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No 13/14 February 2002 |
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Human Farm Incorporated"Our company offers you a range of services,
Behind the public debates on stem cell research, human cloning and germline modification, scientists are delivering human reproduction to corporate control under the guise that all knowledge is necessary if not benign, and only the applications need to be regulated. This is how the Brave New World dawns. Unregulated research is the prime culprit, argues Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, and that is what the debate should address. If you wish to see the complete report with references, please consider becoming a member or friend of ISIS. Full details here. Robert Winston, Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College, London, was highly critical of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for allowing the parents of a two-year-old boy with a blood disorder causing severe anaemia to undergo in vitro fertilisation and genetic screening of the embryos. The parents want their next baby to be free from the disease and its tissue type to match that of the older brother, so it can donate umbilical cord cells to save his life. If the initial treatment fails, the baby may later be expected to give bone marrow or other tissues, or even organs. Furthermore, the experiment is likely to fail from the start because tissue typing in embryos is very difficult and carries no more than a 2 to 3 per cent chance of success. Winston warns, "The real concern is that we might in time debase our own humanity". But Winston is not opposed to human cloning. He obscures the issues by saying it is just like producing twins. His main worry about people like Severino Antinori, who wants to clone humans now, is that through their incompetence, they might "bring valuable DNA science into public disrepute". Winston could have mentioned fundamental, insurmountable technical problems with cloning that has nothing to do with the incompetence of scientists. Abnormalities cannot be avoided. Even Dolly, the celebrated sheep cloned by somatic cell nuclear transplant (SCNT) - plucking out an egg’s nucleus and adding a nucleus from a donor cell - is now found to be suffering from arthritis, and her creator, Ian Wilmut is pointing to the cloning process itself. Although Winston objects to manufacturing a human clone "at risk of being a commodity", he is an ardent supporter of ‘therapeutic’ human cloning by SCNT and embryonic stem cell research, both turning human embryos directly into commodities and nothing else. Robert Winston, like John Sulston, former head of the Cambridge Centre for Genomics Research, and other high profile scientists, have been going around saying that science is neutral, and even benign, and only the applications need to be debated. By implication, research is sacrosanct, and it would be a sin if not a sacrilege to regulate research. The ‘bioethicists’ nod their sage heads in agreement while the public nod off at the anodyne ‘debate’ staged for their benefit. Obviously, none of the scientists has yet discovered quantum physics, which tells us that the knower (observer) and the known (observed) are inseparable, and that how we know determines what we know. More to the point, none of them has noticed that today’s ‘science’ is predominantly application-driven, with a constant eye on marketability. So, scientists have been getting away not only with murder. They are delivering us to the brave new world of human farm incorporated. Read on to find out what’s on the research horizon. The first human clone and the ‘empty egg’ donorsThe "first cloned human embryo" was announced on Thanksgiving by Massachusetts company Advanced Cell Technology (ACT). Michael West, the company’s founder and president, explained on television that it will bring "a whole new era of medicine", it would "give replacement cells and tissues, like the way we repair a car when it’s broken" The announcement coincided with widespread press coverage, and even a cover article in Scientific American. The work itself is published in a little-known electronic journal. West later admitted to have deliberately by-passed the prestigious peer-review journals in order to find an academic outlet that would agree to publish the study simultaneously with U.S. News. In fact, the company did not produce anything resembling a ‘human embryo’. The furthest any egg developed after SCNT was to the six-cell stage. Unfertilised eggs chemically stimulated to develop passed well beyond that stage before arresting, so the experiment was a complete flop. Condemnation was swift from the scientific mainstream, not because they disagree with therapeutic human cloning, far from it, but because the shoddy experiment and the way it was hyped could jeopardise the chances of it gaining public approval. A smoke-screen was further created by the British government’s hasty introduction of an emergency bill to outlaw such reproductive human cloning. The scientific establishment is not mentioning the embryos created only to be destroyed in extracting embryonic stem cells. They are not mentioning adult stem cells that are showing much more promise (see next article). And certainly, they will not mention the seven women ‘volunteers’ who donated the ‘empty eggs’ to receive the transplant nucleus. The women underwent a battery of physical and psychological tests and tests for infectious diseases. They were subjected to a regimen of hormone treatments to make them over-ovulate and the eggs collected for an unspecified number of days. If this does not turn women and their eggs into commodities, what does? There will be no shortage of women, especially those living in poverty, who would be forced into selling their eggs on the open global market. The slippery slide to GM humans and surrogate malesTwo recent reports are bringing us closer to creating GM humans, and more. The United States Food and Drugs Administration suspended an experiment in gene therapy because of concerns that it might alter the germ line. The recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) of the National Institutes of Health met in December 2001 to consider the implications. Mark Kay, molecular biologist at Stanford University, led the study that came under scrutiny in September, when traces of DNA from the vector - an adeno-associated virus - appeared in the semen of a volunteer, the first of nine enrolled. This was detected for a period of 10 weeks, during which the vector could have inserted into the sperm. But one RAC member, neurobiologist Jon Gordon of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, said he believed the risks of germ-line modification to be ‘extremely low’. The FDA is said to be allowing the experiment to resume, but would ask investigators to run tests of germ line effects. The possibility of germ-line modification in ‘somatic’ gene therapy is known from previous studies. We drew attention to that in a report first circulated in 1999. Given the abysmal record of ‘gene therapy’ that has helped no one thus far, and that the vectors themselves have been found to cause death by toxic shock as well as cancer (see ISIS News 11/12), it is unthinkable that such experiments should still be approved. And even germ-line modification is being slipped through as just one of the ‘side-effects’. The ease of germ-line modification is graphically illustrated by a report published in the PNAS, the house journal of the US National Academy of Science, in which researchers isolated male germ-line stem cells from the testis of mice, and genetically modified them in vitro. The modified stem cells were then injected into the testes of genetically infertile mice, which the cells successfully colonised, and matured into sperms. The ease with which the genetic modification has been achieved suggests this may become the method of choice for all GM animals in future, including human beings. One obvious and persistent danger that the researchers have not addressed is the generation of pathogenic viruses through recombination between the vector and endogenous viral sequences in the genome. Practically all retroviral vectors are derived from pathogenic viruses. The other significant result is the ease with which the testis of genetically infertile mice could be colonised by male germ-line stem cells to propagate a male-line indefinitely, thus opening the door to corporate control of male reproduction. This is surely a big step up. In vitro fertilisation, human nuclear transfer cloning, surrogate motherhood, have all passed on with relatively little comment from the establishment probably because they were all aimed at manipulating reproduction in women. But surrogate human sperm-carriers and propagators are now on the horizon. Some dictator or industrial tycoon might want his germ-line propagated and multiplied indefinitely as a way of gaining immortality. A horde of sterile males will be recruited, or worse, created so their testes could be colonised. They would join their female providers of ‘empty eggs’. Both might have to be locked up in germ-free cells for the short duration of their vegetative existence.
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