Our Big Issue pitches are terminated

This morning, The Big Issue Head Office – The Big Issue is a magazine sold by homeless people throughout the UK on registered street pitches – confirmed that our pitches have been terminated, after two years of us having survived on the streets of London by selling the magazine from the same registered pitches and despite Declan’s email letter of complaint to the chair of The Big Issue Foundation (see blog of 11 November “Letter of complaint to the chair of The Big Issue Foundation Charity”). This is an extremely serious situation for me in particular, in that I am facing possible prosecution for begging.

It also means that it is highly likely that Declan will be unable to keep our account in the local internet café (£3 for seven hours) going, so it seems we will be restricted to the 3-hour maximum computer use per day at Idea Store Whitechapel library that our local council imposed on each of our membership cards on 1 February, despite that for several months previous we were given “additional time” subject to computer availability and in accordance with the council’s then and current “Idea Stores PC Usage Policy”. Notwithstanding that, we frequently experience difficulties with internet access and computer bookings in this library (see, for example, blog of 13 October “Letter to the Leader of Tower Hamlets Council”).

With such restrictions, I now have to adapt my blog. Up to today I have been selecting themes in embryonic stem (ES) cell research and therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), and developing each with reference to news, articles, and/or opinion pieces from leading scientists and academics. From now on it will be about researching everything that is going on in the field in ES cell research – conferences, news, reports, discoveries and applications, major research institutions throughout world, joint international efforts, bloggers, etc – and producing blogs with links that will serve as an interesting source of material.

Declan tells me that the litmus test for a successful blog is one that I will revert to myself for information as soon as I have a laptop – to build within two weeks a website for our campaign in support of ES cell research and SCNT. The blog of 1 November “Can a cell have a soul?” includes a brief description of what this website will contain: for example, the subsection “Embryonic stem cell research” will be broken up into the associated subsections “Science”, “Law and Policy”, “Ethics” and “Applications”.

Criticising the restrictions introduced in August 2001 by President George W Bush that prevent federally funded researchers from working on all but a few sources of embryonic stem cells, Robert Lanza - chief scientist at Advanced Cell Technology, a stem cell company in Worcester, Massachusetts (and a signatory of Declan’s petition) – told New Scientist: “We’ve been operating for the past decade with one hand tied behind our back.” This is exactly the way Declan and I are being forced to operate. We believe though that we can work this situation to our advantage, and are quite excited at the prospect of doing so.

Stem cell research tops Obama agenda

The vast majority of emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are still being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”). On Monday I sent 198 emails - mainly to Scotland and California because in Sunday’s blog I referred to the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine of Edinburgh University and the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine in San Diego – but only received ten out-of-office autoreplies, and not unsurprisingly just one signature. Yesterday I sent 128 emails, mainly to California, which yielded two autoreplies, and no signatures.

Also yesterday, The Big Issue Head Office – The Big Issue is a magazine sold by homeless people throughout the UK on registered street pitches – advised Declan that our pitches are in effect terminated (as soon as it has been confirmed by Office staff that we did not purchase a minimum of 40 magazines each week for the four weeks commenced 6 October, we will no longer be able to have a registered pitch), despite his complaint the previous day to the chair of The Big Issue Foundation (see previous blog). This is an extremely serious situation for me in particular, in that I am facing possible prosecution for begging.

Then last night, as we were bedding down, just to add insult to injury, I suppose, two guys entertained themselves on their skateboards above us for some twenty minutes – 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). The last time some guys partied in the enclosure, on 9 September, we decided to sleep somewhere else the following night and I was arrested because I refused to be moved on as result of having nowhere else to sleep (see blog of 11 September “I am arrested for breach of the peace”). The road is described as a “quiet thoroughfare” by the company that owns the building. Oh, well.



Barely a week since his election victory, US President-elect Barack Obama is bringing joy to long-suffering stem cell researchers. For years, US progress has been crippled by restrictions introduced in August 2001 by President George W Bush, preventing federally funded researchers from working on all but a few sources of embryonic stem cells - the cells from embryos with huge medical potential for repairing organs and tissues. Now, those restrictions will be among the first of Bush’s executive orders to be swept away, probably within the next 100 days, said New Scientist. The news emerged on Sunday from an interview on Fox News featuring John Podesta, the head of Obama’s “transition team”, which is managing the switch to power.

