Tuesday, January 20, 2004
The Clone Wars
One of the showmen of the fertility business yesterday claimed to have breached another reproductive frontier by transferring the first cloned human embryo into a 35-year-old woman. Panos Zavos, a fertility specialist at the University of Kentucky, gave no details of the patient, or where she was treated.
There was no independent verification of his claim and he admitted there was only a 30 per cent chance that the embryo, grown from skin cells from the woman's husband, would implant in her womb.
Although he is not the first to claim to have cloned a human embryo - the Raelian cult said a year ago they had cloned several babies whose whereabouts and identities have never been revealed - his assertions have to be taken seriously because he has the technical expertise to achieve his ends. His announcement has been widely condemned. UK Health secretary John Reid described it as a "gross misuse of genetic science."
Wolff Reik, cloning expert at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge, said even if the woman became pregnant the odds were stacked against the baby. "It could die at any time. In every single experiment, 99 per cent of clones die in the womb and the remaining 1 per cent have problems. It remains irresponsible to do it in a human."
Biological research has way outstripped ethical considerations, and the ability of the law to adjudicate. If a clone is man-made, who has the right to determine whether it lives or dies? If your body contains genetic material which is controlled by patents held by a bio-research company, who owns you? We are in hugely uncharted territory, and no-one knows the possible long-term outcomes.
Genetic engineering raises other similarly troubling possibilities, such as creating "chimeras" — organisms combining human and non-human genes. Various researchers have already succeeded in creating "transgenic" animals. Scientists have combined the DNA of monkeys and jellyfish, resulting in a hybrid that glows in the dark; others have fused DNA from spiders and goats, producing ewes whose milk contains spider-web silk. And according to the November 27th New York Times, "A group of American and Canadian biologists is debating whether to recommend stem cell experiments that would involve creating a human-mouse hybrid." Much of this work is being done by “transhumanists� – scientists who want to create a new, non-human species. William Grigg documents this in his article, The Clone Wars.
Dr. Paul Pearsall, a psycho-neuro-immunologist, has written a book entitled The Heart’s Code, in which he puts forward a theory that our heart (the physical organ) also thinks, remembers, stores information, shares energy throughout the body, and even communicates with other hearts. He presents research and anecdotes from heart patients, which he says indicates that our heart has "cellular memory" – that it is capable of storing, in its cells, memories of the life of the person in which it resides.
Pearsall relates a conversation with a psychiatrist who told him about an eight year old girl who had received a heart transplant from a ten year old girl who had been murdered. The girl’s mother sought psychological help for this girl when she began to wake up screaming because of dreams she was having about the man who murdered her heart donor. The girl said she knew who the murderer was. The little girl was able to describe the murderer, knew the place, time and weapon used in the murder, and the clothes that the murderer wore. This young heart transplant recipient helped the police find the murderer. (Editor's note: I have not been able to verify this story from any other source. I think it needs to be treated with caution, in case it turns out to be more “urban myth� than reality.)
A small but significant percentage of heart transplant recipients report changes in their personality, interests, or ways of behaving, which appear to correspond with the personality of the donors of their hearts – even though they would seem to have no way of knowing anything about those donors.
Claire Sylvia, a heart and lung transplant recipient, has written A Change of Heart (1997), in which she describes the changes in her life related to her donor’s organs. Sylvia believes she received much more than a mass of cells and heart and lung tissue from her donor. She relates surprisingly accurate dreams about her donor, changes in food tastes, and even her style of dancing, which support the idea of cellular memory.
Some of Pearsall's admirers are definitely on the New Age end of the spectrum, and most scientists are reluctant to give his theories any credibility. However, an interesting paper looking at various aspects of "sentient" human tissue from a Muslim perspective can be found here.
One of the showmen of the fertility business yesterday claimed to have breached another reproductive frontier by transferring the first cloned human embryo into a 35-year-old woman. Panos Zavos, a fertility specialist at the University of Kentucky, gave no details of the patient, or where she was treated.
There was no independent verification of his claim and he admitted there was only a 30 per cent chance that the embryo, grown from skin cells from the woman's husband, would implant in her womb.
Although he is not the first to claim to have cloned a human embryo - the Raelian cult said a year ago they had cloned several babies whose whereabouts and identities have never been revealed - his assertions have to be taken seriously because he has the technical expertise to achieve his ends. His announcement has been widely condemned. UK Health secretary John Reid described it as a "gross misuse of genetic science."
Wolff Reik, cloning expert at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge, said even if the woman became pregnant the odds were stacked against the baby. "It could die at any time. In every single experiment, 99 per cent of clones die in the womb and the remaining 1 per cent have problems. It remains irresponsible to do it in a human."
Biological research has way outstripped ethical considerations, and the ability of the law to adjudicate. If a clone is man-made, who has the right to determine whether it lives or dies? If your body contains genetic material which is controlled by patents held by a bio-research company, who owns you? We are in hugely uncharted territory, and no-one knows the possible long-term outcomes.
Genetic engineering raises other similarly troubling possibilities, such as creating "chimeras" — organisms combining human and non-human genes. Various researchers have already succeeded in creating "transgenic" animals. Scientists have combined the DNA of monkeys and jellyfish, resulting in a hybrid that glows in the dark; others have fused DNA from spiders and goats, producing ewes whose milk contains spider-web silk. And according to the November 27th New York Times, "A group of American and Canadian biologists is debating whether to recommend stem cell experiments that would involve creating a human-mouse hybrid." Much of this work is being done by “transhumanists� – scientists who want to create a new, non-human species. William Grigg documents this in his article, The Clone Wars.
Dr. Paul Pearsall, a psycho-neuro-immunologist, has written a book entitled The Heart’s Code, in which he puts forward a theory that our heart (the physical organ) also thinks, remembers, stores information, shares energy throughout the body, and even communicates with other hearts. He presents research and anecdotes from heart patients, which he says indicates that our heart has "cellular memory" – that it is capable of storing, in its cells, memories of the life of the person in which it resides.
Pearsall relates a conversation with a psychiatrist who told him about an eight year old girl who had received a heart transplant from a ten year old girl who had been murdered. The girl’s mother sought psychological help for this girl when she began to wake up screaming because of dreams she was having about the man who murdered her heart donor. The girl said she knew who the murderer was. The little girl was able to describe the murderer, knew the place, time and weapon used in the murder, and the clothes that the murderer wore. This young heart transplant recipient helped the police find the murderer. (Editor's note: I have not been able to verify this story from any other source. I think it needs to be treated with caution, in case it turns out to be more “urban myth� than reality.)
A small but significant percentage of heart transplant recipients report changes in their personality, interests, or ways of behaving, which appear to correspond with the personality of the donors of their hearts – even though they would seem to have no way of knowing anything about those donors.
Claire Sylvia, a heart and lung transplant recipient, has written A Change of Heart (1997), in which she describes the changes in her life related to her donor’s organs. Sylvia believes she received much more than a mass of cells and heart and lung tissue from her donor. She relates surprisingly accurate dreams about her donor, changes in food tastes, and even her style of dancing, which support the idea of cellular memory.
Some of Pearsall's admirers are definitely on the New Age end of the spectrum, and most scientists are reluctant to give his theories any credibility. However, an interesting paper looking at various aspects of "sentient" human tissue from a Muslim perspective can be found here.
