Proposals for cow-human embryos put on hold

news@nature.com ^ | 11 January 2007 | Jim Giles

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Published online: 11 January 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070108-11

Proposals for cow-human embryos put on hold

Chimaera experiments still on the table after authority avoids outright ban.

Jim Giles

Mixed up: UK proposals to make embryos using two different species are on hold. Getty

British plans to create cloned human embryos that contain small amounts of cow DNA have been set back by about a year, after regulators decided to gauge public opinion before granting any licences.

Scientists want to use cow eggs to create and study cloned embryos because human eggs are in desperately short supply. Injecting human DNA into animal eggs, creating a 'chimaera' mix of species, gets around this problem. The work could lead to new treatments for conditions such as Parkinson's disease, and the idea of creating chimaeras for research purposes is relatively uncontroversial among scientists. Researchers elsewhere, such as China, have done work with chimaeric embryos before.

The British government said last December that it was considering banning such experiments, prompting concern among researchers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and Kings College London, UK. The two universities submitted an application for a licence to do such work last year.

Such a ban would be a set-back for the UK scientific community, which is currently quite strong in the field of cloning research.

But at the same time, the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the independent body that licenses embryo research, decided to look at the issue. Today, it said that it will consider the applications, but only after a three-month public consultation.

Willing to consider

The results will be used to develop a policy for all chimaeric projects, allowing the applications to be considered in the autumn. Applications typically take three months to be processed.

The Government's white paper policy now has no friends.  Evan Harris MP

"I'm pleased that it's not an outright ban," says Lyle Armstrong, a member of the Newcastle team. "At least they're prepared to consider following the debate."

The HFEA's consultation is expected to influence the Government's proposal to outlaw the research, which parliament is due to discuss later this year. The HFEA's decision to consider the applications is a boost to politicians who are campaigning for the work to go ahead.

"The HFEA has chosen not to support the Government's ill-thought-through and damaging policy of banning this research, which has been attacked from scientists, patients and ethicists," says Evan Harris, a Liberal Democrat MP. "The Government's white-paper policy now has no friends except those who are opposed to all embryo research."

Switching genes

Armstrong and his colleagues want to insert adult human DNA into a cow egg from which the nucleus has been removed. The resulting embryo would not be completely human, because a small amount of its DNA, less than 0.5%, would come from the mitochondrial DNA that exists outside the cell's nucleus. Such an embryo cannot legally be implanted into a woman and can only be grown for 14 days.

During that two-week period, researchers would study the chemical signals that allow the adult DNA to be reprogrammed into an embryonic form. Some genes that are expressed in adult cells are turned off in the embryo, for example, and the teams want to work out how this switching works.

In the long-term, understanding the process could help scientists to reprogramme adult cells without the use of eggs. That would allow doctors to create new cells to treat conditions in which cell loss is critical. In Parkinson's, for example, neurons are lost from an area of the brain that helps control movement.

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[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

This is frickin' bizarre!

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

To have a human embryo conception had to happen at some point, so then they are using the powerless innocent life of a human being to advance their thesis.

That, too.

MOO!

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

But what if the cow-people take over the world!

You won't need lawnmowers.

MOO!

[Telepathic Intruder]

I suppose as long as they're engineering cow-people, they might as well make them low-emission cow-people. Otherwise, all that extra CO2 and methane might increase the average temperature of the earth by .1 degrees or so. But I guess they could also engineer heat-resistant cow-people if they had to. They can do that, right?

[8mmMauser]

Pinged from Terri Dailies

8mm

[MarkL]

Mark

[Global2010]

LOL A perfectly good reason why we don't want scientists going There.

[Paleo Conservative]

[UpAllNight]

I thought conception occurred when the sperm entered the egg?

[T'wit]

Nice try, but that's not a cow. That's a bull.

[Grizzled Bear]

You won't need lawnmowers.
_________________________________________________________
Go ahead and mock! Don't complain to me when some big, ugly stupid cow is in your face yelling "Hey; go get me a bail of straw and wash my laundry!"

[Grizzled Bear]

How about this, instead of carpeting their houses, they can grow grass, and eat it too.
__________________________________________________________
How would you deal with the awkward situation when your neighbors ask you to stop in and milk them?

Miss Manners never addressed that.

[Telepathic Intruder]

lol, depending on whether they were half-cow hybrids that would be either kinky or wierd. Or maybe normal, hard to tell. Hopefully the half-bull hybrid would at work at the time.

[Teacher317]

"regulators decided to gauge public opinion before granting any licences"

There's true leadership for ya. No worries about what is moral, what is best for our future, what unintended consequences could result, what is best for the hu-vines, etc... just take a poll and go from there.

[presidio9]

Mancow is deeply saddended...

[Cicero]

As with most of these things, the first thing that springs to mind is "unnatural." It is a violation of the natural law. And we all know from the old Frankenstein movies that violating the natural law is not a good idea.

The second thing that springs to mind is that it's better not to let the genie out of the bottle. Once you pop the cork, you will find it very difficult to persuade the genie to go back in again. Or, to put this in less metaphorical terms, once the research has been done, the funds invested, the startup companies hired their researchers, secretaries, and janitors, it will be a great deal more difficult to change your mind.

The best time to stop it is right now, before it starts. But regretably there will always be plenty of people around who will want to do it because, like bill clinton, "I can." Still, it would be far easier to stop it now than to wait until after it gets out of the bottle.

[antonia]

They'll have to close down all the McDonalds, for one. How about this, instead of carpeting their houses, they can grow grass, and eat it too. A world populated by cow-people can probably solve a lot of our problems.

You forgot about the methane problem.

[SauronOfMordor]

The second thing that springs to mind is that it's better not to let the genie out of the bottle. Once you pop the cork, you will find it very difficult to persuade the genie to go back in again.

Once you get started sliding down this slope, a later step will be to get the embryo to come to term and be born. Now we will have to answer the question: at what percentage of human DNA will the resulting organism be defined as legally "human" with human rights?

I can see some governments becoming interested in the creation of a race of beings with limited intelligence, docile and submissive temperment, and non-human appearance (so that many humans will not consider them to be worthy of full human rights). For what happens next, the original "Planet of the Apes" film series from the 1960's/70's comes to mind

[Sam Cree]