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The Women Behind Cloning By Josephine Johnston Monday, March 8, 2004; The Washington Post Page A19 What worries many about the recent cloning of human embryos in South Korea is that reproductive cloning of human beings may be just around the corner. Given the virtual inevitability of this technological breakthrough (scientists around the world have been aggressively pursuing this goal) and the company it keeps (plenty of scientific techniques can be put to unethical uses) such a development should come as no surprise. What should worry us is that to create these cloned embryos 242 eggs were extracted from 16 female volunteers. No one is more often overlooked in the ethical debate surrounding cloning than egg donors. To create a cloned human embryo, scientists take a human egg, remove its nucleus and insert a new nucleus from another human cell (in this case from an ovarian cumulus cell). This new entity is then chemically triggered to begin replicating itself -- it begins developing like a human embryo. From the 242 eggs that the Korean scientists harvested from their female volunteers, 30 embryos were created, from which just one embryonic stem cell line was derived. Unlike its male corollary (sperm donation), egg donation is a time-consuming, painful and risky medical procedure. Egg donors are injected with drugs over weeks so that they super-ovulate, or produce far more eggs at once than they would naturally. In most fertile women only one egg matures during each menstrual cycle. Women undergoing stimulation can produce anywhere from a few to more than a dozen eggs at once. The eggs are then removed from the woman by either inserting a hollow needle through her vagina or by laparoscopic surgery. Risks of the stimulation and egg-collection process include hot flashes, headaches, sleeplessness, mood alteration, ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome, nausea, vomiting, pain, bleeding and infection. There is even a controversy over a possible danger of ovarian cancer from the medications. Despite these risks, the protection of egg donors from exploitation and harm receives far less attention in the cloning debate than the still unrealized possibility that one of these embryos might be successfully implanted in a woman and result in the birth of a human clone. Surely the physical and psychological well-being of living humans warrants a little more of the ethical spotlight. Women who donate eggs in the fertility context are almost exclusively under 35. Like fertility donors, women donating eggs to cloning research are participating in an invasive and risky procedure that offers them no health benefit. For this reason alone they should be accorded special ethical concern. Insisting, as many guidelines and regulations do, that egg donors not be financially compensated does not necessarily remove the possibility of undue influence or assuage all concerns about the informed consent and risk-disclosure processes. Neither does informed consent remove the ethical obligation of physicians and researchers to minimize the harm from participating in the research. It may be necessary to impose a limit on the number of cycles women go through for research, to specify the precise risks that must be disclosed to these women in the informed consent process, and to insist that they be counseled and treated by professionals unconnected to the research in question. Follow-up research on the health and well-being of egg donors is also needed. As cloning and stem cell research move ahead, more women will be recruited to donate eggs to science. Indeed, should this research result in therapies, international demand for human eggs could skyrocket. In the debate that accompanies these biotechnologies, the rights and welfare of egg donors must not be overlooked. Recent studies published in Science, Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offer hope of at least a partial solution. The studies describe obtaining sperm- and egg-like cells from mouse embryonic stem cells. If human eggs could one day be derived from existing embryonic stem cell lines, many of the ethical issues surrounding harvesting eggs from female volunteers would disappear, leaving (simply!) those familiar moral concerns about the intentional destruction of human embryos. The writer is associate for ethics, law and society at the Hastings Center. SOURCE: Washington Post, DC http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39174-2004Mar7.html * * * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn