Egg shortage hits race to clone human stem cells
In October, the research community in the UK won over a majority of the public and convinced Parliament to approve some of the most permissive embryonic stem (ES) cell research provisions in the world, said Nature Reports Stem Cells. Speaking this July at the European Science Open Forum in Barcelona, Spain, Stephen Minger, director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory at King’s College London (and an early signatory of Declan’s petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning), said UK researchers had overcome fierce opposition by being at the front of the national debate over legislation governing human stem cell research.
Having been passed into law on 13 November, the updated Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill expands the existing regulatory framework to include, among other provisions, four new types of human-animal hybrid embryos. Hybrid embryos are created by inserting the nuclei of a human cell into an empty animal egg. They are a tool for generating disease-specific embryonic stem cells without the need to use donated human eggs; the cells will not be used in patients, but be used to model diseases in the lab, test new therapies and study cloning processes. Human-animal embryo research can ensure a more plentiful supply of stem cells for use in research into treating conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Speaking in Barcelona, Lord Norman Warner, a former health minister in the UK government, recalled denunciations from the nation’s pulpits and said the bill’s final stages were delayed to avoid upsetting Catholic voters before a series of important by-elections. Nevertheless, he said, a clear majority of the public – once they were aware of the bill’s aims – backed the government against attacks by organised religion and what he called “dialogues of the deaf”. An open letter to the government supporting the bill was signed by representatives of 223 medical organisations and charities. “They were quite happy to meddle with nature because they weren’t happy about what nature was doing to afflict those near and dear to them,” Warner said (Nelson, Nature Reports Stem Cells, 2/10).
In the US, stem-cell researchers are calling for changes to state laws that prohibit compensating women who donate eggs for research. The biggest complaints have come in California, where voters in 2004 approved $3 billion to fund stem cell research, said the American Medical News. Limits on compensation are making it hard to find women willing to undergo the time-consuming, often painful process of egg donation, which involves taking a regimen of hormone shots to stimulate oocyte (egg) production for surgical retrieval, said Samuel Wood, who is CEO of Stemagen, a private embryonic stem cell research firm in La Jolla, California. “Why would a woman take 40 injections and go through everything else involved in oocyte donation in exchange for bus fare?” Wood asked. “It’s wrong to ask women to go through this process and not pay.”
California and Massachusetts outlaw egg donor compensation that goes beyond reimbursement for direct expenses such as travel costs and lost wages. The National Academies of Science adopted similar ethical guidelines in 2005. The restrictions are justified, supporters say, because big-money payouts could induce women unduly into taking risks they otherwise would avoid. But these restrictive payment rules stand in stark contrast to the practice in fertility clinics, where the national average payment to egg donors is $4,217, according to a survey published in the May 2007 Fertility and Sterility. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine says payments of more than $10,000 are inappropriate, but highly educated and therefore highly prized egg donors have sometimes been paid much more. Clinical research subjects are usually compensated for the risks and discomfort associated with invasive procedures such as bronchoscopy or endoscopy (O'Reilly, American Medical News, 15/9).
As I wrote in the blog of 26 November “Therapeutic cloning offers hope of treatment for Parkinson’s”, a chief objective of our campaign in support of therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), is to propagate the call of leading experts for a relaxation of rules restricting the compensation of egg donors to boost the supply of human eggs needed for nuclear transfer. I am currently Googling a leading bioethicist, Insoo Hyun of Case Western Reserve University, Ohio. Hyun has called for women to be paid to donate eggs for stem cell research on the same basis that research participants are compensated for taking part in other medical research. In a Nature commentary Hyun argues that “compensation offers a reasonable way to acknowledge women’s efforts by rightly embracing oocyte providers as healthy research volunteers”.
