of the sixteen women who – with informed consent and without payment – donated their egg and adult cells for the 242 cloning attempts that were made.

The embryos were allowed to develop for five or six days to the 100-cell stage, far longer than with any previous attempt. The researchers were then able to harvest stem cells, but from only one of these embryos.

Embryonic stem cells have the potential to develop into many cell types in the adult body, whereas adult stem cells have a limited potential. In culture, the stem cells went on to form all of three of the main tissue types that normally appear in the early stages of embryonic development. When the cells were injected into mice, they were able to form cells of muscle, bone, cartilage and connective tissues.

The process, somatic cell nuclear transfer, has some similarities to the one used in 1996 to create Dolly-the-sheep. Since then, many species have been cloned by variants of the technique. Some influential scientists had hitherto believed that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to achieve this with higher primates.

This work is a milestone in transplantation medicine, bringing the possibility of “therapeutic cloning” a stage nearer. The stem cells obtained are essentially tailor-made for the woman who donated the cells. That is, they may be returned to the donor, after further processing if necessary, without fear of rejection by the donor's immune system, whereas stem cells taken from embryos left over in fertility clinics would be rejected.

The carrot dangled in front of a public that permits and funds this sort of research is that it could one day – still a long way off, the researchers admit – lead to the treatment by transplantation of the symptoms of not only Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, but also diabetes.

After Dolly, human cloning was euphemistically classified into therapeutic and reproductive versions in order to make it sound more acceptable to the people who view such manipulation of human life with concern. But this breakthrough also brings reproductive cloning, the implantation of such an embryo into a woman, a stage nearer. Currently it is illegal in many countries, including Korea. In in vitro fertilisation, from forty to sixty percent of embryos implanted at around the 100-cell stage end up as babies.

Full details of the method to make the cloned embryos are now in the public domain. If anyone takes the next logical step and obtains a pregnancy, nothing short of coercive abortion (admittedly not unheard of even in modern Britain) would prevent human clones from being born. However, as evidenced by animal cloning, if it is tried, it is likely involve a high frequency of malformations. This alone is an argument against the attempt ever being made.

Let us collude for a moment with the deceptive terminology and confine ourselves therefore to gathering some thoughts for judging therapeutic cloning alone.

To understand the human being we need always to consider the individuality, the unique, absolute and irreducible aspect of the human being which is singled out for special protection under human rights legislation. Were the sixteen individuals who donated tissue treated humanely? Until we know the precise details of the eight-week screening programme that they went through prior to the surgical interventions, it is not possible to be sure. However, despite the ethical precautions, many argue that the volunteers were nevertheless exploited. Their bodies were temporarily instrumentalised, became a means to an end.

An individual's existence must always be seen as the process from incarnation to incarnation, as passing through many different kinds of consciousness, as well as the manifest substance of any particular earthly life in which individuation unfolds through its own incarnate forms of consciousness.

Therefore, creating any vehicle for incarnation, whether normally or in the test tube, must amount to intervention in individual biography. No need then for scholastic arguments about when a soul or person is ”here” or rational-dualist arguments that try to persuade us that the physical body is just a tool of the spirit. The embryos were created with the intention of destroying them. Yet their corporeality was simultaneously the very essence of their humanness. Individual lives were plundered when at their most vulnerable. Heteronomy replaced individual autonomy. Their freedom and integrity were violated.

However, one of the sixteen volunteers has achieved a kind of immortality. Her cloned cell line will join the many other human cell lines which have spread through the world's cell-culture laboratories since 1951 when Henrietta Lack's cancer cells (HeLa cells) underwent the same fate. One more woman has become a resource, a commodity for the benefit, so it is thought, of future humanity.

END/cva

After obtaining a Ph.D.  in biochemistry, David Heaf worked for many years in research and is now UK co-ordinator of Ifgene – the International Forum for Genetic Engineering (www.anth.org/ifgene/).

Item: N040217-01EN Date: 17 February 2004

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