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Cloning:
a sensational declaration
In May 2005, Pr. Hwang Woo-Suk announced that he had obtained 11 different
lines of human embryonic cells through cloning. The scientific community was
struck by such an output. Whereas in 2004, 230 attempts had been necessary
to obtain 1 line, Pr. Hwang explained in 2005 that it was possible to get 1
successful attempt out of every 15. With his results, he hoped to achieve
the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. On October the 10th, at the peak
of his fame, he inaugurated an international consortium on human embryonic
cells. In November, he was to be named “Man of the Year 2005” at the Théâtre
des Folies Bergères in Paris. But the ceremony and the Telethon-financed
joint press conference on the “virtues” of human cloning with Pr.
Peschanski, a long-time activist for the legalization of cloning1,
had to be called off because the rumour that Pr. Hwang was being accused of
a breach of ethics was steadily growing.
The oocyte scandal
It was then discovered that some of the oocytes used for the cloning process
had been taken from young women working under his supervision and that
others had been bought. Although few commentators alluded to the ethical
problems implied by the creation of embryos through cloning, they all
condemned the Korean researcher for the way in which he obtained those
oocytes. The first scandal thus broke out, only to be followed by a second
one.
Fake results
The scientific magazine Science, which published Pr. Hwang’s research, soon
reported that there were mistakes in the article: reduplicated photos,
incoherent diagrams...
Roh Sung-Il, one of Pr. Hwang’s collaborators, contacted the magazine to
withdraw the article. Such withdrawals are extremely rare in scientific
publications. An inquiry was at once initiated by Seoul University experts.
At the end of December, the inquiry panel announced that 9 out the 11
embryonic cell lines were fakes and that serious doubt had been cast on the
authenticity of the remaining two lines. The experts also added that “this
was no accident, but a deliberate lie.”
The final report, released on December the 29th, dealt Pr.Hwang the
finishing blow: the last 2 lines were not obtained through cloning, but
by means of in vitro fertilizations performed in a hospital.
Inquiries concerning Pr. Hwang’s other publications on the first example of
human cloning (Science, 2004), the cloning of a cow (1999), of pigs
(2002), and of a dog (Nature, 2005), are under way.
Political consequences in Korea
This affair could have serious political implications, as the South-Korean
president has supported Pr.Hwang’s work for the last two years. The
biologist’s work was the central piece in a strategy aimed at publicizing
the country’s “ground-breaking” research in the field of embryonic
cells. Professor Hwang has received considerable funding since 2002- 34
million euros. The ministry of Science announced that the 2,4 million euros
($2.9 million) originally pledged for the scientist’s research had been
withdrawn.
South Korean scientists are worried about the consequences this may have on
their own work. Even before the scandal broke out, their research was
controversial, as many Koreans oppose cloning. “I hope this affair will
not tarnish South Korean scientists’ image, as it is not representative of
the way research is conducted in our country,” Pr. O Il-Whan, a
specialist of adult stem cells, emphasized.
The stance of the Church of South Korea, which has long been condemning
embryonic cells research and cloning, comes out reinforced. It had
announced, before the scandal broke out, that the Comittee for Life, an
organization created by the Seoul diocese, would provide funding of 8
million euros ($9.6 million) for research on adult stem cells.
International turmoil
In the opinion of Pr. Axel Kahn, “this means political upheaval, because
countries all around the world are getting ready to pass laws on cloning or
stem-cell research that are based on Hwang’s results.” Besides, he
remarked, “the field of cloning is a world of complete insanity”. “One
of the characteristics of this field of research is that is makes everyone
who touches it crazy.”
The illusory dream of cloning will remind anyone acquainted with Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings of the ring of power: it alienates all those who come near
it and they are eventually consumed by ambition. Myth has given way to
reality, with the scandal of the Raël cult and of Drs. Antinori and Zavros.
The Hwang affair, too, illustrates this “complete insanity”, just
like the French Parliament hearings on the 22nd of November 20052.
“Ever since the beginning, fantasies, illusions and lobbies have been
interfering with proper scientific procedure,” noted A.Kahn, whose words
seem representative of the general state of mind in the scientific
community. Let us recall that Axel Kahn opposed cloning for a long time,
before switching to the pro-cloning side in May 2005 on account of Pr.
Hwang’s alleged results.
Toward a
post-cloning era
Scientists who advocate cloning are becoming disillusioned. Pr. Peschanski
admits that “for almost a year, every prospect cloning research has been
based on the fact that Pr. Hwang had managed to do it.” If this research
team, which “has considerable human and technological means at its
disposal,” did not succeed in its attempts, “it will cast doubts on
the feasibility of human cloning,” he admits. For Axel Kahn, “any
research which hoped to isolate lines of stem cells from diseased persons in
order to study these diseases, will necessarily come to a standstill if it
turns out that we do not actually know how to obtain cloned human embryos!”
