We have long been alarmed by the bioethical and administrative lurching at the HFEA – incompetence and unethical decision making have become its forte.  This drift looks like continuing, even worsening, under its new chairman.  Lisa Jardine looks like a dangerous woman.
 

Human Embryonic Stem Cell Trial – Why?
In January 2009, the Geron Corporation was granted permission by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct the first US human trial using embryonic stem cells.

The plan was to coax these cells to develop into oligodendrocytes, which would provide insulation and growth factors needed to repair damaged nerve cells.  These cells, called GRNOPC1, would then be injected into ten or so paralyzed patients, who had recently severed their spinal cords.  The excitement among the hESC (human embryonic stem cell) community was palpable.

However, in mid-August, Geron announced that the FDA had halted Phase 1 of the trial, which was intended to test the safety of such a potential treatment.  At the end of August, the California-based biotechnology firm stated that the postponement was because cysts had developed in some of their laboratory animals undergoing analogous treatments.  Apparently the risk in leaping from mice to men was too great.

The whole affair has a political smell about it because the trial was initially approved just days after the Obama inauguration.  Some of us remember the hype surrounding the predicted cures from so-called human gene therapy during the 1990s – serious safety issues have largely returned that to the medical doldrums.

The key question to ask Geron executives and scientists is, why bother with this proposed trial?  Here are four reasons to abandon it.  It is unethical because the extraction of stem cells from embryos destroys them.  Similar trials with animals have been plagued by the development of tumours thus raising doubts about safety.  Treatments for spinal cord damage with adult human stem cells have already yielded good results.  And furthermore, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, discovered within the last two years, hold out vast, additional prospects for the development of successful and ethical therapies.

Incidentally, huge strides are being made in the production of these iPS cells. When the first human iPS cells were generated (in 2007), they required the presence of four transcription factors (namely, OCT4, SOX2, c-Myc and KLF4).  These were problematic because at least two of them were linked to the development of cancerous cells.  In 2008, further experiments showed that just two of these factors were required, and in August 2009, so-called ‘one-factor human iPS cells’ were produced using only OCT4.  As the Germany-led research team stated, ‘One-factor iPS cell generation will advance the field further towards understanding reprogramming and generating patient-specific pluripotent stem cells.’  So, why persist in destroying human embryos, Geron?
 

Abortion Reforms in the USA
We may have lost all the battles in the UK to limit abortion, but elsewhere the fight goes on, especially in the USA.

For example, in Oklahoma a state law was passed in August 2009 that required women who were seeking an abortion to view ultrasound images of their unborn child.  The very next day a certain Judge Robertson repealed it, albeit on a technicality. Nevertheless, the State said it would appeal against this ruling.  The battle is set to continue for several months and may yet reach the State Supreme Court.

The Oklahoma bill, often categorised as an ‘informed consent law’, is not atypical because at least three states, namely Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, already require doctors to offer the pregnant woman the chance to see ultrasound images before she consents to an abortion.  But the Oklahoma bill went one step further.  It required the doctor or a technician to set up the ultrasound monitor where the woman could see it and then talk her through the procedure, describing the heart, limbs, internal organs and so on.  The woman would, the proposed law stated, be allowed to ‘avert her eyes’.

The bill’s sponsor, Senator Todd Lamb, said, ‘Before that mother goes through the procedure, we believe it is positive public policy to give her as much information as possible about that baby.  She might just change her mind and, who knows, that baby could be a future Nobel Prize winner.’

Beyond mandating ultrasounds, the Oklahoma bill would have allowed doctors to refuse to take part in an abortion for religious reasons, required signs in clinics stating that abortions cannot be coerced and it would also have prohibited ‘wrongful-life lawsuits’ in which a plaintiff could argue that a disabled child would have been better off not being born.  Additionally, it would have put restrictions on the supply and use of the morning-after pill.

A similar state of affairs has been rumbling on in South Dakota since 2005.  Its informed consent law for abortion recently survived a legal challenge from the powerful abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.  Though a judge struck down some parts of the law, he also ruled that doctors must continue to tell pregnant women that abortions, ‘… terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living, human being.’  Well, there is nothing like telling the truth, is there?

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is causing its own disquiet over the possible extension of federal abortion law.  Some fear that the President and Democratic leaders in Congress are trying to smuggle easier access to abortion on demand, including the federal funding of abortion, under the guise of their ‘health care reform’ legislation.  If passed, these reforms could result in the greatest expansion of US abortion since the 1973 landmark decision in the case of Roe v. Wade.
 

Bioethics in the East
Bioethical issues are not the preserve of the West.  The East also creates its own appliance-of-science dilemmas.  For example, in common with many other countries (including almost all in the West), China is facing a demographic catastrophe – its proportion of elderly people is growing at such a rate that there are insufficient workers to pay for its retired population.  Of course, China’s dilemma has been exacerbated by its one-child policy.  Now, officials in the country’s most populous city, Shanghai, are actively urging parents, who themselves were only children, to have a second child.

This new and surprising strategy comes at the same time as the latest Chinese official figures show that abortions, both enforced and optional, have reach record levels.  The annual total for China has now reached more than 13 million abortions, a marked increase on the figure of 9 million from 2003, when the last statistics were released.

From China to Korea.  Remember back in 2004 and 2005, when the Korean researcher, Hwang Woo-suk, cooked the books and published falsified data in the journal Science claiming to have produced the world's first cloned human embryonic cell lines?  He was fired from his professorial post at the Seoul National University and banned from again undertaking stem cell research.  In the meantime, he kept himself busy by setting up a joint US-Korean company to clone pet dogs after he produced the world’s first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy, a portmanteau of the initials of the Seoul National University (SNU) and ‘puppy’.

