This week, Britain’s Labour Party made remarkable progress in
securing the country’s reputation as the most scientifically
illiterate and morally obtuse hamlet in the Western world. At the
urging of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, both houses of Parliament
defeated amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill
that would have outlawed the creation of “chimerical embryos.”
Chimeras (whether “cybrids” or “hybrids”) are human embryos that
contain genetic material from other species. Chinese researchers
began in 2003 by fusing human cells with rabbit eggs to produce the
first human-animal chimeras. Two years later scientists at Stanford
University planned an experiment to create mice with human
brains.
“To what end?” is a good question here. As James Sherley, from
the Program in Regenerative Biology and Cancer, Boston, notes,
“Huge volumes of…basic cellular and molecular biology must be
ignored to justify [this kind of] research.”
In fact, “Not a single new experiment is necessary to know with
certainty that human-animal cloning will not provide faithful
models for human-human cloning.”
British neuroscientist Neil Scolding admits that “few serious
embryonic stem-cell scientists will speak in support of cybrid
embryos specifically on the basis of their intrinsic potential for
therapeutic research…”
YET IN A recent editorial in the Observer, Prime
Minister Brown makes just such a ridiculous claim. Whether from
honest ignorance or blatant dishonesty, Brown attempts to convince
the public that chimerical research is not only necessary but vital
for biomedical research.
Since adult stem cells are “already being used in treatments for
conditions including leukemia and heart disease,” explains the
Prime Minister, “scientists are close to the breakthroughs that
will allow embryonic stem cells to be used to treat a much wider
range of conditions, especially those affecting the brain and
nervous system.”
While it is true that adult stem cells have been used in
treatments for over 70 diseases and condition, it is patently false
that “scientists are close” to breakthroughs using embryonic stem
cells. The question, as framed by Professor Sherley, is not “How
soon could human embryonic stem cells be used for cures?” but
rather, “Could human embryonic stem cells ever be used for
cures?”
Answer: “When the errant biological properties of human
embryonic stem cells are considered, it is difficult to foresee
them ever being used directly as cures in children or
adults…figuring out how to use human embryonic stem cells
directly by transplantation into patients is tantamount to solving
the cancer problem.”
In other words, embryonic stem cell research will start
producing cures as soon as we figure out how to cure cancer.
And stem cells derived from cloned embryos are even less useful.
Even the New England Journal of Medicine backhandedly
admits that such research is likely to be fruitless, because the
“technical difficulties and ethical complexities of this approach
[cloned human embryonic stem cells] were always likely to render it
impractical.”
BROWN, WHO OBVIOUSLY hasn’t kept up with the latest findings,
passes on a myth that has been debunked for almost half a decade.
He claims that stem cell research will help to cure “diseases that
have afflicted mankind over centuries — from Parkinson’s and
Alzheimer’s to conditions such as cancer…”
It has long been recognized by researchers that embryonic stem
cells are unlikely to have any significant impact on degenerative
diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. Dr. Scolding says that
expecting that the implantation of “stem-cell-derived neurons” will
cure Alzheimer’s, “would be a little like packing a few cogs and
wheels and springs into the back of a broken clock and waiting for
it to start working again.”
Having established that he knows nothing about the subject at
hand, Brown adds this whopper: “[Medical researchers] argue that
the safest way to maintain progress is to make use of animal eggs
from which the animal genetic material is almost entirely removed,
then a human cell nucleus added, to make them compatible for
research on human diseases.”
Earlier this week, 16 medical scientists from around the world
— from Munich to Melbourne, Detroit to Dusseldorf — sent an open
letter to Brown refuting this nonsense. These scientists were all
“actively involved in stem-cell research and regenerative
medicine,” and denied that they hold “a single common view about
the relative merits, ethics and potential of adult v (conventional)
embryonic stem cells.”
But they could agree that the Prime Minister’s “extravagant
claims regarding the purported merits of human-non-human
interspecies embryos are mistaken and misleading.” The research
that he would allow, they wrote, “would damage public confidence
and support, to the detriment both of the cause of stem-cell
science and, ultimately, of patients.”
BROWN’S “MISTAKEN AND MISLEADING” impression is not surprising.
British journalist Simon Carr pointed out that “the most fundamental fact
about the debate is [the MPs] didn’t actually know what a stem cell
is.” Another fundamental fact, disregarded in the debate is that
stem cell research using chimeras is a colossal waste of money,
resources, and, most importantly, of the lives of humans
beings.
In clinging to their willful ignorance, Brown and his Labour
Party are attempting to deny the reality of bioethics and
bioscience. But as Aldous Huxley once observed, “Facts do not cease
to exist because they are ignored.”