He thinks this scandal reveals “how much of a fantasy the so-called
“therapeutic” cloning is.” “Indeed, even if a single line of stem
cells derived from a cloned human embryo could be obtained, we would still
be a long way away from being able to cure the hundreds of millions of
people who suffer from diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, heart-diseases, etc...
Such an undertaking would indeed mean resorting to hundreds of thousands of
ova,” and then creating a clone of each patient. “Obviously, such a
heavy procedure cannot be implemented on a large scale.”
In Great-Britain, where therapeutic cloning is legal, people are beginning
to suggest that it might be necessary to steer research towards less
ethically-sensitive areas, like stem cells from umbilical cords.
1 -
www.genethique.org, press review 23/11/05 |
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Father
files complaint
Three Parisian doctors, among whom two gynaecologist-obstetricians, were
given a cautionary warning by a Paris court, on account of a therapeutic
abortion they practiced in 2001 at Necker Hospital. The court ruled that a
foetus’s being malformed is not reason enough to justify a therapeutic
abortion (which is normally authorized when there is an “important
probability” that the child will “suffer from a particularly serious
disease found to be incurable at the time of the diagnosis.”) The foetus
suffered from congenital diaphragmatic hernia, a rare and serious disease.
It is possible in those cases to operate on the baby, although this carries
risks of severe sequelae and post-operation mortality, so that only one baby
out of two survives. At the time, the couple had agreed to have a
therapeutic abortion. But two years later, the husband made inquiries about
the diaphragmatic hernia diagnosis and filed a complaint against the doctors
for practicing an unwarranted therapeutic abortion.
An
illegal abortion
The prosecution deemed that the conditions warranting a therapeutic abortion
were not all fulfilled: “the incurability criterion was not fulfilled.”
This would make it an “illegal abortion.” By summoning the three
doctors to court to give them the warning, the prosecution resorted to a
penal procedure meant to warn the interested parties that in the event of a
second offence they will be prosecuted.
Reactions
Prenatal diagnosis centres felt that this was a threatening decision. At
Necker Hospital and Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris, doctors have decided
that they will not sign any therapeutic abortion authorizations until the
Minister of Justice has given his opinion on the matter. All 43 other
prenatal diagnosis centres have threatened to follow suit. For the National
Union of French gynaecologists and obstetricians, “the justice system is
threatening pre-natal diagnosis with death.” Other doctors have
expressed doubts as to a judge’s ability to have a qualified opinion on the
appropriateness of a medical team’s decision to perform a therapeutic
abortion. The prosecutor’s office, on the other hand, has explained that
they “simply asked these doctors to be more careful in the future about
getting the mother’s consent before practicing a therapeutic abortion. At no
point did the prosecution comment on the soundness of this medical decision.”
The prosecutor also decided that this cautionary warning should have no
further legal consequences. For the Ministry of Health, there has been, in
this case “a dysfunction of justice.”
An
evident inconsistency
These reactions reveal how inconsistent practices are in the field of foetal
medicine. On the one hand, the Perruche case, and on the other hand, the
recent cases of foetus manslaughter are the sign that our society suffers
from schizophrenia. The Perruche decision, in which a handicapped person
brought a case against a doctor for not aborting her and won, dramatically
raised the pressure on doctors to bring “flawless” babies into the
world. But whenever a medical error leads to the foetus’s dying when the
mother wanted it to be born, the doctor is not liable to be prosecuted (as
he used to be, until a recent case-law.) Nowadays, any unscrupulous doctor
will see that, if he suspects a foetus of having a handicap—and even more so
if he is responsible for that handicap—it is in his best interest to abort
it, rather than to let it be born. A missing foetus will never get him into
trouble; one child too many might. This complaint for unwarranted abortion
restores the balance of risks.
Medical
community worried
Gynaecologist-obstetricians who practice therapeutical abortions fear that
this might only be the first of series of lawsuits. It is easy to understand
the cause of these concerns when one reads the words of Dr. Daffos1,
one of the pioneers of prenatal diagnosis, who, in criticism of the court’s
warning, noted: “many decisions to carry out therapeutical abortions are
made on the basis of strong probability rather than certainty.” Saying
that many therapeutical abortions are carried out without proof that the
foetus does indeed suffer from malformation amounts to admitting that a
number of aborted foetuses did not actually suffer from any malformation at
all, or suffered from curable diseases. Since the practice of carrying out
therapeutical abortions on the basis of simple probability—no matter how
strong— does not take into account the value of the unborn baby’s life,
doctors are right to be afraid of the reaction of the parents who want to
have that baby.
Guilty
until proven innocent
Unlike adults, the unborn baby is not presumed normal until proven malformed.
He must prove that he is neither handicapped nor diseased to be allowed to
be born.
When one hears Pr. Frydman, departmental head at A.Bédère Hospital say that
he is “concerned” that this cautionary warning comes within the scope
of “the ideological trend that advocates protecting life at any cost,”
it is easy to see how badly foetal medicine suffers from a lack of ethics
when it aims not at “protecting life at any cost,” but at protecting
“normal life, at any cost,” even at the cost of life itself.
1 - Le Monde, 27/12/05 |
