Text of Original Topic Proposal - 12/26/2007

[johnkarls]

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HUMAN CLONES - INVOLUNTARY SOLDIERS, SEX SLAVES, HUMAN "LAB RATS" ETC.
AND THE FAILURE OF THE POLITICAL ANALYSTS IN THE MEDIA TO FOCUS ON SERIOUS ETHICAL ISSUES
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Original proposal below posted 26 December 2007
221 views before selected on March 13th for April 9th topic
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Many of us will recall that in June 2006, Paitris and I hosted our discussion of this imbroglio – starting with viewing a DVD of “The Island” starring Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor. Scarlett and Ewan portrayed two members of a large community of clones, each of whom was created and maintained at the expense of a wealthy person to be killed when the wealthy person should have need of her/his clone’s vital organs for transplants.

Since Scarlett and Ewan seemed as real as they in fact are in real life, everyone agreed at our meeting that they were human beings and that they should have the same constitutional rights as non-cloned human beings.

The question was then raised whether it might some day be possible to clone solely vital organs without cloning the rest of the human being.

However, we again achieved universal agreement. This time that any future ability to clone solely vital organs would not solve the problem of “clone rights” because there would still be other reasons to clone the entire human being – for example, for use as soldiers, sex slaves, etc.

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There are at least two developments that demand we revisit this issue of “clone rights.”

The first is the announcement in mid-November that scientists are now able to create human stem cells without destroying human embryos – by re-programming skin cells to become stem cells. There follows the MacNeil-Lehrer report on this development. As can be seen -- with its typical “blind eye” for ethical issues, MacNeil-Lehrer consulted the Roman Catholic Church on the question of whether this development solves all ethical concerns!!! And the representative of the Roman Catholic Church opined that “all is well” so long as embryos are not destroyed – turning a “blind eye” to the question of whether human clones have any rights or can be treated the same as lab rats!!!

The second was the announcement about a year ago on MacNeil-Lehrer by a Yale U biology professor. By way of background, the Yale U Biology Department has been extremely controversial for various reasons over the last 15-20 years with respect to its research regarding chimpanzees, the animals that have the most DNA in common with human beings.

The Yale U biology prof reported that he had succeeded in creating an animal whose DNA was 25% of the way from chimp to human (that is, for the DNA that is not shared by chimps and humans, he had substituted 25% human DNA for chimp DNA). He also reported that he was in the process of creating an animal whose DNA was 50% of the way from chimp to human. And that it was his intention to begin work on creating an animal whose DNA would be 75% of the way from chimp to human!!!

Nothing further has been reported in the media on this work!!! Indeed, MacNeil-Lehrer has deleted this report from its public data base (much like the C.I.A. deleted from public data bases all references to the fact that 15-20 years ago, undergraduate M.I.T. students produced blueprints for highly-effective atomic bombs based on information that was then publicly available on the internet – however, unlike MacNeil-Lehrer’s transition this past fall from providing transcripts of entire programs on their web site, to providing solely audio tapes of only program segments, any one of which can be deleted without attracting notice, the C.I.A. can’t erase all mention of the feat of the M.I.T. students without going to each library around the country and creating “18.5-minute gaps” in their microfiche records of the nation’s newspapers during that period (Orwellian re-writing of history is more difficult with physical records than computerized data bases!!!)).

However, per the usual ethical “blind eye” of MacNeil-Lehrer, there were no questions about whether the 25% human chimp, the 50% human or even the 75% human would have any constitutional rights, or be treated like a lab rat!!! Or even whether the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) shouldn’t take an interest in the 25% human, 50% human and/or 75% human!!!

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PRELIMINARY CONCLUSION

Shouldn’t we, as citizens, use our “six (or fewer) degrees of separation” to insure that the failure of the media to examine these issues is remedied???

Or should we kid ourselves into believing that “anything goes” when it comes to medical research???

After all, how would you feel if you were forced to live a life as a sex slave or a soldier (with no constitutional rights or even any attention from the ASPCA) simply because you are a human being produced from stem cells created by re-programming skin cells, rather than a human being produced from the stem cells of an embryo??? Why should the source of the stem cells from which you were produced make such a horrendous difference???

And after all, how would you feel if you were confined to a Yale U biology lab as the subject of whatever tests their profs wanted to perform on you – simply because your DNA was not 100% human, but only 99% of the way from chimp to human???

