On red alert
As I said in yesterday’s blog “Charis Thompson: Why we should, in fact, pay for egg donation”, on Wednesday morning we learnt that the place where Declan gets his breakfast every weekday and I get my food for the day, the Catholic Sisters of Mercy Dellow Centre, is closed next week Monday to Wednesday, a first in over two years; and that I am pretty much on red alert: for example, two days after the date on a letter from the European Court of Human Rights advising that Declan’s case would be dealt with “as soon as practicable”, our main bag, containing all our money and documents, was robbed in the centre (see blog of 20 June “Letter from the European Court of Human Rights”). My eyes have been particularly on our sleeping pitch – since 7 September we have been sleeping tucked away, about twenty paces from the side entrance of a building, down some twelve steps; prior to that we slept for almost two years in a porch.
I’m afraid I am spot-on: in addition to being told on Wednesday night to stay away until 1.00am due to there being a “function”, last night we were told exactly the same and the guy so effectively communicated how funny it is that we get up at 4.20am (6.20am on weekends) that I am convinced this is going to be a nightly occurrence. On 10 September, after we bedded down elsewhere, I was arrested for refusing to move on as a result of having nowhere else to sleep (see blog of 11 September “I am arrested for breach of the peace”).
I believe there is a link between us getting a maximum of three hours sleep for the past two nights and the work I have being doing this week on therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). As I wrote in Tuesday’s blog “Egg shortage hits race to clone human stem cells”, I am Googling leading bioethicist, Insoo Hyun of Case Western Reserve University, Ohio – in a Nature commentary titled “Fair payment or undue inducement?” he calls 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; unfortunately you need to make a payment to read the commentary.
Because we are getting so little sleep, I am cutting my losses and concentrating exclusively on SCNT: I am putting together all the content that will be on my website in support of nuclear transfer – the blog of 1 November “Can a cell have a soul?” describes what this website will contain, including with respect to human embryonic stem (hES) cell research. Among the resources on SCNT that I am assembling is a 2007 report by the ethics committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, stating: “Financial compensation of women donating eggs for infertility therapy or for research is justified on ethical grounds.” Also the testimony of scientists before legislators in Massachusetts (2005) and California (2006) will be high on my list of experts calling for a relaxation of rules restricting the compensation of egg donors to boost the supply of human eggs needed for nuclear transfer (Kaplan, Los Angeles Times, 13/9/06).
On our other SCNT front, Declan’s email inviting scientists and academics to sign his petition to the UN is still very much in the firing line. The issue of spam was dealt with in the blog of 18 November, including that on 29 February Declan emailed the Home Secretary, Jacqueline Smith; and that the NAC website was suspended on 8 March, three days after the Home Office denied there was a warrant to intercept his communications. Including the 70 emails I sent yesterday to the Department of Cell & Tissue Biology at University of California San Francisco (which yielded zero out-of-office autoreplies), this week from a total of 318 emails there has been one signature – last week, it was two signatures from 661 emails; three weeks ago, two signatures from 640 emails; and five weeks ago, one signature from 1,072 emails. All the more reason to concentrate on the contents of our SCNT campaign.
