To:  Parkinson Information Exchange
Subject:  Fetal tissue transplantation research

Following is an excerpt from an article entitled "The Short,
Exceedingly Strange Debate Over Fetal Tissue Transplant
Research" which appeared in the American Journal of Ethics and
Medicine, Fall 1994, written by Dr. Arthur Caplan, Director of
the Center of Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine.

"One of the first acts President Bill Clinton performed upon
assuming office was to rescind the ban the Bush administration
had imposed in 1988 on the use of Federal funds to pay for
research on transplants using tissues obtained from aborted
fetuses.  Congress subsequently enacted legislation governing
the use of such tissue. The NIH has now reopened its grant
application process to those who wish to pursue research on
this form of transplantation.

"The argument over the use of tissues from aborted fetuses for
transplantation reearch was one of the strangest in the annals
of human experimentation ethics.  The debate focused almost
exclusively on the proposals of a tiny handful of American
scientists to use fetal tissue transplants to see whether they
might be of benefit to persons suffering from Parkinsonism or
diabetes.  Yet, few people appear to have understood how truly
bizarre it was to debate the morality of this research given
the prior history of fetal tissue transplant research and the
ongoing commitment of the Federal government to funding other
forms of research using tissues obtained from aborted fetuses.

"Transplants using tissue from aborted fetuses were hardly
unknown in medicine at the time the debate over the morality
of fetal tissue transplants erupted.  The first experiment
involving a fetal tissue transplant using tissue from an
aborted fetus took place in Italy with a patient suffering
from diabetes.  The experiment, which did not succeed, was
reported in the medical literature in 1928.  The first
American experiment using fetal pancreas to try to treat a
person with diabetes took place in 1939.  It too failed.  At
least one form of fetal tissue transplantation had, however,
been established as therapeutic long before the debate broke
out about the morality of such research. (Vawter, et. al.,
1990)

"By the early 1970s many transplant experiments using fetal
cells in newborn babies had been undertaken.  The subjects
were children afflicted with a congenital condition known as
DiGeorge's syndrome.  Babies with this condition are born
severely immunocompromised because they do not have a
functioning thymus.  The results reported throughout the 1970s
and 1980s of transplant research for this condition were very
positive.  One report on the successful use of fetal tissue
transplants appeared in the peer reviewed literature just a
year before the Bush administration imposed its ban. (Vawter
et. al., 1990).

"Not only did transplants using tissue from electively aborted
fetuses have a long history in medicine prior to the debate
which eventuated in the Bush administration's ban, but fetal
tissue from aborted fetuses had nong been used in medican
research for such purposes as toxicity studies, research on
fetal development. and the culturing of tissue lines for all
manner of genetic and biological research.  These types of
experiments continued with Federal support throughout the time
period when the government imposed ban on fetal tissue
research for transplantation prevailed.  In 1988, the year the
ban was imposed, the NIH spent 8.3 million dollars on non-
transplant related research involving human fetal tissue.

"Not only did the government support research using fetal
tissue, the government had historically been involved in
procuring such tissues.  The Federal government in 1961 helped
create a tissue bank, the Laboratory for the Study of Human
Embryos and Fetuses at the University of Washington, for
distributing fetal tissues to researchers in the United
States.  A similar bank had been in existence in the United
Kingdom under the auspices of the British Medical Research
Council since 1957.  Oddly, arguments about the merits of
allowing fetal tissue transplant research to proceed were
treated as independent from, and unconnected to, the use of
fetal tissue from aborted fetuses for other forms of
scientific research which continued with government support
throughout the five years the ban existed. (Vawter, et. al.,
1991)

The only way of understanding how it could be that the
nation's leaders, interest groups, members of the media and
scientific societies could find themselves embroiled in a
debate about the permissibility of research that had a half
century history in medicine, which had already proven
successful in the treatment of at least one disease, and which
used precisely the same source of tissue as many other forms
of publicly funded research, is politics.  Specifically,
abortion politics fueled the debate.  The debate about the use
of fetal tissue for transplants was nothing more than a
chapter in the nation's long-running debate about the morality
of elective abortion (Vawter and Caplan, 1992).

"The strangest thing about the many strange things which
characterized the debate about the use of fetal tissue from
elective abortions for transplants was that hardly anyone
challenged the underlying notion that allowing research on
fetal tissue transplants would increase the incidence of
abortion. (Vawter, et. al., 1990); Garry, Caplan, et. al.,
1992).  There was no evidence at all that the expenditure of
Federal funds on other forms of research using fetal tissue
from elective abortion had any impact on rates of abortion.
Nor was there any evidenced presented that women thinking
about or seeking abortions would assign very much if any
weight to considerations about the disposition of fetal
remains post-abortion.  And no one seemed interested in asking
whether the supply of tissue required to conduct a small
number of experiments would require more abortions than the
one and a half million taking place each year in the United
States."

Dolores Gross