Do we really have to remain “asleep at the switch” until a “clone liberation movement” is required in the mold of the movements for African-American/women/gay liberation???

One final question – don’t the percentages of chimp vs. human DNA influencing our perceptions of the rights (if any) of these organisms evoke eerie memories of how the percentage of African-American “blood” affected legal classifications in the “Old South” or the percentage of Jewish “blood” affected legal classifications in Hitler’s Third Reich???


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MacNeil-Lehrer Report (aka “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer”)
Transcript - November 20, 2007

MacN-L Topic Heading = “Breakthrough Set To Radically Change Stem Cell Debate”

Editorial Comment – MacNeil-Lehrer stopped providing transcripts of their telecasts this past fall. Since then, they only provide a sound video complete with advertisements. Accordingly, the following transcript was created by “yours truly” from the sound video, stopping frequently to type what had been said and stopping quite often to go back on the sound video to be sure of what had been said.

JIM LEHRER: Now the new stem-cell story and to Jeffrey Brown.

JEFFREY BROWN:

The excitement today was over new studies that a way around the ethical, practical and financial controversies that have characterized the stem-cell debate for so long.

Two teams of scientists from Japan and the University of Wisconsin reported they were able to re-program human skin cells to behave like embryonic stem cells without using embryos or women’s eggs.

Robert Lanza, a leading researcher on embryonic cells, called it a scientific milestone – the biological equivalent of the Wright brothers’ first airplane.

On the other side, Richard Doorflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called it “A very significant breakthrough…that would be readily acceptable to Catholics.”

And James Battey of the National Institute of Health, said he saw no reason on earth why this would not be eligible for federal funding.

To help explain this, we turn to Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist and professor at Brown University. He also serves as an advisor to the New Hour’s Science Unit.

Well, Ken, let’s start with the science here. What does it actually mean to re-program cells?

MILLER:

Well, what it means to re-program cells, ah, builds upon essentially, um, a trick. And it’s a trick that our own reproductive cells pull off when a sperm and egg unite to form an embryo.

The cells in an adult body, the skin cells, muscle cells, nerve cells, are sort of at dead ends. In other words, that skin cell is going to remain a skin cell, that muscle cell is going to remain a muscle cell.

But our reproductive cells have the ability to go back to stage one, form a single-celled embryo, and then grow into every one of the tissues and cells in the body. That re-programming is something that happens with us normally between each generation.

What developmental biologists have longed to understand is how that re-programming takes place and what this development means today is that we are a little bit closer to understanding how to switch on the re-programming – take one of our of our adult cells, trick it into thinking it’s part of an embryo and hopefully get that cell to develop into cells that we really need to repair or to heal the body.

BROWN:

And this work came out of studies that were done on mice, right? We talked about it on the program when that was done. So what’s the advance here?

MILLER:

Well, the advance here, um, at one hand the advance isn’t much. In other words you could minimize it. You could say back in June, three laboratories reported that it was possible to pull this feat off of taking an ordinary adult cell, sticking a few extra genes in it, and re-programming it to become an embryonic stem cell. And that was done in one species, mice.

Um, the development today is now it’s been done in another species. And you might say “Bid Deal” but that other species happens to be human beings, human cells. And now it’s getting close to be, to have direct application in hospitals and in laboratories.

BROWN:

All right, so let’s talk about the real reason though for the excitement is because as I said in the intro, it allows the potential to side-step, start with the ethical problems that have been there. How does this, how does this allow people to get around those?

MILLER:

Well, it may allow people to get around this. Let’s be very clear about that, um, the, the , the big ethical dilemma that has faced everyone working with embryonic stem cells is to get them, you have to take them out of an embryo and that usually means that embryo has to be destroyed in the process.

Now if you’re working with human embryonic stem cells, it’s a human embryo you have to destroy and for obvious reasons, that’s a problem and it’s a problem, more so for some people than for others, but it is still a problem.

Now, the important thing to emphasize is that people doing this research have never wanted to destroy embryos. They just want cells that know the tricks that the embryo has mastered. And ultimately, what one hopes to do is to understand specifically what genes are activated and how those tricks take place.

