¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

AT THE END of last year, BASF, the West German chemicals company, announced
where it would build its new research centre for genetic engineering. The
centre, together with a pilot production plant, would not be in West Germany,
as originally planned, but in Boston in the US.

It was not the first time that a biotechnology company had rejected
West Germany for the US. In 1981, the pharmaceuticals company, Hoechst,
which is based in Frankfurt, preferred to invest $70 million for research
into gene technology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston rather
than in Germany.

The reasons behind these two decisions were completely different. When
Hoechst decided to go to Boston, the company complained about the ‘poor
density of good German research in the field of recombinant technology’.
The company’s decision was a warning shot across the bows of biotechnological
research. West Germany has poured hundreds of millions of Deutschmarks into
biotechnological research since then, and the situation has changed greatly
for the better.

Unlike Hoechst, BASF, which is based in Ludwigshaven, left no doubt
that it would have preferred to invest its $60 million in Germany rather
than in the US. Spokesmen from the company praised German molecular biology
as ‘internationally competitive’. Instead of concern about the quality of
German research, something else was bothering the company.

One of BASF’s managers, Ingo Paetzke, declared: ‘West Germany is no
longer the optimal place for a commitment in biotechnology.’ Shocked by
the company’s decision, conservative and liberal politicians in the coalition
government rushed to find a scapegoat. They blamed the country’s Green movement
for the new drain of research funds to the US.

Paetzke’s view was slightly different. Speaking to the press two months
before the company’s decision, he listed almost a dozen laws or regulations
that, in his opinion, made the life of a biotechnology company very difficult
in Germany. The coalition government had drafted and passed all the regulations
concerning research into organisms which carry foreign or additional genes,
and the production of such ‘recombinant’ organisms. The laws did not result
from pressure by Green politicians in parliament.

The most annoying regulation for biotechnology companies in West Germany
was a new version of the law on industrial emissions. Prepared by Klaus
Topfer, the environment minister, this law came into force in September
1988, two months before BASF announced its move. The revised legislation
made it necessary for companies planning to produce recombinant products
to seek public approval. ‘The law makes the planning process for a company
completely unpredictable,’ Paetzke said.

Once the law had provided ‘Green power’ with the legal tools of objection,
environmentalists began to influence the course of events. Environmental
groups, some of them headed by Green politicians, have successfully blocked
most new biotechnology projects financed by industry in West Germany.

Hoechst, for example, faced a four-year delay until it finally received
official approval for its factory to produce recombinant insulin in July
1988. Even now, the law allows the company to operate the new plant for
a test period of only two years. After this time, Hoechst has to seek final
approval. In the meantime, one of Hoechst’s competitors in the insulin business,
the American company Eli Lilly, has chosen to build its second factory for
the manufacture of recombinant insulin in Europe.

Ironically, the company plans to site the plant close to the French
city of Strasbourg, only a few kilometres from the Franco-German border.
In France, the approval process is much less rigid. Even in Denmark, where
public opposition to gene technology seems to be as strong as in Germany,
Novo Nordisk is producing recombinant insulin in genetically manipulated
yeast.

One of Hoechst’s subsidiaries, Behring-werke, based in Marburg in central
Germany, has also felt the force of the new law. In September 1988, it sought
approval to make recombinant erythropoietin, a growth factor for red blood
cells. The company is unlikely to begin production for a long time. FraGen,
an environmental group with a very mixed composition, put forward hundreds
of objections to Behringwerke’s proposed plant.

The same happened to the pharmaceuticals company Grunenthal, which is
based near Aachen, close to the Belgian border. Grunenthal wanted to build
a plant to make saruplase, a substance that can dissolve blood clots. The
company recently withdrew its original application after dozens of objections
from environmental groups. Likewise, last April, BASF was forced to close
down its experimental plant producing recombinant tumour necrosis factor,
a potential treatment for cancer and inflammatory conditions.

At the moment, only one organisation produces a recombinant substance
on a large scale in West Germany with legal approval. A company called Dr
Karl Thomae, in Biberach in the southwest of Germany, makes recombinant
tissue plasminogen activator, a drug that dissolves blood clots, from genetically
manipulated hamster cells.

Public opposition to gene technology in West Germany has proved to be
at least as effective as the protests against nuclear power in the 1970s.
The organisation Gen-ethisches Netzwerk (gene-ethical network), based in
Berlin, says that there are about 60 groups in Germany which are opposed
to different aspects of gene technology. They range from veterinarians and
consumer groups, who are opposed to giving bovine growth hormone to cows
to increase milk production, to groups opposing the deliberate release of
recombinant organisms. One example of the latter is Berber beobachten Petunien
(citizens watching petunias).

