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Welcome to the

Techno-Eugenics Email Newsletter

Number 13

December 7, 2000

Supporting genetic science in the public interest
Opposing the new techno-eugenics
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CONTENTS

I. NEWS
1. Netherlands Bank Code: No Funds for Human Genetic Modification
2. Human Cloning Effort by Religious Group Reportedly to Begin
3. New Comments on Human Genetic Modification by Noted Figures:
James Watson, Daniel Wikler, Gregory Stock
4. Lawsuit in Gene Therapy Death Settled; Suspended Experiment
Allowed to Resume
5. Embryo Cloning Debate Grows in Europe and UK
6. New Push for In Utero Gene Transfer

II. POINTERS
1. Wild Duck Review
2. James Watson and Matt Ridley in San Francisco February 8

III. ABOUT THE TECHNO-EUGENICS EMAIL NEWSLETTER
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I. NEWS

1. Netherlands Bank Code: No Funds for Human Genetic Modification

A Netherlands financial institution, the Rabobank Group, has published
a "draft code of conduct regarding genetic modification" that says in
part, "The Rabobank Group will not finance or become involved in the
genetic modification and cloning of people." The code also states that
the "bank will, in principle, not finance genetic modification of animals
either, unless the risks are acceptable from a scientific point of view
and there is broad support for it in society."

The code pledges to take "existing laws and regulations as its guideline
for action, because these reflect the dominant values and standards of
a democratic society," and to "apply the precautionary principle." This
does not constitute "a wait-and-see attitude towards the risks and
problems which may occur," the code states, "but an early and careful
consideration of the possible dangers and risks and risk management
attached to the development of new technology." The code is on-line at
<www.rabobank.com/asp/custom/custom_redir.asp?node_id=4396>.
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2. Human Cloning Effort by Religious Group Reportedly to Begin

The scientific director for the Raelian religion, which believes that
humans are clones of extraterrestrial scientists and that human cloning
is the key to eternal life, said the group has begun work to clone a
10-month-old American girl who died earlier this year. The Sunday Times
reports that the "project is being carried out in a secret laboratory" in
Nevada, and the "scientists involved hope their baby will be born towards
the end of next year" (Lois Rogers,"`Aliens' cult about to clone dead
baby girl," Sunday Times, London, 11/5/00, <www.sunday_times.co.uk/>).

The Raelians have announced that an anonymous U.S. couple has given their
human cloning company, Clonaid, more than $1 million to clone their dead
daughter from preserved cells. The group claims to be working with four
qualified scientists and 50 female volunteers who will act as egg donors
and surrogates for the clone. The Clonaid web site states, "This service
offers a fantastic opportunity to parents with fertility problems or
homosexuals," and promises to drop its charge for "cloning services" to
"as low as $200,000." See <www.clonaid.com>.

The Rael religion claims 55,000 members in 84 countries (<www.rael.org>),
and has raised millions of dollars for other projects, including a plan
to build an embassy near Jerusalem for the extraterrestrials.

Coverage of the Raelian cloning announcement in the Washington Post
highlighted assertions by scientists including Lee Silver (Princeton
University) and Michael West (Advanced Cell Technology) who believe that
producing a cloned human is technically feasible. According to George
Seidel, a "cloning expert" at Colorado State University in Fort Collins,
"It's a numbers game. It's very likely that if you did it enough times
you could make it work" (Rick Weiss, "Human Cloning's `Numbers Game,'"
10/10/2000, <http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39671-2000Oct9>).
Other reports focused on scientists who have strongly criticized the
project. Ian Wilmut, for example, condemned it as "absolutely criminal"
(Rogers, Sunday Times).

Whether or not the Raelians are in fact able to create a cloned child,
their claims represent an important challenge to U.S. policy makers and
to the American public. If a cloned child were to be created, opponents
of human genetic manipulation should take the event as a catalyst for
action. In any case, a ban on human reproductive cloning is a high
priority in the effort to avert a techno-eugenic future.
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3. New Comments on Human Genetic Modification by Noted Figures: James
Watson, Daniel Wikler, Gregory Stock

o Nobel laureate James Watson, widely known for his co-discovery of
the structure of DNA, told a startled UC Berkeley audience in October
that skin color is biochemically linked to sexual activity, and thinness
to ambition.

According to a member of the audience, Watson "showed slides of women
in bikinis and contrasted them to veiled Muslim women, to suggest that
controlling exposure to sun may suppress sexual desire and vice versa."
Explaining that thin people are unhappy and therefore more ambitious,
he said, "Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you
know you're not going to hire them."

