JOHN WAGNER, a tall, thin, bespectacled doctor with a broad smile, is sipping water on the east balcony of Grand Central Station in New York. In a few months he could be sipping champagne. Together with the Geron Corporation, his clinic at Minnesota University will soon begin inserting stem cells into the severed spines of a handful of paralysed patients. Those stem cells will be plucked from days-old clones of the patients themselves.
It will make him the first person in the world to put human embryonic stem cells inside human patients. If the results are anything like those in rats, Wagner’s patients will be able to walk across the room to thank him personally. Yet not everyone likes Wagner’s business. “I was giving a talk the other day and someone stood up and called me a murderer,” he says, with a resigned smile.
The demonisation of Wagner, and hundreds of other scientists and doctors like him, may soon be complete. In November the United Nations is likely to hold a vote on whether to ban all human cloning. If passed, the ban would prohibit not just the kind of cloning that makes babies (called reproductive cloning), a Brave New World against which all but a few maverick scientists and cult members are united. It will also proscribe therapeutic cloning, which is the creation and use of embryos a few days old in order to harvest a special, versatile kind of cell — embryonic stem cells — that could be used in treatments for virtually every disease known to mankind.
Earlier this month the top researchers and clinicians in the world — Ian Wilmut, the man who cloned the first mammal (Dolly), and Shin Yong Moon and Woo Suk Hwang, the Korean duo who first cloned a human embryo — and patient groups flew to the United Nations headquarters in New York in a last-ditch attempt to head off such a ban. The former Superman actor Christopher Reeve, paralysed in a horseriding accident, also sent a televised address to what he called “the collective moral voice of the world”, saying that “not to encourage the ethical pursuit of (embryonic stem-cell) research may result in needless human suffering”.
What makes the conference so urgent is that the United Nations has already come within a whisker of an outright ban. Last year Costa Rica proposed a motion — seconded by America — to forbid all cloning immediately. Iran countered with a last-minute proposal to defer the vote temporarily, to allow more considered deliberation. Iran’s motion won the day by a single vote, a skin-of-the-teeth result that Wagner calls “shocking”.
A UN treaty against cloning will not technically trump domestic laws, such as those in Britain (therapeutic cloning and stem-cell research are legal under licence on embryos under 14 days old, but reproductive cloning is illegal). However, most experts feel that it would smother the field in an atmosphere of hostility, spelling a slow death for one of medicine’s most promising weapons in the war against sickness. A UN decision might also set a precedent for other lawmaking bodies such as the European Parliament, possibly leading to legislation that conflicts with that of member states.
“A ban would definitely set the field back, no doubt about it,” says Ross Frommer, an expert on health policy at Columbia University, as we admire the newly cleaned station from the balcony. “If the UN resolution is adopted, nations would still be able to carry out the research as they saw fit. However, there would be this tremendous policy statement that embryonic stem-cell research and therapeutic cloning should be stopped. Governments would stop funding it. Individuals would stop funding it. Who wants to be in contravention of the UN?”
Bernard Siegel, a silver-haired, fast-talking attorney and head of the non-profit organisation Genetics Policy Institute, which has organised the conference, says that humanity cannot afford for the United Nations to make the wrong decision. The GPI, like most leading scientists, supports a ban on reproductive cloning but opposes one on therapeutic cloning.
“A ban would have been horrible,” says Siegel, shaking his head. “It would have been a disaster for anyone with a child suffering from diabetes or who has a parent with Alzheimer’s. This research has the greatest hope of providing treatments and cures, of being able to repair damaged organs. How can we allow it not to advance? All I want is for people like Sabrina to be able to walk again.” I turn around — he is pointing over my shoulder towards a pretty, dark-haired young woman in a wheelchair, who is chatting animatedly to a television reporter.
A car accident 14 years ago left 26-year-old Sabrina Cohen a quadriplegic; she now works as public relations director for the Genetics Policy Institute. She is proud of living alone but needs round-the-clock assistance. “The thing that keeps me going is the hope that I’ll be able to get out of this wheelchair one day,” Cohen says, matter-of-factly. “A ban on therapeutic cloning would be catastrophic. Now is the time for people to wake up and start fighting, not just for those suffering now but for people who, like me, will become the next statistic.”
It is medicine’s misfortune that both reproductive and therapeutic cloning share the same first step. The recipe for genetically “Xeroxing” a person — Madonna, say — starts with a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Take one unfertilised human egg and suck out the contents. Next, take a skin cell (or any other cell) from Madonna and remove its DNA. Then insert the DNA in the egg, and add a small burst of electricity to make them fuse into an embryo.
The embryo produced in this way will be genetically identical to the person who donated the skin cell, ie, Madonna. Dolly was the first living, breathing mammalian product of this DNA copying technique — her DNA came from a donated mammary cell, and her naming in honour of the well-endowed country singer Dolly Parton seemed a deliberate, if pointless, act of levity to counter the fact that her birth really did change the world.
As an embryo develops into a foetus and then a baby, its cells specialise, unfurling into heart muscle, liver cells, neurones. But catch those embryonic stem cells (ESC) early, in the first five or so days of life, and they become a chameleon-like panacea for every ill. When placed in the pancreas of diabetic animals, ESC turn into pancreatic cells, generating life-saving insulin. Put them in the heart and they become heart cells capable of pumping blood. And, most dramatically, put them in the severed spinal cords of paralysed rats and the rodents regain the ability to walk.