So the current technology seems to argue that what we are able to do at this point is to take cells from an ordinary adult, cells just under the skin – in one case in the Wisconsin studies, cells derived from the foreskin of a new-born baby. Take those cells, insert a little mixture of just four genes into those cells, activate those genes, and those cells seem to become re-programmed to such an extent that they act in the laboratory very much like embryonic stem cells react. And what this means, essentially, is that we may have been able in these two laboratories to produce cells that have all the capabilities and all the potentials of embryonic stem cells without ever producing, or sacrificing, an embryo.

And I think that’s good news regardless of how one feels about the ethics of conventional embryonic stem-cell research.

BROWN:

The researchers were clear the potential drawbacks here. Talk a little bit about that, including the potential of the introduction of cancer.

MILLER:

Oh, absolutely. The, the, the trick in both laboratories, one laboratory in Kyoto and San Francisco, they were collaborating jointly, and the other one at the University of Wisconsin. Each laboratory used a slightly different trick but in, in both cases, they took four genes and inserted them into human cells by using a virus. Virus, or viruses, are, in effect, little packages of protein and DNA that are specialized in getting genes into cells. So it’s a logical choice.

But the first problem is the virus itself goes in and you don’t know where that, that, those genes, that DNA is going to insert. So that could cause unpredictable damage to the cell into which these genes are inserted.

The second problem is that one of the genes that was used by one of the groups is known as the Mick Aka Gene (phonetic – correct spelling?), and the Mick Aka Gene is associated with a variety of types of cancer and in an earlier study this year in mice, the Japanese group showed that mice re-generated by using this technique. In other words, to prove that these things really had the capability of embryonic stem cells, these mice actually had a much higher incidence of cancer than mice that were produced by other, ordinary methods.

So this is a powerful technology. But all powerful technologies are dangerous and both groups of researchers have expressed an eagerness in their respective publications, to find a way to do the same genetic trick without involving viruses, and without involving genes that have the potential to do harm. So this is a tricky technique.

BROWN:

They, they, they did seem to suggest that they found, that they thought there was ways around this – that, that they would solve the problem. So where are we, what is the prob, remind people the promise here and, and given this, how soon might that day come.

MILLER:

I, I’m not going to venture a guess on how soon the day will come. I’m going to talk about this from the point of view of basic biology.

What we have wanted to know about in cell biology are what the tricks are that are used to re-program cells to bring them into an embryonic state where they’re capable of everything so that, for example, if someone has a heart attack and the cardiac muscle cells begin to die in the heart or stroke and nervous tissue in the brain begins to die, we’d like to be able to take cells and give those cells an instruction – become heart muscle cells and fix the heart attack or become brain neuros and fix the damage from the stroke.

Embryonic cells seem to be capable of doing that. What this research suggests is it might be possible to take cells from an adult human, no destruction of an embryo, insert in a relatively small number of genes, and then persuade those cells to in fact become nervous-tissue cells or to become heart muscle cells. And, and in the Japanese study in fact both of those cell types were produced in culture which is very, very exciting.

All of the dangers that you mentioned are still there but what it means for every laboratory in the world doing this research is that we are now a technical step closer to actually being able to try these techniques out and work out the kinks in them so that they become safe and effective.

BROWN:

You know, scientists, I know you know them, um, Douglas Melton at Harvard (Miller: “Of course”) had the great quote today that I want to read to you. He said, after he saw the results, he said: “Once it worked, I hit my forehead and said: ‘It’s so obvious, but it’s not obvious until it’s done.’” I though that’s a great way of thinking about how science actually works in a case like this.

MILLER:

Oh, I, I, I, I think it’s absolutely true and, and, and all this goes back to work that was done in Shinya Yamanaka’s lab at the University of Kyoto almost a year and a half ago.

And what his laboratory did, did was to take embryonic stem cells and very carefully analyze which genes were expressed at higher levels in those cells than you might expect. He got about 24 candidate genes and then one at a time, very systematically, his lab knocked them out until the found 4 genes that were absolutely essential – couldn’t get rid of them to maintain the stem-cell state.

Now that was a stunning finding that everybody who read it, myself included, thought it can’t be that simple. But a year later three laboratories, the one in Kyoto, one in California and one in Massachusetts, did the logical experiment which is to take mouse cells, throw in those four genes, activate them and see if they act like embryonic stem cells. Lo and behold, they did. Hence, Doctor Melton’s surprise. Now we know that very same trick works in human cells as well which is truly an exciting development.

BROWN:

All right, Ken Miller. Thanks a lot.

MILLER:

My pleasure.