Watson's remarks were reported several weeks later on the front page of
the San Francisco Chronicle. According to the article, they were brought
"into the public spotlight" by graduate students in the molecular biology
department who had found Watson's talk "profoundly disturbing." Several
UC faculty members "branded his remarks as racist, sexist and unsupported
by any scientific data." UC Berkeley biologist Michael Botchan, who
presided over the session, said that Watson advanced his hypothesis with
"comments that were crude and sexist and potentially racist." Botchan
said he doesn't think Watson is racist or sexist, but merely insensitive.
(Tom Abate, "Nobel Winner's Theories Raise Uproar in Berkeley," 11/13/00.
Use the "search" function at <www.sfgate.com/chronicle>.)

o Daniel Wikler, Staff Ethicist for the World Health Organization and
professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
said in October that the completion of the human genome project would
make it possible to promote some genetic qualities such as intelligence
and lower the incidence of others, and that the state of a nation's gene
pool should be subject to government policies. Wikler made these comments
at the Third Menzies Scholar Symposium in Australia. "The question of
whether there should be a state genetic policy...is not one that can be
answered...with a simple 'no'," he said. "It may be conceivably required
by justice itself." (From <http://www.theage.com.au>.)

Wikler is co-author of a new book, From Chance to Choice: Genetics &
Justice (Allen Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels, & Daniel Wikler,
Cambridge University Press, 2000). The four bioethicists believe that
engineering the human germline is both inevitable and at least in some
cases desirable. Unlike most other advocates, they argue for state
intervention in human genetic manipulation, rather than for a "free-
market" consumer eugenics. Their book is also remarkable for the way
its title appropriates the language of reproductive rights--blurring
the enormous difference between ending an unwanted pregnancy and
manipulating the genetic makeup of a future child. For a review of the
book that accepts its premise of the inevitability of human germline
engineering, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Brave Good World, The New Republic,
12/4/00 <www.thenewrepublic.com/120400/nussbaum120400_print.html>.

o The technology to modify the genes we pass on to our children will
be available within 10 to 20 years, according to Gregory Stock, a key
figure in the campaign to promote human germline engineering. Stock
was addressing the annual meeting of the American Society for Human
Reproduction in San Diego in October, reportedly the world's largest
ever gathering of fertility experts. His remarks included the assertion
that parents will "want to weed out children who would turn out to be
obese or mentally retarded" by using pre-implantation genetic screening.
"This is the beginning of the end of sex as the way we reproduce,"
Stock predicted. "We will still have sex for pleasure, of course, but
we will view our children as too damn important to leave it to a random
meeting of sperm and eggs." (Michael Hanlon, "Why You Won't Need to
Have Sex to Make a Baby, The Montreal Express, October 25, 2000,
<www.lineone.net/express/00/10/25/news/n1520-d.html>.)
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4. Lawsuit in Gene Therapy Death Settled; Suspended Experiment Allowed
to Resume

The family of Jesse Gelsinger, the 18-year-old who died last September
in a gene therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania, has agreed
to an out-of-court settlement with the institutions and individual
researchers involved in the experiment. The parties to the settlement
included James Wilson, the lead investigator at Penn, and Genovo, Inc.,
a company that Wilson founded and that would have profited from a
successful outcome.

The family released from the lawsuit two other defendants, including
bioethicist Arthur Caplan, who had advised the researchers to enroll
relatively healthy adults such as Gelsinger, instead of critically ill
infants as they had originally planned.

The Washington Post reported that Paul Gelsinger, Jesse's father, said
"he had undergone a painful change of heart in the year after his son's
death" as he learned of "apparent wrongdoing" and eventually concluded
"that he had been duped by scientists who cared more about profits than
safety." (Rick Weiss and Deborah Nelson, "Penn Settles Gene Therapy Suit,"
11/4/00, <http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11512-2000Nov3>.)

About a week after the settlement, Dr. Jeffrey Isner of Tufts University
and St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Boston announced that the FDA will allow
him to resume gene therapy trials it had ordered suspended last May during
investigations triggered by Gelsinger's death. "Much of the hysteria has
died down," Isner told a Reuters reporter. "The atmosphere has been a lot
more positive."

When it closed down Isner's experiment, the FDA issued a strongly worded
letter accusing him of failing to report the death of one patient and
saying he showed a "serious lack of knowledge" about his duties.

Isner's trials are sponsored by Vascular Genetics Inc. of Durham, NC,
a company he helped found in 1997. Like many other gene therapy
researchers, Isner thus stands to gain financially from his own work.
(Maggie Fox, "Doctor: U.S. Restores Heart Gene Therapy Trials," 11/12/00,
<http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20001112/sc/heart_gene_dc_2.html>).
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5. Embryo Cloning Debate Grows in Europe and UK

The European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE), an
advisory group to the European Commission, has issued a report saying
that allowing embryo cloning for stem cell research would be "premature."
The November report, "Ethical Aspects of Human Stem Cell Research and
Use," acknowledges that embryo cloning (also known as "non-reproductive"
cloning) may turn out to be the most effective way to derive stem cells
for use in creating compatible tissue transplants.

