Therapeutic Cloning

LET US FIND cures we can all live with, said a series of nationwide ads produced by the US Catholic Bishops Conference in October 2004, in the lead up to the US election. The Bishops were rejecting therapeutic cloning -which implies embryo-destructive research - in the quest for breakthroughs to help people with heart disease, spinal cord injury, Parkinson's and other health problems. They did, however, lend their support to adult stem-cell research.

Relief

Less than two weeks after his sudden death last year, US actor Christopher Reeve appeared in a taped appeal to Californians to vote for a controversial measure that would fund a decade of stem cell research, that is medical experiments involving human embryos. He filmed the ad shortly before he died on 10 October, but his family gave permission for it to go ahead. Stem cells have already cured paralysis in animals, Reeve said in the 30-second TV spot. He described stem cell research as the future of medicine. Reeve, who was paralysed from the neck down in a 1995 horseback-riding accident, strongly believed this research would someday help people like him with spinal cord injuries, and he campaigned vigorously for more funding. Along with other high-profile advocates such as Nancy Reagan - the widow of former President Ronald Reagan, who had similar hopes for brain diseases such as Alzheimer's, which afflicted her husband - Reeve brought the debate on the issue truly into the public domain.
Last November California did indeed become the first US state to provide funding for stem cell research, with Californian voters approving $3 billion-worth of funding to last 10 years. The measure was backed by its governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a break with his Republican party's stance. So, there is now the constitutional right to conduct therapeutic cloning in California, while still outlawing research on reproductive cloning. Reproductive cloning, where a full living copy of a person is created, is generally regarded to be morally unethical although an ever expanding menagerie of other living creatures have been cloned including sheep, mice, rats, cows, cats and even flies.
President Bush and religious groups have strongly opposed stem cell research on moral grounds. The controversy became an issue in the US presidential election campaign, with President George W. Bush opposing government funding for any research involving the future destruction of human embryos, and his Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, backing the pursuit of embryonic stem cell studies. While Bush argued that creating new stem cell stocks would be unethical, Kerry declared that scientists would be respecting life by using the technology to seek cures for illnesses. Catholics are amongst those who vehemently oppose abortion, and consequently the destruction of embryos required for stem cell research, and many supported Bush's successful November campaign to stay on in the White House for this reason.

Controversy

Therapeutic cloning involves taking a human egg from which the nucleus has been removed, and replacing that nucleus with DNA from the cell of another organism, the donor. The result is an embryo with almost identical DNA to the donor organism. The procedure is surrounded by controversy, and this is reflected in the language used to describe the embryo created. Some people don't like to refer to the result as an embryo, since it has not been created by fertilisation, but others think that since, given the right conditions, it could grow into a foetus and eventually a child, it doesn't seem misleading to call it an embryo. The aim of carrying out this procedure is to obtain stem cells that are genetically matched to the donor organism. For example, if a person with Parkinson's disease donated their DNA, then it should be theoretically possible to generate embryonic stem cells that could be used to treat their condition without being rejected by the patient's immune system. No such therapies presently exist, however, and the development of the technology has been delayed as governments debate whether to ban such research.
Therapeutic cloning is currently legal for research purposes in the UK, having been incorporated into the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act in 2001. In many other countries, the practice is banned, though laws are being debated and changed regularly. Support for this procedure derives from its potential medical applications. Most opposition is based on the fact that the procedure destroys human embryos. Others feel that it instrumentalises human life or that it would be impossible to allow therapeutic cloning while preventing reproductive cloning from occurring.

Medical breakthroughs

Stem cells are the body's master cells, with the ability to transform into any type of tissue. They can come from a variety of sources - including adults - but those taken from days-old human embryos seem to have the most flexibility, although scientists agree much more research is needed to prove this absolutely. They can be extracted from human embryos obtained from fertility treatments or abortions. Once isolated, the cells can be grown in the laboratory and stored for future use. Each reservoir of cells, derived from a single embryo, is known as a cell line. A more reliable supply, however, would be obtained by cloning embryos specifically for their stem cells. One embryo could, therefore, be a source for many thousands of cells.
Proponents say research using human embryonic stem cells, either from fertility-clinic leftovers or clones, promises to transform medicine by treating nerve damage or diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. Opponents say each embryo used in such research signifies a human life destroyed. In addition, there have been problems since therapeutic cloning is still in its early stages of development. Stem cells have sometimes mutated, and thus have been rejected by the recipient's body. In other cases, at least with experiments on animals, they have produced tumours. It is obvious that therapeutic cloning will not be feasible until these deficiencies have been overcome.