“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” said Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. According to New Scientist, the aim is to quickly dismantle the legacies of the Bush era that Obama sees as holding back progress, particularly those motivated by ideology or religion. Bush’s resistance to stem cell research, for example, is a concession to evangelical conservatives who oppose all research on embryos. “I think across the board, on stem cell research, on a number of areas, you see the Bush administration even today moving aggressively to do things that I think are probably not in the interest of the country,” said Podesta.

The news was greeted with delight by researchers who have long criticised the Bush restrictions. “Hallelujah - at last,” Robert Lanza, chief scientist at Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts (and a signatory of Declan’s petition), told New Scientist. He added: “This represents the end of a sad chapter in American scientific history. Under an Obama administration, money will hopefully flow to all promising avenues of research based on scientific merit, and not skewed to fit a conservative agenda. We’ve been operating for the past decade with one hand tied behind our back” (Coghlan, New Scientist, 12/11).

The Union-Tribune quotes Joe Panetta, executive director of San Diego’s Biocom, an association representing the local biotech industry. “I’m feeling very positive about some of the things we’ve seen and heard about Obama’s plans to increase funding for basic research,” Panetta said. He added that a number of local biotech firms depend on federal funds for research, largely distributed through the National Institutes of Health. Federal support of stem cell research would also aid the Burnham, Scripps and Salk research institutes (of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine). Although California has enacted its own $3 billion stem cell research program, under current federal regulations, embryonic research must be conducted separately from federally funded research. “That’s an incredible nightmare in logistics and operations,” Panetta said. “It would be great to see the rules loosening” (Calbreath, The Union-Tribune, 9/11).

According to Reuters, a reversal of President Bush’s long-standing policy would give a boost to companies seeking to develop therapies based on stem cell research. Several stem cell focused companies reported positive developments on Monday. Geron Corp said its potential HIV treatment, TAT2, had promising preclinical data, while biotech giant Celgene Corp got a regulatory nod to go ahead with human trials of its experimental stem cell therapy for the treatment of Crohn’s disease. “We will see more and more of these events just given the fact that there is more and more path for the commercialisation of stem cells – adult, placental, umbilical and now, more embryonic,” WBB Securities analyst Steve Brozak said. Shares of Geron were up as much as 16 percent, while StemCells’ shares soared 42 percent. Both stocks have risen significantly over the last one month. Other smaller players in the field also benefited (Dey, Reuters, 10/11).

Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan of Mexico, who acts as the Vatican health minister, said that stem cells taken from human embryos and involving the destruction of the embryos “serve no purpose”, reports The Times yesterday under the headline “Vatican fires off warning to Barack Obama over stem cell research”. Asked whether the Vatican was concerned about reports that Mr Obama might reverse the Bush Administration’s ban, the cardinal said that embryonic stem cell research had not resulted in any significant health cure so far and was “good for nothing”. Research on adult stem cells and umbilical cords had been shown to have “positive value”, by contrast, although even that was not “a panacea for everything”. He said the Vatican would seek clarification of the new administration’s position on stem cells, and he himself was not “fully aware” what it was (Owen, The Times, 11/11).

Our campaign in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), will argue that stem cell research, including human embryonic stem (hES) cell research, is vital to advancing regenerative medicine. According to a 2006 US Department of Health & Human Services report, a conservative estimate of the worldwide market for regenerative medicine by 2010 is $500 billion (the projected US market is $100 billion). We will also argue that advancements in hES cell research have the potential to be an economic boon for countries throughout the world and to lower overall domestic health care costs, which in the US alone are in excess of $2 trillion annually (16 percent of US Gross Domestic Product). With reference to the United States, we will further argue that ill-considered interventions at a state level that replace rational regulation with restrictions based on ideology undercut a peer-governed competitive national system for funding biomedical research that has been a fundamental policy and programmatic triumph for the United States (see blog of 3 November “State Stem Cell Policies Deserve National Attention”).