"But," it cautions, "these remote therapeutic perspectives must be
balanced against considerations related to the risks of trivialising
the use of embryos and exerting pressure on women as sources of oocytes"
that would be needed for embryo cloning. The report points out that
"there is a wide field of research to be carried out with alternative
sources of human stem cells: from spare embryos, foetal tissues and
adult stem cells." The report is available at
<http://europa.eu.int/comm/secretariat_general/sgc/ethics/en/index.htm>.

Embryo cloning is the subject of public and parliamentary debate in the
UK, where the government has announced plans to relax its regulations on
using human embryo cells for research. A briefing paper on the science
and politics of non-reproductive cloning by the Campaign Against Human
Genetic Engineering (CAHGE) states that "Britain is taking an inter-
national lead in developing [embryo cloning] technology," a situation
that prompted the European Parliament to pass a motion in September
"censuring the British government for pressing ahead so quickly."

The CAHGE briefing paper clearly discusses the technical and legal links
between non-reproductive and reproductive human cloning, and proposes a
moratorium on the former "until there is a global ban on cloning babies
and until there has been a chance for a better informed public debate."
It also explains why a moratorium "would not harm progress towards
treatments for disease." See <www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~cahge>.
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6. New Push for In Utero Gene Transfer

British and U.S. researchers have begun a new push for approval of gene
transfer trials in human fetuses. Such "in utero" procedures would very
likely affect the developing eggs or sperm of the fetus, introducing
germline changes that would be passed on to all subsequent generations.

The New Scientist, a British magazine, reports that in utero gene
transfer "was a hot topic among delegates to the Millennium Festival of
Medicine in London last month." It named Charles Coutelle, a researcher
at the Imperial College School of Medicine in London and Janet Larson of
the Ochsner Medical Foundation in New Orleans as two scientists who are
experimenting with such procedures in animals. Coutelle says his team
could be ready for trials in human fetuses in four or five years.

Because of the risk of germline alterations, gene therapy on human
fetuses is effectively banned in Britain. In the U.S., the National
Institutes of Health said in 1999 that it will not consider proposals
for procedures that could modify the human germline "at this time."
This decision was in response to a proposal for in utero gene transfer
by W. French Anderson, who led the campaign for approval of somatic
gene therapy in the late 1980s and has long argued that germline
manipulation is an appropriate medical procedure.

The New Scientist quoted several scientists who strongly oppose gene
transfer in human fetuses. "My concern is that we don't know what we're
doing," said John Bell, head of clinical medicine at Oxford University.
"Maybe it will be acceptable in a thousand years' time, but not today."

Developmental biologist Stuart Newman of New York Medical College and
the Council for Responsible Genetics said he suspects that some people
may be downplaying concerns about in utero gene transfers in order to
soften up public opinion and pave the way for germline engineering.

(Joanna Marchant, "Generation game: If gene therapy in the womb could
cure common diseases, what's the problem?," New Scientist 12/2/00.)
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II. POINTERS

1. Wild Duck Review

Just out: a new issue of Wild Duck Review, titled "End of Human Nature?"
"Editor Casey Walker extends the critique of new, transformative tech-
nologies beyond issues of safety, efficacy, and rights. Can we anticipate
a threshold of no return for human and wild nature as we use technologies
to create biotic and abiotic matter from scratch?"

Also now available: WDR's last issue has been published by Sierra Club
Books, as Made Not Born: The Troubling World of Biotechnology.

For descriptions and ordering information, see <www.wildduckreview.com>
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2. James Watson and Matt Ridley in San Francisco February 8

James Watson will speak at San Francisco's Herbst Theater February 8,
"in conversation with" science writer Matt Ridley, author of Genome:
The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. The program is part of a
series sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences. For information,
415-392-4400.
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III. ABOUT THE TECHNO-EUGENICS EMAIL NEWSLETTER

This newsletter stems from the work of academics, activists, and others
in the San Francisco Bay Area who are concerned about the direction of
the new human genetic technologies.

We support technologies that serve the public interest. We oppose
those--including human germline engineering and human cloning--that foster
inequality, discrimination, objectification, and the commodification of
human genes and tissues.

This newsletter is intended to alert and inform concerned individuals
about the new technologies and the techno-eugenic vision. For at least
the next several months, the newsletter will be irregular (once every
four to six weeks) and informal. We'd welcome feedback, and suggestions
about focus and format. A web site will be coming soon.

Marcy Darnovsky will moderate. Send submissions to her via the email
address below.

Unless we hear from you, we'll keep you on this list. Please let us
know if you don't want to receive the newsletter--we won't feel
rejected! On the other hand, feel free to forward it to others who
may be interested, and encourage them to subscribe by reply to Marcy.
If you're a new subscriber, let us know if you'd like to receive
back issues.

Marcy Darnovsky, Ph.D. Richard Hayes, M.A.
teel@adax.com rhayes@publicmediacenter.org