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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