In fact, we believe that NAC will be in a position to be a leading Vatican watchdog regarding ES cell research and SCNT. We are well aware of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE), for example, which has a permanent Secretariat in Brussels. The COMECE secretariat monitors and analyses current developments in research policy, biotechnology and bioethics at the European Union level, according to its website.

Fighting for the Right to Clone

We have decided that as soon as we raise £450 I am buying a laptop to build a website for an international campaign in support of Declan's petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells, which will be uploaded in free space. For the past few weeks, half the computers in our local council's Idea Store Whitechapel library have been turned off as result of faults (last Saturday I even had difficulty booking a computer for Sunday) and things don't look good for September when everybody is back from their break. We don't believe we can rely on the library computers to do our emailing and work, and so we are switching to the campaign instead of waiting until we are off the street – we are giving ourselves two weeks to have the campaign on the internet (although we won't go public to patients' rights organisations until we have a sufficient number of distinguished signatories, and hopefully the endorsement of scientific organisations). Central to the campaign are applications of embryonic stem cell technology: for example, the growth of human blood for transfusion (see previous blog) and the generation of retinal pigment epithelium cells to treat human blindness (see below). The campaign will also expose that an egg-payment ban is hindering therapeutic cloning research (San Francisco Chronicle "Scientists: Egg shortage hurts stem cell research").

Robert Lanza

On 19 August, Discover magazine published an interview with Robert Lanza, Chief Scientific Officer of the biotech company Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts (who is an early signatory of Declan's petition), under the title "Fighting for the Right to Clone", with the subtitle "Stem cell and cloning guru Robert Lanza has battled the Catholic Church, the White House, and violent protesters". As mentioned in the previous blog, last week Lanza announced that his research team had devised a way to grow large quantities of blood in the lab using embryonic stem cells, potentially making blood drives a thing of the past. The Discover introduction reveals that Lanza is close to delivering cellular therapies that might reseed the immune system, heal damaged hearts, even save limbs. "Yet for almost 20 years government policy has kept his innovations literally on ice. He has been called a murderer for tampering with embryos, and personal threats were so common at one point that he believed he would be killed."

It is no wonder, Discover says, that Lanza "would lead the charge into medicine's most controversial turf: the creation of cloned embryos for therapy and the engineering of spare human parts". The value of therapeutic cloning has long been clear to Lanza, who did his early work with South African heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. Starting from those early days, Lanza understood that the barrier to tissue transfer was rejection by the recipient. From an entire organ to a dose of embryonic stem cells, if the tissue's DNA came from anyone else, the transplant would be rejected without the aid of harsh immunosuppressive drugs. "The treatment could be worse than the problem," Lanza found.

Around 1990, when Lanza was still at UCLA, he was approached by BioHybrid Technologies in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and it was while working for BioHybrid that he learnt about Dolly, the sheep cloned by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell (both signatories of Declan's petition) and colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland. "Aha! That's it," he says he said, adding that if you can create an embryo genetically identical to the adult - that is, a clone - you can harvest immune-compatible cells to replace any tissue you might want without fear of rejection. "My idea was to clone the sick individual, not for reproduction but for therapy," he says. "The stem cells produced through this therapeutic cloning would, like other embryonic stem cells, be capable of developing into many cell types and serve as a repair system for whatever part of the body required replenishment at the time. You solve the rejection problem, and you have unlimited amounts of tissue."

In 1998 Lanza learnt that there was a cloning company right up the street from BioHybrid that was "the top in the world", called Advanced Cell Technologies, or ACT. But before they would hire him they gave him a task "that was like bringing back the witch's broom". There was a question about whether the National Institutes of Health would allow the work, Lanza says. "Even though this was for therapy and not reproduction, it still involved cloning embryos, and the public was totally against it. Many considered it murder. So I was asked to get all the Nobel laureates in the country to sign a letter to support embryonic stem cell research, addressed to Harold Varmus, the head of the NIH [National Institutes of Health]." The effort was published in Science, and a few months later, many college presidents also signed on. (The letter published in Science on 19 March 1999 can be read here; and another letter, co-authored by Lanza, published by the Washington Post on 21 February 2001, and signed by 80 Nobel laureates, can be read here.)

