Monday, March 01, 2004
New publicity strategy for therapeutic cloning campaign
Scientists lobbying for therapeutic cloning are using a new argument to persuade politicians and the public to endorse the controversial procedure. Until recently they had been stressing the possibility of "miracle cures" for ailments like Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and juvenile diabetes if they could use laboratory-created embryos to create stem cells. But it has become apparent that clinical applications for embryonic stem cells are still many years away -- 10 years at the earliest. More importantly, intense lobbying has still failed to secure essential funding from the US government for programs which create and destroy embryos.
Although embryonic stem cell researchers still believe that cures will come, the Washington Post reports that "in moments of candour... many scientists concede that therapeutic cloning is far down the list of reasons they want to clone human embryos". They have now begun to highlight the embryo's potential for research, their focus shifting from making sick adults healthy to making healthy embyros sick. "Instead of making cloned embryos as a source of healthy stem cells for transplantation into patients, scientists are proposing to make cloned embryos that explicitly bear the genetic glitch or glitches at the root of a patient's disease," the Post says.
The disease highlighted by leading stem cell researchers like Ian Wilmut, the Scottish scientist who created Dolly the sheep, and Irving Weissman, of Stanford University, who is researching motor neurone disease (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease). They envisage taking a normal human egg and creating a clone with a diseased cell from a patient. The cloned embryo would then produce nerve stem cells. Researchers could watch the disease develop and use the embryos to test drugs which might slow or prevent the gradual degeneration.
"This use of clones has been totally missed by the public but is of extreme importance to really understand the molecular basis of disease," says Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, an American company which is developing uses for cloning.
(Reported in the Australasian Bioethics Newsletter, 27 February, 2004)
Scientists lobbying for therapeutic cloning are using a new argument to persuade politicians and the public to endorse the controversial procedure. Until recently they had been stressing the possibility of "miracle cures" for ailments like Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and juvenile diabetes if they could use laboratory-created embryos to create stem cells. But it has become apparent that clinical applications for embryonic stem cells are still many years away -- 10 years at the earliest. More importantly, intense lobbying has still failed to secure essential funding from the US government for programs which create and destroy embryos.
Although embryonic stem cell researchers still believe that cures will come, the Washington Post reports that "in moments of candour... many scientists concede that therapeutic cloning is far down the list of reasons they want to clone human embryos". They have now begun to highlight the embryo's potential for research, their focus shifting from making sick adults healthy to making healthy embyros sick. "Instead of making cloned embryos as a source of healthy stem cells for transplantation into patients, scientists are proposing to make cloned embryos that explicitly bear the genetic glitch or glitches at the root of a patient's disease," the Post says.
The disease highlighted by leading stem cell researchers like Ian Wilmut, the Scottish scientist who created Dolly the sheep, and Irving Weissman, of Stanford University, who is researching motor neurone disease (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease). They envisage taking a normal human egg and creating a clone with a diseased cell from a patient. The cloned embryo would then produce nerve stem cells. Researchers could watch the disease develop and use the embryos to test drugs which might slow or prevent the gradual degeneration.
"This use of clones has been totally missed by the public but is of extreme importance to really understand the molecular basis of disease," says Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, an American company which is developing uses for cloning.
(Reported in the Australasian Bioethics Newsletter, 27 February, 2004)