Though still disgraced, in April the Korean government saw fit to lift Hwang’s research ban and in June 2009 he was awarded the Jang Yeong-sil prize for Scientist of the Year.  I know, I cannot believe it either!  Now he is before the courts again.  This time he is accused of embezzling something like $2 million from government research grants – if found guilty, he faces a possible four-year jail sentence.

East or West, bioethical issues commonly know no boundaries, both in the geographical and the ethical sense of that phrase.
 

Assisted Suicide and the Law
On Wednesday 23 September 2009, the Director Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer QC, published interim guidance on whether or not to prosecute those involved in acts of assisted suicide.

On 30 July, Mr Starmer had been ordered to produce these guidelines by the Law Lords after they had heard the appeal by Debbie Purdy, a multiple sclerosis sufferer.  She wanted to know under what circumstances her husband would fall foul of Section 2(1) of the 1961 Suicide Act and be prosecuted for helping her to die at the Dignitas ‘clinic’ in Switzerland.

Mr Starmer has outlined sixteen ‘public interest factors’ likely to favour a prosecution and thirteen factors against taking legal action.  These can be read at www.cps.gov.uk/consultations/as_policy.html  This online interim document also includes nine questions which constitute a public consultation exercise that closes on 16 December 2009.  A final policy will be published in Spring 2010.

Committing or attempting to commit suicide is not in itself a criminal offence – assisting is.  The 1961 Act defines assisting a suicide as 'aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring' the suicide of another, and it carries a maximum penalty of fourteen years imprisonment.  These new guidelines were not intended to alter the law on assisted suicide – only Parliament should do that.  Nor do they provide an individual with any assurance of immunity from prosecution.  However, what they do say is that sometimes it will not be unlawful to assist a suicide – if, for example, the victim is a family member, over 18 years old and not suffering from a mental illness or learning difficulty, and is assisted by someone ‘wholly motivated by compassion’, then that is OK, no prosecution will follow.

On the other hand, those who assist and who might gain financially from the victim’s death, are more likely to be prosecuted.  Yet most assisters are going to be close family members who will probably, albeit perhaps unintentionally, gain monetarily from the victim’s death.  So how will compassion be weighed against benefit?  In effect the law has been changed – a suicide has been assisted, a crime has been committed, but now it can be overlooked because it is deemed to be just a crime of compassion.

This legal farrago represents the latest skirmish in a carefully-orchestrated and well-funded campaign by pro-euthanasia proponents, spearheaded by the Dignity in Dying organisation, formerly known as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (VES).  And this is despite the House of Lords rejecting any change to the law in 2006 and the House of Commons doing the same earlier this year by rejecting Lord Falconer’s amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill.

These guidelines will put the elderly, the infirm and the vulnerable at greater risk.  How our country’s bureaucracies, and now even our justice system, have become enamoured with the tick-box agenda.  The 1961 Act was pretty unequivocal, now it will be subjected to a fuzzy, sort of 6 ‘for’ versus 2 ‘against’ decision-making process.  Next year, or thereabouts, there will be calls for this new-fangled version of the Suicide Act to be repealed because it will prove to be unworkable and inequitable.  The law will have truly become the ass.  After that, Dignitas ‘clinics’ will be franchised across the UK.

Maybe not.  But the truly cheerless prospect is this – once the brake on assisted suicide has been slackened, once it is regarded as not unlawful, the few victims will become the many.  As ever, the history of abortion is the forlorn paradigm.  Assisted suicide, as a side shoot of euthanasia, will then grow into the full-blown thing.  Then the circle of human destruction will be complete – from womb to tomb – man, the master of his own (and everybody else’s) destiny.
 

Dr Francis S. Collins
Most readers will not recognise this name – Francis Collins.  Yet he is perhaps the most powerful man in the world of biological research.  He is a highly-acclaimed geneticist and he was the former leader of the worldwide Human Genome Project.  Now President Barack Obama has appointed him as the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The appointment of Collins is interesting and controversial, on at least three levels.  First, the NIH is undoubtedly powerful – it is the USA’s gigantic medical research council, which this year will donate $40 billion to the biological sciences.  Second, Collins was appointed just two days after the NIH released its new, and permissive, guidelines governing human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research.  Third, Collins is an evangelical Christian.

The appointment of Collins has been viewed with suspicion on all sides.  Christians ask, how can an evangelical support research which destroys human embryos?  Francis Collins also supports therapeutic human cloning.  On the other hand, he has dismissed the existence of a ‘gay’ gene that would predetermine homosexual behaviour.  And he is a staunch opponent of atheistic Darwinian evolution and he has debated against Richard Dawkins, though he describes himself as a ‘theistic evolutionist’.

Then secular humanists ask, how can a proper scientist have fundamental religious convictions?  In 2006, Collins wrote The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.  In it he argues that, ‘… belief in God can be an entirely rational choice, and that the principles of faith are, in fact, complementary with the principles of science.’  Moreover, he also described how, as a 27-year-old scientist, his life-changing conversion was due in part to his reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.

Collins has stated, ‘In my view there is no conflict in being a rigorous scientist and a person who believes in a God who takes a personal interest in each one of us.  Science's domain is to explore nature.  God's domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science.  It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul – and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms.’

Poor Francis Collins.  His high-profile stance for the truths of Christianity has drawn the ire of the atheists, and if we are not careful we will condemn the man too.  Many of us hope and pray that evangelicals will attain high public office and then stand firm for Jesus Christ.  Yet when such a man arrives there we can so easily nitpick and pull him down.  Ask yourself, how would you fare?  Would you, for example, make a good mayor of your town?  Our proper response must be to pray for Francis Collins, that he may stand for truth and bring glory to God – just like Daniel did.