November 15, 2007...4:51 pm
Monkey Cells: one step closer
by Christopher Scott
In the next few days you may encounter at least one story about monkey clones drinking blue lab juice, or my favorite, attention-deficit chimps hijacking business meetings. Here’s the real thing from The New York Times, describing how researchers in Oregon—working with monkey cells–used nuclear transfer to make an embryonic cell line. Nuclear transfer takes the genetic material from a donor cell (contained in the nucleus) and puts it into egg stripped of its DNA. In a few days, embryo divides into a hollow ball of cells (Read TSC’s Cleavage for more). Then, a clump of cells are removed and cultured in a dish, a process which destroys the embryo. The cells are a near-genetic match to the donor cell (and to the donor animal). The hope is the technique can be used with human cells and eggs to make lines to study and possibly treat disease. In either case, NO animal (monkey or human) is cloned.
At a July stem cell meeting in Australia, this group announced they had something big. Why? One reason is a thorny problem called the “species barrier.” Experiments usually start out in lower animals (in the cloning field, fifty years ago with frogs) before moving up the evolutionary ladder. In 2005 South Korean scientists—experts in animal cloning—said they had successfully cloned human cells. The South Koreans skipped the step using monkey cells. It turns out they lied about their discovery, leading one of the biggest scientific frauds in memory.
But a step-wise approach was used by the University of Wisconsin’s James Thomson (who trained at Oregon) when he discovered human embryonic stem cells. Taking cues from mice, he worked out a system in marmosets (a small primate), and with further fiddling, worked it out with human cells. His method is now the “common art” (though there is a dispute about this from an intellectual property perspective). Now that a cloned monkey cell line is is possible, it could mean a lower technical hurdle with human cells. (Making cloned animals hasn’t been so straightforward. Mouse clones were announced in 1981, but those experiments were never repeated. It took over ten years—well after Dolly the sheep gamboled upon the scene—to get a cloned mouse).
What’s on the horizon? Monya Baker, editor of Nature’s The Niche, says the Oregon team will collaborate with other human embryonic stem cell researchers in the UK. They’ll get the eggs through the UK’s egg sharing plan,which offers fertility treatment discounts to women who opt to donate eggs for research. I described the plan and how it compares to US policy in TSC’s Eggs for Research: UK vs. US.
1 Comment
February 5, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Jamie Thomson, the father of embryonic research since he isolated the first line of embryonic stem cells in 1998, recently discovered, along with a Japanese associate, a method of creating faux-embryonic stem cells from adult skin cells, as announced in November 2007.
Virtually all of the stem cell writers in America declared the stem cell wars were over. “We can make embryonic stem cells from skin, so there are no moral issues!” they exclaimed. As is normal for embryonic publicists, they were years premature. We are no closer to real cures for real humans than we were before the new miracle. Embryonic cures cannot sail, this decade or next.
On the day after the big press release, I wrote that the Thomson announcement was a non-event; only that the embryonic movement needed its “miracle press release of the month,” and Thomson gave them one, inadvertently I am sure, since Thomson has never been anything but an honest man of science. His level-headed statement on the so-called miracle is refreshing when compared to the cheerleaders: “I believe these new results, while they do not eliminate that controversy, is probably the beginning of the end of that controversy,” Thompson said. ”Even though we have this nice new source of cells, it doesn’t solve all the downstream problems of getting them into the body in useful form.” Now you know why I respect the good doctor as much as I do. Few other embryonic researchers could make that underlined statement and expect to keep his job; but Thomson is untouchable!
You see, I look at embryonic stem cells from one perspective only: “Does this advance in knowledge bring the treatment of incurable diseases by implanting embryonic stem cells into suffering humans one step closer to mankind.” In this case, the answer is a resounding “NO!
Let us take a look from the real world of science rather than the science fiction world of the embryonic cheerleaders. The majority of these cheerleaders in America do not know that embryonic cells come from cancer cells and those cancer cells come along with embryonic stem cells in every lab in the world; witnessed by the tumor growth generated among the animal subjects in the animal trials….. a major obstacle that must be overcome before an ESC can be implanted into a human being. The reason they don’t know it is that the word “cancer” has been prohibited from being mentioned in association with “embryonic” in virtually every newspaper and medical journal in the land.
But the movement’s censors could not keep the word “cancer” out of the Thomson 2007 promotion, since Thomson put it in himself, as did his colleague Dr.Yamanaka and other quoted serious researchers. The same thing happened in 2006 when an honest embryonic researcher at the University of Rochester, after his team virtually cured his lab animals of Parkinson’s, was forced to watch as those doomed animals all developed tumors. “Cancer” appeared in the reporting medical journal and the spin doctors were forced to use it in the newspapers. The researcher was brutally honest about the events, which is why the Washington Post refused to print his most damning quotes and why the censors are still doing their best to keep “cancer” and “embryonic” from appearing in the same newspaper articles. You won’t find it in USA medical journals either, unless the reported event screams it out, as it did in Rochester.
