6-14-07, 9:28 am

The world of medical research was put into a spin last week. The respected scientific journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell both carried results of studies undertaken by three research teams — one in Japan and two in the US — claiming success in converting skin cells in mice back to an embryonic state. The promising results had been brought about by a simple bio-chemical technique involving the insertion of four genes. No embryos were involved. Doors to research seemingly barred by legislation based on ethical concerns over the use of human embryos to obtain stems cells may have been prised open.

The production of cells to study drug treatments and to predict how a patient’s disease might progress appears feasible. Important as these developments are, scientists caution against dropping research involving embryos. 'You don’t shoot one horse until the race is run', as Australian scientist Dr Peter Mountford pointed out to The Sydney Morning Herald last week.

Australia appears set to experience a rapid increase in embryonic stem cell research. As The Guardian goes to press, legislation passed by the Federal Parliament last November giving the green light is due to be enacted. It should take another three to six months for the National Health and Medical Research Council to produce guidelines and establish an application procedure.

In NSW, the lower house of parliament recently passed a bill allowing the research. The upper house is expected to endorse the legislation during its next session. Public opinion is solidly behind these developments. Only a shortage of donor eggs from fertility clinics appears to block the way to a bright new dawn in this field of medical research in Australia. And even this obstacle may prove temporary. Research (again in mice) at Harvard University in the US has successfully used defective fertilised eggs rather than unfertilised ones for the 'therapeutic cloning' process.

Australian scientists may not be the first to crack the secrets of therapeutic cloning in humans. British scientists have had access to this field of research for several years but have not yet cloned a human cell. Still, hopes remain high that the international effort will succeed in producing cells to create tissue to treat cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, diabetes and other afflictions.

This optimism seems well founded. Adult stem cell treatments are already being used successfully in therapy for Parkinson’s disease, juvenile diabetes, spinal cord injuries and bone marrow transplants for the treatment of leukaemia. And the potential for therapies using embryonic stem cells seems far greater.

So what are the objections raised in some quarters to this type of research and the eventual application of these therapies? Therapeutic cloning — or 'somatic cell nuclear transfer' — occurs when the nucleus of an ordinary cell (in future it is hoped this will come from the patient) is inserted into an egg that has been emptied of its nucleus. Several days later, an embryo forms into a sphere (or 'blastocyst') from which the stem cells are extracted.

These cells are then grown in a Petri dish, forming what is called a stem cell 'line' that might ultimately be used to produce other cells; blood cells for leukaemia patients, pancreatic cells for diabetes sufferers, etc. Finally, these perfectly matched cells could be transplanted into the patient. The human body has over 200 different types of tissue.

Opponents, chiefly more conservative religious believers, believe the embryo, any embryo, is a human life having all the rights and dignity attaching to that status. They also worry that a slippery slope exists between therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning; that scientists would be tempted to play God and create humans without the combination of sperm and egg.

Dangers for medical research certainly exist, especially in the current environment dominated by commercial imperatives. This is another challenge to the scientists working at solutions to an array of diseases causing great suffering.

It would be much better and safer for all research centres involved in stem cell research to be publicly owned enterprises rather than the existing drug and pharmaceutical corporations whose lack of ethics and their profit objectives have brought them into disrepute and created public suspicion.

However the research work must go on.

From The Guardian