THE EMBRYO DEBATE

The case for: by Doctor Stephen Minger

 
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WHAT WE are interested in doing is taking skin
cells from people who have known genetic forms of
major neurological disorders - such as Alzheimer's
and Parkinson's disease and motor neurone disease
- and putting them into an egg which has had its
own DNA removed. In that way, we create an embryo
and can extract cells that we can turn into human
embryonic stem cells.

In the process of doing this we will make cell
lines which encode genetic mutations which cause
Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and so on.

We can turn those cells selectively into whatever
cell types are most affected in each of those
particular disorders. In Alzheimer's patients,
certain cells in the brain have died - but these
are very different to those cells which die in
patients with Parkinson's disease.


The research is needed to understand better the
mechanism of each of these diseases, and if we can
understand at the cellular level how these
proteins kill cells we hope to be able to use that
as a guide for developing new therapies.

The part that becomes controversial is the source
of eggs to be used. Typically in cloning, the plan
has been to use human eggs. But what we know from
work which has already been carried out is that
when human eggs are used the efficiency level is
incredibly low. The group of researchers led by
(now-disgraced) cloning scientist Hwang Woo-Suk in
South Korea had more than 2000 human eggs and they
were unable to make a cloned human embryonic stem
cell line.

We decided it is not morally justifiable to ask
large numbers of very young women to commit to
donating eggs for a procedure where we were going
to need thousands and thousands of eggs to create
each of these stem cell lines. So we proposed a
much more practical solution, which was to use a
non-human egg, for example a cow egg.

We can obtain large numbers of eggs by collecting
them from the ovaries of livestock which are being
slaughtered for the food industry. This means we
can get very high quality eggs in the large
numbers that we need without the moral and ethical
problems of trying to obtain human eggs.

Where the Church has it wrong is in thinking we
are mixing human and animal cells together,
creating something that is a true hybrid. But what
we are doing in the process of doing this
inter-species work - which is referred to by
scientists as using "admixed embryos" - is
physically removing the nucleus from the cow egg,
which completely removes the genetic and species
identity, so it is essentially no longer a cow
egg.

There are cow versions of proteins and some
mitochondria (which provide the cells with
energy), but as the cell lines expand over time,
those proteins will be exclusively replaced with
human proteins and the mitochondria will become
predominantly human.

The Church is failing to recognise that this has
been a very long and deliberate process. We went
through a very long consultation with the Human
Fertilisation and Embryology Authority over the
last year and there was an exhaustive science and
technology committee hearing in the House of
Commons. In both cases, overwhelmingly, they
agreed that these are human embryos, they are not
a mixture of animal and human. The fact they have
been derived using what was originally a cow egg
in no way mitigates the fact they are human.

There has been so much support for this research
from the general scientific community. Moreover,
in an open letter to the prime minister, more than
300 patient charities and organisations supported
this research and urged the government to allow it
to happen. The cardinal's comments in some ways
are offensive to all of those people who supported
this research, who see that it might lead to new
developments in a field where we have almost
nothing to offer patients with these catastrophic
neurological conditions.

I don't know what the cardinal's personal
motivations are for doing this, but I think it is
offensive that science which the government feels
is important and has allowed, he construes as
being monstrous or "Frankenstein research".

In fact, the ultimate purpose of this research is
to restore hope, life and human dignity to the
millions of people across the world suffering from
terrible, incurable diseases. What could be more
pro-life than this?

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