International picture

The UN was forced to shelve efforts to draft a treaty banning all forms of human cloning last November. Diplomats abandoned a planned vote on two competing motions on 18 November, when it became clear that neither of the two polarised camps had enough support. One resolution, drawn up by Costa Rica, and backed by the Vatican, the US and 60 other countries, called for a treaty to ban all cloning as unethical and morally reproachable. A second motion, from Belgium, was designed to keep the door open for therapeutic cloning. Belgium's resolution would have allowed individual countries the choice on whether to ban therapeutic cloning, while backing a treaty banning cloning for reproductive purposes, something which all 191 UN members oppose. Instead of a treaty, UN members agreed to discuss the wording of a declaration - a much weaker device - on cloning in February 2005.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has made his views known. Obviously it is an issue for the member-states to decide, but as an individual and in my personal view, I think I will go for therapeutic cloning, Annan told reporters last October. But Costa Rican Foreign Minister Roberto Tovar felt therapeutic cloning reduces humans to a mere object of industrial production and manipulation. He added that, there is no substantial difference between an embryo, a foetus, a child, an adolescent and an adult.
While the debate raged at the UN, the Centre for Life at Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England received permission to proceed with cloning experiments using 'spare' eggs, left over from in vitro fertilization treatments. The British government assured the scientists that their work will continue no matter what the UN decides. The UK research proposes to create cloned embryonic unborn children to serve as stem cell farms from which cells will be harvested to treat diseases such as diabetes. One US bioethics expert, Dr. Dianne Irving, has been a vocal critic of what she calls the linguistic deceptions employed by researchers, such as the adoption of the fictitious term 'pre-embryo'.
 
Church stance

The Catholic Church opposes abortion and consequently the destruction of embryos required for stem cell research. It advocates that resources be put into adult stem cell research. Last October's ads in many US papers, funded by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), explained the distinction between embryonic stem cell research, which requires the destruction of human life at the embryonic stage, and adult stem cell research. Adult stem cell research is already helping people with many diseases, including heart disease, spinal cord injury, even Parkinson's disease, said Cathy Cleaver Ruse of the USCCB's Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities; by contrast, embryonic stem cell research has not helped one single human patient, and it comes with a hefty price tag: the deliberate destruction of human life. The ads, which stated that, science does not have to kill in order to cure, were sent to dioceses nationwide for use in local publications. Hundreds of thousands of informational flyers, Stem Cell Research and Human Cloning: Questions and Answers were distributed through parishes and Catholic organisations across the country.
Last November, a strong majority of Swiss voters approved a measure to allow embryonic stem cell research using so-called leftover human embryos from fertility clinics. Some 66.4 percent of Swiss voted in a referendum to favour the measure while 33.6 percent opposed the proposal, which will take effect in March 2005. The Catholic bishops and pro-life groups were dismayed, as they had actively opposed the measure. Normally, the Swiss bishops conference does not give pointers on how to vote, the bishops said, however, a fundamental issue of bioethics is involved relating to the dignity and intangibility of human life. Despite its unproven status and failures in clinical trials, Swiss voters say they hope embryonic stem cell research will succeed. The bishops had pointed out that adult stem cells have already produced over 120 treatments for diseases and ailments. There are more than 1,500 'spare' human embryos in Swiss fertility clinics and 200 more created annually.
The Vatican has no problem with the use of adult stem cells which, in the Church's view, does not entail any ethical problems, and is compatible with respect for the dignity of human beings. Speaking at the UN on 21 October, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, permanent observer of the Holy See to the UN, observed that research using stem cells obtained from adults has been promising, while research on embryonic stem cells has not produced the same results. He alerted the UN to the danger of hindering promising research in adult stem cells by diverting attention to the cloning of human beings as a source of embryonic stem cells. The Holy See opposes the cloning of human embryos for the purpose of destroying them in order to harvest their stem cells, even for a noble purpose, because it is inconsistent with the ground and motive of human biomedical research, that is, respect for the dignity of human beings said Archbishop Migliore, and this process, moreover, makes one human life nothing more than the instrument of another. To those who felt the Church is hampering scientific progress, the Archbishop had this response: Does this mean that we are opposed to scientific progress? Rather, we would say that the choice is not between science and ethics, but between science that is ethically responsible and science that is not.

Adult stem cells and multiple sclerosis
In April 2003, Italian researchers announced that treatment with adult stem cells cured mice suffering with a form of multiple sclerosis. Almost a third of the mice recovered completely from paralysis of their back legs, and the rest all showed substantial improvement. It was amazing, says Angelo Vescovi, of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan. He has now begun experiments giving human adult stem cells to monkeys with the nerve and brain damage seen in MS. But he warned that success in mice does not guarantee success in humans. The scientists had injected the diseased mice with stem cells that had been extracted from the brains of adult mice and multiplied in the lab. Post-mortems on the mice showed that the stem cells had migrated to and then repaired damaged areas of the nerves and brain. In particular, the myelin sheaths of nerve cells were restored, after having been worn away. Despite this, Vescovi stressed that his team's apparent success with adult stem cells should not be used as a reason to halt research on embryonic stem cells. Although Vescovi does not think embryos should created solely to supply stem cells, he believes it is justified to extract them from spare IVF (In Vitro Fertilisation) embryos that would otherwise be put down the sink.