At the time, Lanza recounts, ACT was a subsidiary of a poultry genetics company, doing work in agriculture. "When I joined they made the move from animal cloning to human therapy, and we knew we would get hit, big-time. I may be the only person who's had the [Catholic] Church, the pope, and a couple of presidents condemn my work. At one point we had bodyguards here. There was a bombing up the street; then a doctor at a local in vitro fertilization clinic was targeted. I didn't think I would be alive for more than a few years."

Lanza describes the original groundbreaking work at ACT: "We injected human DNA from an adult cell into an egg from which the nucleus had been removed. We managed to clone early-stage embryos that grew to four or six cells in size. This was obviously far short of getting stem cells, which require a blastocyst [an embryo with a larger cluster of cells]. In fact, even to this day, a decade after the cloning of Dolly, scientists still have not cloned human embryos developed enough to generate patient-specific cells."

Lanza has been exploring other ways of producing patient-specific cells. "We recently published a paper on a cell we created called a hemangioblast, which exists only transiently in the embryo but not in the adult. I think of them like unicorns, these elusive cells that we had hypothesized and sought for years. With the ability to become all of the blood cells--including your immune cells, red blood cells, all of your blood system, as well as vasculature--hemangioblasts have been biology's holy grail. What we discovered is that we can create literally millions or billions of these from human embryonic stem cells. Now that we have them, we are harnessing, for the first time, one of nature's early, most profoundly powerful cellular building blocks. The point is, we can use transient, intermediate cells like hemangioblasts as a toolbox to fix the adult so you don't have to have limbs amputated, so you may not have to go blind, to prevent heart attacks. We can direct their development into different cell types by adding certain molecules to them as they divide."

Lanza recounts that a police officer visited him four years ago because he had a 16-year-old who would go totally blind in two years; Lanza had just published a paper showing that they could create human retinal pigment epithelial cells capable of restoring visual function in animals. "By the time he finished his story, I was almost in tears because we had these cells and they had been frozen at that point for nine months," Lanza says. "We didn't have $20,000, which is what we needed to do the preclinical studies required for working with people. At that point, our phones had been turned off. We didn't have a fax machine. I couldn't even afford bottled water for my pipettes. The point is, there is just no funding because basic research is generally funded by the government and the government will not fund stem cell work." (An article dated 23 September 2004 titled "Successful Generation of Retinal Pigment Epithelium Cells to Treat Blindness Reported in Cloning and Stem Cells" can be read here; Lanza's Cloning and Stem Cells paper here.)

So what does Lanza think these technologies portend for human longevity? "It turns out that the human life span plateaus as it approaches a roof of about 120. By eliminating infectious diseases, some chronic diseases, and cancer, we can get the life span past 100. I think with tissue engineering we can patch you together like a bicycle tire, replacing a kidney with a kidney and a heart with a heart, to about 120 years. That was always my thinking: That was the limit. But with these hemangioblasts, I now have questioned my own rules. These cells can go in and fix the damaged tissue inside, almost like nanoparticles. We may be able to do the same thing with similar cell lines for neurons, where we can repair the damage in the brain itself. So if it continues the way it's going, we may break that ceiling, like breaking the sound barrier. I'd be very hesitant to put a lid as to where longevity is going to go."

"Rather than curing disease, we're trying to get around theological problems," Lanza says. "It's not what I signed up for in medical school. I can't tell you how many times I've thrown my hands up and said, 'Enough, I can't take it anymore,' but then I'm back the next day. We're crippled, but they can't stop us forever." He says that it's just a shame that the research has been held up so long. "We're living through a paradigm shift. People are going to look back at us and say, 'They used to cut people's legs off.' Then they'll just give an injection and the blood flow will be restored and the limb saved. If I were a patient and I knew I was going to have my leg cut off and something could be done, I would be demanding it. But most people, even most scientists, don't realize what we're capable of. I realize it because I'm doing the work and I can see what's possible before my eyes."