Cow-Human Cell News Raises Ethical Issues

Per the request of President Bill Clinton, the members of the presidentially appointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) met on Nov. 17 to discuss the bioethical, medical, and legal ramifications of the apparent first-ever creation of bovine-human hybrid cells, embryonic cells consisting of a human cell's nucleus inside a cow egg. In a Nov. 14 letter to the NBAC, the president said that he was "deeply troubled by this news of experiments involving the mingling of human and nonhuman species." Media attention over the research was such that the as-yet-unpublished findings from scientists at the Worcester, Mass., company Advanced Cell Technologies overshadowed the intended primary purpose of the NBAC meeting: the presentation of suggested new regulations for research involving human subjects with mental disorders. At week's end, the commission, headed by NBAC chairman and Princeton University president Harold T. Shapiro, sent a letter to the president that included tentative, open-ended advice on the implications of hybrid cell research. They suggested that the development of a child from a human cell fused with the egg of a nonhuman animal--a feat that, according to scientists, may or may not be possible in the future--should "not be permitted" as is "consistent with our views expressed in [our previous report] Cloning Human Beings (June 1997, www.bioethics.gov/pubs.html)." Thomas H. Murray "The thought that you would try to make a child that way should you actually create a viable embryo ... is pretty frightening for all the reasons that we opposed any effort to create a child by cloning--plus the crossing of the species line," commission member Thomas H. Murray, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Case Western Reserve University, told The Scientist. While all were clearly opposed to allowing the research to evolve into a reproductive technology, some didn't take the species-crossing issue seriously. "I think that was just a game, like ... with human cloning, in which you have a lot of what I call fevered imagination," says NBAC commissioner Patricia Backlar, assistant director of the Center for Ethics in Health Care at Oregon Health Sciences University. "It's a red herring." Arthur Caplan "I don't see them as chimeras," remarks Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. Caplan does, however, find it somewhat troubling that the research was done without apparent careful review by an Institutional Review Board (IRB). As to whether the fusion of a human cell and an egg from a nonhuman animal constitutes a human embryo at all, the NBAC, taking into account the advice of Advanced Cell Technology scientist Michael West and recognized embryology expert Ralph Brinster of the University of Pennsylvania, said that there was currently "insufficient scientific evidence" to conclude one way or the other, but that if an embryo did in fact result, then "important ethical concerns arise." R. Alta Charo If embryos cannot be produced from the hybrid cells, the panel concluded, no new ethical issues would arise; scientists have, for some time, routinely conducted beneficial research that involves combining human and nonhuman biological material--such as the manufacture of insulin for diabetics or the manufacture of blood-clotting factors for hemophiliacs. Murray notes that what may end up setting this research apart is the involvement of an oocyte, the cell from an animal ovary that undergoes meiosis to form an ovum. But perhaps as potentially troubling as what was discovered at the lab in Worcester was who discovered it. Like the human embryonic stem cell research reported in early November (P. Smaglik, The Scientist, 12[23]:1, Nov. 23, 1998), the hybrid cell research was, owing in part to a ban on federal funding for human embryonic research, funded by a private company. Asked at a Nov. 17 telephone press conference about the push of such research into the private sector, Shapiro said, "As the technology continues to burst forward with such stunning speed, one has to be very modest about what one can expect to do to control and regulate one's basic principles. We know that it would be very difficult but not impossible to stop something that we are against." According to Backlar and Murray, the move into the private sector might be one of the unintended and undesirable consequences of the congressional ban. Not only are bioethical concerns more difficult to monitor, but academic and government scientists have limited access to potentially valuable, beneficial research. "I think there's going to be a lot of pressure to overturn it," suggests Caplan. NBAC commissioner R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and medical ethics at the University of Wisconsin, cautions that while federal funding ensures that the government can shape the kind of research done and the pace at which it proceeds, it does not prevent the private companies from exploring research that pushes the bioethical envelope. Says Charo, "It forms an example for others, but it doesn't control ... what others do with their own money."

Cow-Human Cell News Raises Ethical Issues

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