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Parthenogenesis & Cloned Embryos : Don’t jump to hasty conclusions
Comment from the Society Religion & Technology Project Church of Scotland
Contact : Dr Donald Bruce, SRT Project tel. 0131-240 2250/ 556 9310, Fax 0131-240 2239
srtp@srtp.org.uk http://www.srtp/org.uk
Yesterday’s headlines that the first human embryos had been produced may be premature. At this stage producing pre-embryos with no more than 6 cells is no guarantee that Advanced Cell Technologies have achieved the viability needed to produce human stem cells, let alone cloned human babies. In the past, the same company made claims to have produced a non-viable human-cow hybrid "embryo" by nuclear transfer which were not confirmed. Many uncertainties need to be resolved about the subsequent development before anyone can say this is the breakthrough which it is claimed to be, whether for good or ill.
More significant is that some of the pre-embryos were made by parthenogenesis. An egg cell has been induced to divide as if it was an embryo, but for fundamental genetic reasons it would not be viable to produce a baby. Some are claiming that producing embryos this way could solve the ethical problems surrounding embryonic stem cells. This is by no means clear.
Parthenogenesis may not solve ethical problems of the embryo
The mere fact that such an embryo is not likely to be viable does not mean that it removes all ethical concerns. Similar claims were made about ACT’s cow-human hybrid, which raise serious ethical issues about human-animal admixing, a procedure which the UK Government and the Donaldson Report have both condemned. The moral status of parthenogenetic creations is not clear, and we should not jump to hasty conclusions. If they are not viable because certain crucial factors in their development does not follow the pattern of normal sperm plus egg embryos, are these defective human embryos, or are they not real embryos at all? If they are defective then this suggests that, as with cow-human hybrids, the route may pose at least as many ethical problems as other methods, including nuclear transfer embryos.
For more on parthenogenesis see our press release Parthenogenetic Primate Stem Cells don’t Solve Ethical Problems of Embryos.
Cloning Bill welcome but UK must Ratify Council of Europe Bioethics Convention
While we welcome the belated action in this week’s emergency cloning bill, it is bad practice to resort to rushed emergency legislation, when it could have been carefully planned 4 years ago when we and others first pointed out the loophole. It is a sad reflection that it took the threat of political embarrassment to do something for which there was a clear and politically uncontroversial moral duty in 1997.
The cloning bill is important but not enough. The fact that this research has been done in a private sector US company continues to raise problems for legislation. It adds even more urgency to the need for international legalisation banning reproductive human cloning. The UK Government could take a significant step forward internationally by ratifying the Council of Europe’s 1996 convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine which would go some serious way to blocking the loopholes in trans-boundary cloning.
Dr Bruce is Director of the Church of Scotland Society Religion and Technology Project, assessing ethical issues in technology for Scotland's national church, and a leading authority on the ethics of cloning and genetic engineering. The Kirk is at the forefront of the ethical debate over cloning and stem cell technology and has for several years been in dialogue with Roslin researchers.
This page was created on 27 November 2001
