Mary Meets Dolly

Last week, a California biotech company announced that its human stem cells restored memory in rodents bred to have an Alzheimer's-like condition—the first evidence that human neural stem cells can improve memory.

The company, called StemCells, is betting that its proprietary preparation of stem cells from fetal brain tissue will take on many different roles in the central nervous system. The company and its collaborators have already shown that its stem-cell product has potential in protecting vision in diseased eyes, acting as brain support cells, or improving walking ability in rodents with spinal cord injury....

His company is not the only group bringing stem cells into the clinic. While much attention was paid to Geron's departure from the world's first embryonic stem cell trial (see "Geron Shuts Down Pioneering Stem-Cell Program"), many other groups have continued to push their non-embryonic stem-cell therapies forward for leukemia, colitis, stroke, and more. Meanwhile, Advanced Cell Technology continues its U.K.-based embryonic stem-cell therapy trials for blindness. Non-embryonic stem cells can come from a variety of sources—bone marrow, blood, as well as donated aborted fetal tissue, as is the case with StemCells and Neuralstem, another company focused on neuronal stem cells. In recent years, scientists have also developed methods for turning normal adult cells into stem cells (so-called induced pluripotent stem cells), but their safety has yet to be tested in humans.

So while StemCells is not a lone wolf, it may well be a pack leader. [Emphasis mine.]

Medical experts and investigators are pondering the origins of more than 200 human fetuses found disposed in the Urals. Speculation ranges from illegal abortions to illegal stem-cell research.

The discovery of 248 human fetuses near the town of Nevyansk in the Urals sent waves through the medical community in Russia, raising questions as to why and how the fetuses, aged 12-16 weeks, ended up in the forest near a highway.

Officials already believe the fetuses are from at least four different medical institutions. Some of them may be more than a decade old.

All the fetuses are now undergoing forensic examination at a local hospital in an attempt to discover more details which may shed light on the case.

Police officials say negligence on behalf of company which provided disposal of biological waste for several hospitals in the region is most likely responsible for the incident. They add right now none of the medical institutions are under suspicion for questionable activity.

However, before any definite ruling is made by investigators, many in the medical field propose their own version of events.

The head of the State Duma committee on Family, Women and Children, Elena Mizulina, believes the fetuses were intended for pharmacological and cosmetological purposes.

“It’s possible there was some kind of medical or law enforcement inspection coming up, so someone wanted to get rid of incriminating evidence,” she said in an interview to newspaper Izvestia.

Mizulina said fetuses at this stage of development are especially valued by pharmacologists and cosmetologists since they present a great source of stem cells. “The demand for such “material” is huge.”

Some believe the fetuses were “leftovers” of a negligent experiment: “I wouldn’t be surprised if at the end it turned out that someone was gathering research material for a dissertation, and then just threw it away in this manner,” said an unidentified doctor in an interview to Gazeta.ru.

Gynecologist Yuliana Abaeva also believes the fetuses may have been intended to serve as the source of vaccines: “It could be an unused abortive material for vaccines or fetal therapy, which is a cell therapy, extremely popular in cosmetology,” she said in an interview to Russian News Service.

The figures show that 3,144,386 embryos have been created in UK laboratories since the passage of the 1991 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. A total of 1,455,832 embryos were discarded in the course of treatment, 101,605 were given for research in destructive experiments, and 764,311 were frozen for later use.

The rest were implanted, resulting in 94,090 births, meaning that in the region of 32 embryos are created for every live birth.

But others argue that enhancers have become so prevalent that the only realistic option is for the sporting authorities to let athletes use what they want, as long as they do it safely.

“If the goal is to protect health, then medically supervised doping is likely to be a better route,” says Andy Miah, a bioethicist at the University of the West of Scotland in Ayr. “Better yet, the world of sport should complement the World Anti-Doping Agency with a World Pro-Doping Agency, the goal of which is to invest in safer forms of enhancement.”

According to [Hugh Herr, a biomechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology], performance-enhancing technologies will advance to a point at which they will not only extend human limits, they will demand an Olympics all of their own. “For each one there will be a new sport — power running, and power swimming, and power climbing,” projects Herr.

OHSS [ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome] is a little-known complication of fertility treatments that rely on high doses of hormones, which are standard in the United States and the United Kingdom; the syndrome is not the only health problem to be linked to in vitro fertilization. Fertility clinics in Europe and Japan have turned to a safer, low-dose form of IVF, but clinics here have largely resisted on the grounds that the success rates for low-dose IVF are not as high.

“Pregnancy rates are lower, and more cycles of IVF are necessary” with low-dose IVF, said Dr. Glenn L. Schattman, a fertility doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology.

But some critics are urging the industry to reconsider.

“Mild stimulation is clearly much healthier for women,” said Francine Coeytaux, founder of the Pacific Institute for Women’s Health, a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles. “The reason hyper-stimulation happened is because these fertility clinics compete against each other by posting their success rates.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, high-dose stimulation leads to OHSS in 10 percent of IVF patients. The ovaries become swollen and, as in Ms. Demidon’s case, can leak fluid into the chest and abdomen. Symptoms can range from mild to serious; in rare cases, OHSS can be life-threatening.

A recent inquiry into maternal deaths in the United Kingdom found that OHSS following high-dose IVF is now one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in England and Wales.

