History or hype? This was the question swirling about the widely
publicised announcement by a Massachusetts company that it had
mastered a technique for creating "ethical" embryonic stem cells
which could break the logjam in America's stem cell politics. Nature
rushed its article into an on-line express edition. "We have
demonstrated, for the first time, that human embryonic stem cells
can be generated without interfering with the embryo's potential for
life," said lead author Robert Lanza.
The CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, William Caldwell, delivered
the same message: "we do not destroy the embryo. That's the whole
purpose of what we perceive to be a major scientific breakthrough."
Ronald Green, a bioethicist at Dartmouth who heads ACT's Ethics
Advisory Board, gave it his imprimatur. "This technique overcomes
this [ethical] hurdle and has the potential to play a critical role
in the advancement of regenerative medicine."
However, after Richard Doerflinger, of the US Conference of
Catholic Bishops, dissected the Nature article it became painfully
evident that the company's own press release -- to say nothing of
media coverage around the world - was completely wrong. None of the
embryos described in the paper had survived. Nature hastily
corrected the wording of its own press release.
What Lanza's team had done was to biopsy an eight-cell human
embryo and gently remove a single cell -- a standard technique
nowadays in IVF. With this cell he created a stem cell line while
the embryo continued to develop normally. At least that was what he
intended. In fact, although 16 embryos were dismembered into 91
separate cells, Lanza produced only two stem cell lines. "It was a
very disruptive, very wasteful, very inefficient procedure, and it
left all the old embryos dead, just like the old method did," said
Doerflinger. He also claimed that it was deceitful to post a picture
of a mature healthy embryo which had survived the removal of a
single cell.
Criticism. In a rare moment of consensus on the
controversial issue of embryonic stem cells, even supporters of
therapeutic cloning dismissed Lanza's work. "A pitiful attempt to
look morally acceptable, rather than do valuable science," sneered
Glenn McGee, editor of the American Journal of Bioethics. Some
critics compared Lanza's economy with the truth to the
prevarications of disgraced Korean
stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk. Although this seems unfair,
there is no doubt that the episode shows how credulous the media --
even leading scientific journals -- can be about therapeutic cloning.
Lanza's work represented a small technical advance, but it hardly
passed muster as a "breakthrough".
Media coverage. The media has a short memory. Only last
year the ethics of this experiment had been thoroughly analysed in a
major but quickly buried -- white paper by the President's Council
for Bioethics. It was criticised then for potentially harming the
embryo. The Council also pointed out that the biopsied cell might be
totipotent and could therefore be an embryo itself, raising further
ethical problems.
Furthermore, Advanced Cell Technology has a track record as a
publicity hound. A listed company which is perpetually in the red,
it burst onto the front page back in 2001 claiming that it had
cloned a human embryo and initiated a stem cell line. Nothing came
of that extraordinary wave of publicity, but it no doubt put ACT
scientists in the rolodexes of journalists across the world.
Significant advance. A development reported in BioEdge
earlier this month was far more significant, even though it has been
totally ignored by the media. Japanese scientists reported in
another major journal, Cell, that they had reprogrammed an adult
mouse cell and converted it into something closely resembling an
embryonic stem cell. Scientists from the Harvard Stem Cell group
grudgingly acknowledged in a commentary that it was a "significant
step" "unencumbered by neither the logistical constraints nor the
societal concerns presented by somatic cell nuclear transfer [ie,
cloning]." If this success can be replicated with human cells, it
might indeed transform America's stem cell politics.
BioEdge
IX/06
