071301Company Using Cloning to Yield Stem Cells
July 13, 2001
Company Using Cloning to Yield Stem Cells
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Marty Katz for The New York Times
Michael West is the president of a Massachusetts company that
is trying to use a technique called therapeutic cloning to
create human embryos.
ASHINGTON, July 12 — In another example of how stem cell research is
running ahead of public policy, a Massachusetts company is trying to
use cloning technology to create human embryos that would yield the
cells, which in turn might give rise to tissues that were a perfect
match for patients.
The technique, being developed by Advanced Cell Technology Inc., a
privately held biotechnology company in Worcester, Mass., is often
called therapeutic cloning. It is the subject of intense debate in
Congress, which is considering legislation, backed by President
Bush, to ban such research.
"We've thought long and hard about this," Michael West, the
president of Advanced Cell Technology, said in an interview today.
After keeping the experiments secret for a year, Mr. West said, he
decided to talk about it when reporters began pressing him. The
experiment was first reported today in The Washington Post. "We need
transparency here, I agree," he said.
Dr. West would not say how far along the experiments were, or
whether any embryos had been created. But he did say women were
being recruited as egg donors for the research, and that the company
had taken extreme precautions to prevent any embryos from being
implanted into a woman's womb, where they might grow into a baby.
"We are not trying to clone people," Dr. West said.
The company's disclosure comes days after a Virginia fertility
clinic said it had mixed donated eggs and sperm to create embryos
for the express purpose of deriving stem cells, which may be useful
in treating disease. Taken together, the studies are intensifying an
already heated debate over the morality of stem cell work, which is
opposed by religious conservatives because the embryos, microscopic
balls of cells that they regard as nascent life, are destroyed.
In the case of the Massachusetts research, the company's bioethics
board questions whether embryo is even the right term, because
scientists are not working with the union of egg and sperm and have
no intention of creating a baby.
"I'm tending personally to steer toward the term `activated egg,' "
said Dr. Ronald M. Green, a bioethicist at Dartmouth College, the
chairman of the board.
Until this week, the stem cell debate has centered on whether the
federal government should pay for research on cells derived from
frozen embryos that would otherwise be discarded by fertility
clinics. President Bush is weighing a decision on that issue. Now,
however, it is apparent that scientists are creating fresh embryos
and also using a technology — cloning — that makes many people
nervous.
"The comfort level that exists with embryonic stem cell research has
been premised on the idea that the embryos would be lost anyway,"
said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin.
"These two techniques involve embryos that would not have been lost.
So they put, quite squarely, the question of how we balance our
interest in protecting people who are already born and our interests
in protecting embryonic life."
Stem cells, which are extracted from embryos when the embryos are
still microscopic clusters of cells, have the potential to grow into
any of the body's more than 200 cell types. So scientists say they
may be useful in repairing or replacing damaged body parts. But many
scientists foresee a problem: immune rejection.
Some see therapeutic cloning as a way to get around that problem.
Cloning for research is legal in Britain, but the United States
government has no policy on it. Many ethicists here argue that it is
morally justifiable, but others argue that it will lead to cloning
people.
"Our technology is ahead of our thinking as a country," said Senator
Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, the author of the bill that
would ban cloning for either research or reproduction. "I have been
saying for some time that this is where we are headed, but we are
getting here faster than I thought."
About a year ago, Advanced Cell Technology convened an ethics panel
to review its proposed experiment. Dr. Green, the panel chairman,
said the members agreed at the outset that the goals of the research
were ethical. They have focused primarily on protecting the
interests of egg donors, he said.
Dr. Green said the women were paid "in the middle range" of the
$3,000 to $5,000 fee that is customary in New England. The company,
he said, does not want to draw donors away from couples who want to
have babies. Once their eggs are retrieved at fertility clinics,
Advanced Cell scientist will try to create embryos with a technique
similar to the one used to clone the sheep Dolly.
The procedure would begin by removing the nucleus of a donor's egg.
Then, scientists would take a cell from the skin of another donor
and slip it into the egg. If the cloning effort worked, the egg
would reprogram the genes of the skin to make them ready to direct
the development of an embryo. Advanced Cell scientists would then
try to extract stem cells from the resulting embryo. The cells might
later be coaxed to become those of the heart, liver or any other
organ — "personalized cells," in the words of Dr. West, that could
be transplanted into patients without fear of rejection.
"What a dream," Dr. West said. "To take a cell from a patient and
take it back in this little time machine, of the egg cell, and make
it young again."
But Dr. West's dream is not the only way to get around the immune
rejection problem, said Dr. James Thomson, the University of
Wisconsin developmental biologist who first isolated human embryonic
stem cells three years ago.
And a former member of the Advanced Cell Technology ethics panel,
Dr. Glenn McGee, was highly critical of the company today, saying he
had resigned from the panel in protest over the company's
secretiveness.
"This company has done everything it can to keep everything it does
quiet as long as possible," said Dr. McGee, who teaches bioethics at
the University of Pennsylvania. "They are protecting their
intellectual property interest rather than the public interest."
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