One recent study suggested that high-dose IVF contributes to lower birth weights, compared with the babies of women who receive minimal doses of hormones. And experts have debated for decades whether IVF contributes to an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer; studies have reached conflicting conclusions.

Lupron, used to suppress the ovaries, has raised concerns as well. The drug is approved to treat prostate cancer; its use in IVF is off-label (meaning it is not FDA-approved for this purpose). Thousands of women have reported adverse reactions, including memory loss, liver disorders, bone loss and severe muscle, joint and bone pain, said Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a public interest group in Berkeley, Calif.

“Lots of drugs are used off-label, but is this use appropriate?” said Ms. Darnovsky. “Considering the number of women who’ve taken these drugs over the past 25 years, you’d think much more rigorous studies and analysis would have been done on them.”

• Pro-life 1.0 deals with "the taking of life."  Abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia


• Pro-life 2.0 deals with "the making of life."  Artificial insemination, IVF, surrogacy, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, egg and sperm "donation"


• Pro-life 3.0 deals with "the remaking of life."  Genetic engineering, human enhancements, nanotechnology, human cloning, transhumanism

So I finally did it.  I sat down and read

"The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains.  We will gain power over our fates.  Our mortality will be in our own hands.  We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever.)"

"The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but transcends our biological roots."

"There will be no distinction post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality."

"Let's consider where we are, circa early 2030s.  We've eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines and bowel.  What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus and brain."

"And to the extent that there will be debate about the desirability of such augmentation, it's easy to predict who will win, since those with enhanced intelligence will be far better debaters."

The world's first genetically modified humans have been created, it was revealed last night.

The disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics.

So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three 'parents'.

Fifteen of the children were born in the past three years as a result of one experimental programme at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas in New Jersey.

The babies were born to women who had problems conceiving. Extra genes from a female donor were inserted into their eggs before they were fertilised in an attempt to enable them to conceive.

Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year- old children confirm that they have inherited DNA from three adults --two women and one man.

The fact that the children have inherited the extra genes and incorporated them into their 'germline' means that they will, in turn, be able to pass them on to their own offspring.

Altering the human germline - in effect tinkering with the very make-up of our species - is a technique shunned by the vast majority of the world's scientists.

Geneticists fear that one day this method could be used to create new races of humans with extra, desired characteristics such as strength or high intelligence.

Writing in the journal Human Reproduction, the researchers, led by fertility pioneer Professor Jacques Cohen, say that this 'is the first case of human germline genetic modification resulting in normal healthy children'.

In the mid-1990s, embryologist Jacques Cohen pioneered a promising new technique for helping infertile women have children. His technique, known as cytoplasmic transfer, was intended to "rescue" the eggs of infertile women who had undergone repeated, unsuccessful attempts at in vitro fertilization, or IVF. It involved injecting the cytoplasm found inside the eggs of a fertile donor, into the patient's eggs.

When the first baby conceived through cytoplasmic transfer was born in 1997, the press instantly hailed Cohen's technique as yet another technological miracle. But four years later, the real story has proven somewhat more complicated. Last year, Cohen and his colleagues at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St. Barnabas, a New Jersey fertility clinic, set off alarm bells among bioethicists with the publication of a paper detailing the genetic condition of two the 17 cytoplasmic-transfer babies born through the clinic to date. The embryologists reported that they had endowed the children with extra bits of a special type of genetic material, known as mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, which came with the cytoplasm transferred from the donor eggs to the patient's.

Just how normal those children will turn out to be is anybody's guess. At a recent meeting in Europe, the New Jersey researchers reported that one of the children conceived through cytoplasmic transfer has been diagnosed with "pervasive developmental disorder," a catch-all term for symptoms that range from mild delays in speech to autism. Cohen's group maintained that it is extremely unlikely that cytoplasmic transfer and the resulting mishmash of mtDNA is to blame.

But geneticists have only begun to trace the connections between mtDNA and a host of diseases ranging from strange metabolic ailments to diabetes and Lou Gehrig's disease, and some experts argued that the child's disorder may well be caused by a mismatch between the donor and mother's mtDNA. As Jim Cummins, a molecular biologist at Murdoch University in Western Australia, put it: "To deliberately create individuals with multiple mitochondrial genotypes without knowing the consequences is really a step into the dark."

Since 1998, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has argued that genetically manipulated embryos are a "biological product," and therefore subject to regulation, just like medical devices and drugs. But because of a quirk in federal law, the FDA's authority in this sphere is far from certain.

Last summer, FDA sent warning letters to six fertility centers threatening "enforcement action," and asserting its regulatory power over "therapy involving the transfer of genetic material by means other than the union of [sperm and egg.]" Cohen's clinic at St. Barnabas chose to stop performing cytoplasmic transfer. But at least two other recipients scoffed at the agency's threat: Panos Zavos, an embryologist at a Kentucky fertility clinic, and Brigitte Boisselier, the scientific director of Clonaid, the clinic set up by a group known as the Raelians, who believes human beings were genetically engineered by aliens. Both have announced their intentions to clone a human being.

Both also disputed the FDA's authority, and several bioethicists and legal scholars had to agree that the FDA could not prevent them from tinkering with human bioengineering. "It's a stretch for the FDA," says R. Alta Charo, a legal scholar and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, and former member of President Bill Clinton's Bioethics Advisory Committee.