News
Fury over embyros
Number: 5803 Date: January
By Nick Weinberg
The chairman of a bio-ethics think-tank has condemned proposals for the creation of hybrid embryos - by fusing human cells with rabbit eggs -as amounting to " British leadership in the depressing journey towards the brave new world." Nigel Cameron, chairman of the Centre for Bioethics and Public Policy (CBPP), has expressed deep concern over plans by British scientists to create embryos by combining rabbit eggs with human cells.
Scientists, if granted consent, aim to fuse human cells with rabbit eggs in a bid to further stem cell research into incurable diseases and providing them with a plentiful supply of eggs to experiment with. Dr Cameron said: "It's no surprise that the hottest news today is that British scientists want to avoid the need for women's eggs at all by using rabbits. "But this would neatly take us out of the frying pan and into the fire. Creating human-rabbit hybrids for our embryo experiments is worse." Claire Foster, Church of England Policy Adviser on Science, Medicine, Technology and Environmental Issues, said: "The Church is opposed to the creation of rabbit-human hybrid cloned embryos."
It follows the advice of the Church of Scotland's Society, Religion and Technology Project that "such a technique would create an 'embryo' so deformed that it could not be viable and inherently denies its potential to develop." She added: "As the SRTP points out, 'the admixture of human and animal at a basic cellular and developmental level of the embryo breaches the distinction between human and animal in a far more fundamental way than, for example, a sheep expressing a single human gene in its milk, or having a functioning pig kidney inside a human body'." The scientists, led by Professor Chris Shaw, a neurologist and expert in motor neurone disease at King's College, London, and Professor Ian Wilmot, creator of Dolly the sheep, claim using rabbit eggs is necessary because of the practical and ethical difficulty of obtaining women's eggs.
This difficulty has been further exacerbated by a recent cloning scandal involving a scientist in south Korea - Dr Hwang Woo-suk. Dr Hwang made a landmark claim in 2004 that he had created a line of stem cells from cloned human embryos. An investigation into his research found that his claims and data were false. The chairman of the CBPP said: "The unmasking of the Korean cloning fiasco represents a climax for stem cell hype. "The fact that he [Dr Hwang] lied about his results, and was believed by the science establishment, demonstrates the power of wishful thinking."
A US Christian group expressed its shock and horror last month after one of the US leading research institutes, the Salk Institute in California, created a man-mouse chimera. Scientists at the Salk Institute created the man-mouse chimeras by injecting the brains of mice with human embryonic stem cells obtained by killing live human embryos.
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