That, and Thomson’s efforts to keep the truth in view (not an easy task in America, even for him) was the clue that convinced me this whole “miracle” was virtually meaningless as to the only thing that matters: “Where are the embryonic cures for human beings, or even animals, for that matter?” The answer is “further away than they seemed to be in before the announcement—and that was real far away.” Over the intervening weeks, serious embryonic people started to realize the truth. Please note I am not saying the latest breakthrough isn’t important, only that it does not bring embryonic implants into humans any closer.
Why?
FIRST, Thomson and friends must confirm their findings, meaning that some other research group must duplicate them elsewhere; and the consensus seems to be a year or two. Merely SOP in science, no argument there.
SECOND, researchers must conquer the cancer issue if they even dream of the FDA considering an embryonic stem cell trial. Conquering that embryonic cancer cell has proved impossible to overcome during the decade since Thomson’s initial discovery and no one is even claiming serious progress. They like to blame their failings on Bush, but this ignores thousands of researchers working around-the-clock around the world, mostly in countries with government funding and NO government restrictions. The manipulations of the pro-embryonic media prove how desperate they are to keep that information from their readers, the majority of whom are “true-believers.” Their readers, overwhelming pro-embryonic, have no idea that cancer is even a problem, let alone that nobody, not even Thomson with his latest triumph, has yet come up with a way to avoid it.
THIRD, they must conquer the rejection problem, a problem “solved” by transplant cardiologists who have no choice but to permanently compromise the dying heart patient’s immune system to prevent rejection of the new healthy heart. Permanently compromising the patient’s immune system is NOT an option for embryonic researchers.
FOURTH. The availability of embryos for research, Bush or no Bush, is a problem. Without a doubt, the cost of research embryos adds to the already super-high cost of embryonic research. For a complete report on this issue from the Rand thinktank, click here: http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9038/index1.html
FIFTH, and this will come as a shock to those who closely follow the movement, is that the only bragging point of embryonics is that their cells are “pluripotent,” which means they can presumably become any cell in the human body, and therefore help any part of the body get better. Some are beginning to realize what I said in 2006: “Pluripotentcy is a two edged-sword.”
The best researchers in the world, on five continents, all know that science cannot begin to control the embryonic stem cell’s ability and desire to become whatever it darn well pleases. Good embryonic researchers can train their cells to significantly help patients with many different diseases, but once the cells are finished doing that, off they go, wherever and whenever and however they wish and that “however” too often results in tumors. In two words, as of the beginning of 2008, embryonic stem cells are unstable and unpredictable. The Curse of the Pluripotent! But read on: it gets worse.
Too many snippets are coming out of the real world of science to allow such an easy path to human treatment. The strange thing is that the leading embryonic scientists in America, but not the media giants, are actually pulling in their horns after the Thomson announcement!
First thing I noticed was the fear of the “reprogramming” that Dr. Yamanaka used to revert the skin cells all the way back to embryonic cells. Embryonic stem cells are already unpredictable, and Yamanaka’s method figures to raise the level of unpredictability. That makes them impossible to use on humans. That is not Don Margolis talking; this is from Dr. George Q. Daley, a stem cell researcher at Children’s Hospital Boston, who concludes:
“But for the ultimate goal of getting cells into a patient, it’s a lot less clear. These cells may never be useful for direct therapy.” Amen, Dr. Daley! For a guy who earns his living in embryonics, your honesty is refreshing!
Across town there is another embryonic research leader who is even more adamant than Dr. Daley. From Boston.com:
In what is even more of a lurking threat, the process uses retroviruses to carry the genes into cells. These viruses can disrupt the normal function of DNA and also can spur the birth of cancer cells.
Some proponents of reprogramming argue that problems from genetic modification and use of viruses are purely technical and easily surmountable. But other stem cell researchers are skeptical that reprogrammed cells or specialized cells produced from them will ever win approval for use in humans. “It will never be approved [by the FDA] to put these cells in a patient,” said biologist Douglas A. Melton, co director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. “The retrovirus can be a Trojan horse that can carry all sorts of problems.” (Thanks to Boston.com)
What is astonishing about these quotes is that they both come from Boston, the hotbed of embryonic exaggeration and adult stem cell denigration. FYI, there is no bigger embryonic research center in the world than Harvard, and the only difference of opinion between Co-Director Melton and myself is that he believes that real embryonic cells can, someday soon, safely be put into a human being, and I do not. I repeat, only an opinion, on both our parts.
Don Margolis
Leave a Reply