Is therapeutic cloning on the skids?Two big stories this week could signal the end of therapeutic cloning.
First, the good news. A few days ago it was announced that researchers at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland have successfully cloned primate embryos and used them to make embryonic stem-cell lines. Until a Korean cloned human embryos back in 2004, the difficulties seemed almost insurmountable. But that turned out to be a calculated fraud. Disheartened stem cell researchers once again fretted that human cloning to cure dread diseases might actually be impossible. Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his colleages merged skin cells from a nine-year-old rhesus macaque male with unfertilized monkey eggs whose DNA had been removed. It was far from an efficient process. After tweaking conventional cloning techniques, they produced only two embryonic stem-cell lines from 304 eggs. But at least it wasn't a fraud.
Stem cell scientists greeted the news
ecstatically. "Like breaking the sound barrier", says
Robert Lanza, with Advanced Cell Technology in Los Angeles. Even
serious newspapers like the London Times sprinkled stardust on the
results: "First cloning of monkey embryo raises hope of a great
leap in medical science". Now, the bad news. The scientist who cloned Dolly, Ian Wilmut, the world's most prominent expert in cloning, has abandoned his plans to clone human embryos. He believes that an "extremely exciting and astonishing" Japanese method of creating stem cells is more effective and carried no ethical baggage. "His announcement could mark the beginning of the end for therapeutic cloning," says the London Daily Telegraph.
This confirms what critics have been saying for years. What's baffling about the pubic infatuation with
embryonic stem cells, which are obtained by dissecting and killing
early stage embryos, is that they have not cured anyone or been useful for anything.
A very thorough summary of current research into
therapeutic cloning was presented to the German
Parliament (the Bundestag) earlier this year. In it Dr Lukas Kenner, of
the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Cancer Research in Vienna, reminded
the German government that only a single experimental study has
demonstrated that therapeutic cloning is possible, at least in mice.
However, to the surprise of the researchers, the cloned cells were
incompatible with the patient's immune system. That was in 2002,
and in the five ensuing years, no one, not even the original authors,
have "produced
animal experimental evidence of the core hypothesis of the
feasibility of immunocompatible 'therapeutic cloning'
that overcomes the hurdle of immune rejection". Of course, maybe someday embryonic stem cells will eventually work as a scientific tool. But only dazzled journalists, a few starry-eyed scientists and a lot of vote-hungry politicians are prepared to invest money in a maybe -- other people's money, that is. Earlier this month Governor Jon Corzine and other leading politicians lobbied hard to persuade New Jersey voters to authorise spending US$450 million on stem cell research. The voters snubbed them. A baffled Mr Corzine now wants pharmaceutical companies to step up to the plate. Fat chance. The hoopla over monkey cloning shows the enormous pressure on scientists to wring good news out of the tiniest advances. In this hyper-competitive atmosphere, some are bound to exaggerate or even fake their results. This has already happened -- and not just in Korea. Last year it was discovered that a scientist at the University of Missouri-Columbia, had digitally altered images of mouse embryos in an article in the leading journal Science. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which has the world's biggest stem cell budget -- US$3 billion over 10 years, mostly for embryonic stem cells -- has already had problems with two of its grants. And this week a long investigation at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, concluded that a senior stem cell scientist had been negligent and had presented inaccurate research results. His project was adult stem cells and lung regeneration. The significance of this event is that the hapless fellow's supervisor was the newly appointed head of the California Institute, Professor Alan Trounson. The Monash vice-chancellor found that Trounson himself had been negligent in approving the results without examining them -- although, it must be stressed, he was not personally involved. If Professor Trounson cannot supervise a $1 million grant properly, how will he manage with $3 billion sloshing around in the trough? The California funds are so immense that some scientists worry that too much money might be chasing too few high-quality research projects. "We have to have very discerning review boards so it doesn't become a boondoggle for companies that haven't succeeded," Dr Irving Weissman, a prominent stem cell researcher at Stanford University, has said. Furthermore, only Californian scientists will be allowed to paddle in this sea of money, so the number of qualified researchers is relatively small.
Too much hype. Too many daydreams. Too much
taxpayers' money. Too few researchers. Too little supervision. It's the kind of
brew that rogues and rascals thrive on. We can expect more stem
cell scandals in the years to come unless scientists follow Ian Wilmut's lead and abandon therapeutic cloning. |
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Fr. Larry Gearhart said...The Yamanaka - Takahashi result has been known since the beginning of June. It’s only now that Wilmut and others are getting around to acknowledging its importance to the world press. Even so, if it hadn’t been for the London Telegraph, it might still have gone ignored. The breakthrough, of course, is largely a matter of showing the possibility of taking a different road, not finding the road itself.
Nevertheless, I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Cook’s assessment. This could be the beginning of the end for therapeutic embryonic stem cell research, an area of research that, so far, has only proven to be an oxymoron.
United States | Sunday, 18 November 2007 at 9:08 am
Peter J. Colosi said...Excellent article; except: it is not good news that a primate has been successfully cloned.
United States | Sunday, 18 November 2007 at 3:01 pm
David van Gend said...Michael,
This is certainly ‘extremely exciting and astonishing’. Wilmut, after all, has the license in the UK to go ahead with cloning, and is saying nay. I expect in the papers tomorrow will be a chorus of cloning colleagues (and no doubt Wilmut too) saying, “my my, how interesting - but of course we still have to continue with SCNT to see what light that might shed on other aspects of stem cell biology"…
The papers by Yamanaka and Thompson (who first identified human ESCs a decade back) are due to be published this week, I undestand. They show that the technique proven in mice only a few months back is now a goer in humans - taking a humble skin cell, adding a few factors that ‘unlock’ all the closed files in the genome, and hey presto we have the equivalent thing to an embryonic stem cell. Must be an ESC-type thing, because it causes tumours… But no embryo-type thing ever created.
I note Wilmut also refers to the fact that the direct de-differentiation of adult cells to pluripotent cells is “easier to accept socially”. I suppose that is as close as he will get to showing regret for promoting human cloning.
This is beautiful - science saving us, perhaps, from the catastrophe science had just created for us. Maybe.
Australia | Sunday, 18 November 2007 at 10:01 pm
Doc Sabbath said...Michael Cook is right on the mark when he wrote that this is absolutely the kind of environment where opportunist researchers are able to take advantage of vast funding, such as in California, USA. Due to their inherent procilivity (and talent) for acquiring such pecuniary delights, this handful of scientists will no doubt run roughshod over the normal and accepted ethical supervision expected and demanded of this type of research.
Shame on them for exhibiting the same lack of character as evident in some of the researchers portrayed in David Kagan’s book, Sunstroke, which depicts a tight little group of individuals determined to foist an entirely new and untested technology on our innocent, present-day world.
Thank you for setting us all straight in these gravely important matters.
United States | Monday, 19 November 2007 at 5:35 pm
The Old Bloke up The Road said...I was hoping to live long enough to have the pleasure of seeing a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, come waddling down the street. Now I`m starting to wonder whether this dream may be fulfilled. We live in hope. I wish those boys in the science labs would stop meddling with precious human embryos, and get to work on the real issue of bringing some of our prehistoric creatures back to life. Why should our ancestors be the people who had all the fun?
-- | Wednesday, 21 November 2007 at 5:37 pm
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