What has changed dramatically since the early days of environmental
protests is the strategy of the groups. Large-scale demonstrations are a
thing of the past. Environmentalists today do not gather hundreds of thousands
of people to express their feelings.

The new movement has the slogan ‘smart is beautiful’. The groups use
science and expert opinions to back them up during the approval process
that companies have to go through. ‘In many cases, participating citizens
are more competent than the politicians or the administrators that have
to approve the project,’ says Michael Braungart. He is an engineer and chemist
based in Hamburg, who specialises in environmental technology and who used
to work for the Green party and Greenpeace.

The strategy of the opposition groups has proved very successful. It
makes it very costly for a company to obtain final approval, in terms of
both time and money. Hoechst, for example, not only lost time in beginning
its production of recombinant insulin; it also lost its chance to capture
its share of the European market. Until recently, Hoechst could make human
insulin only by extracting porcine insulin from the pancreases of pigs (which
are limited in supply) and chemically modifying the molecule to make human
insulin. This method does not allow Hoechst to produce enough human insulin
to export the product to countries other than Austria and Switzerland. Novo
Nordisk and Eli Lilly, which can make recombinant human insulin, are limited
not by supply but by the capacity of their production facilities.

Environmental groups that oppose companies’ plans because they object
to recombinant methods of production often ask: ‘Can you exclude any risk?’
A spokesman from Hoechst, Helga Hennemann, says: ‘Scientifically, it is
impossible to exclude any risk that might be involved in a process. The
only thing we can say is that the risk of the process is reduced to the
absolute minimum.’

The increasing trend of German companies to move to other countries,
where it is easier to establish new technologies, occurs not only in biotechnology.
The most spectacular decision in this respect was that of VEBA, West Germany’s
leading operator of nuclear power plants. For several years, the West German
nuclear industry, the national government in Bonn and the regional government
in Munich supported the idea of a nationally operated nuclear reprocessing
plant in Wackersdorf, Bavaria.

Run to ruin

The building site at Wackersdorf was for many years the focus of violent
controversy in Germany. In April this year, Rudolf von Bennigsen-Foerder,
director of VEBA, announced that the German nuclear industry could save
up to 8 billion Deutschmarks a year if a plant at The Hague handled the
material, instead of it being processed in Wackersdorf. It took only a week
for the West German government to turn Wackersdorf from a number one priority
and a ‘national necessity’ into a political ruin.

It may not be long before research on human embryos joins the list of
scientific and technological activities incompatible with the political
atmosphere in West Germany. Proposed legislation controlling research on
embryos could put the country at odds with other European states, including
Britain. If the West German government’s draft law on embryo research and
in vitro fertilisation comes into force in 1991, research on human embryos,
similar to that already carried out in Britain, will become a criminal offence
in Germany. Research of a kind that, in other realms, could win Nobel prizes
could send German researchers to jail for up to five years.

Embryo research has become a pressing political issue for West Germany’s
Greens. In this field of research, however, unlike those of nuclear power
or gene technology, they have not been campaigning alone. Opposition to
embryo research ranges from the anti-abortion movement at one end, supported
by conservatives and those with religious motives, to Greens and feminists.
Although the different groups used very different arguments, they were at
one with their desire to ban experiments on human embryos.

Strange coalitions evolved in Germany during the fight over the draft
law to regulate embryo research. Last year, for example, the Christian Democrats
who control the regional government of Baden-Wurttemberg agreed, with the
Green party, on a statement calling for a ban on embryo research, ‘even
on dead bodies’. They made this move after it became public that a hospital
was using material from stillborn fetuses for endocrinological research
– research that the local ethics committee had earlier approved.

Surprisingly, science did not play a major role in the discussions in
Germany over the pros and cons of embryo research. ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs in France
and Britain have argued that embryo research may make it possible to diagnose
genetic diseases before the embryo becomes implanted in the uterus, for
example. One instance is the article by Anne McLaren, of the Mammalian Development
Unit of the University of London, which appeared in ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ (‘Can
we diagnose genetic disease in pre-embryos?’, 10 December 1987, p 42). In
contrast, I have been unable to find a single article written by a German
geneticist, which tried to explain the prospects for such diagnosis.

German geneticists, like those in other countries, do discuss the possibilities
for diagnosis of genetic disease in embryos before implantation. But it
is not a topic that they like to talk about in public or with journalists.
Christine Fonatsch, from the Institute of Human Genetics of the University
of Lubeck, for example, says it is ‘too early’ to talk about preimplantation
diagnosis, although she attends international meetings where the topic is
on the agenda.

German scientists failed to defend a broad case for research on human
embryos in the face of the proposed law. The two leading research organisations,
the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Max Planck Society, wanted
embryo research restricted to ‘high-ranking projects in cancer and AIDS
research’. The statements they published after the first draft of the law
appeared avoided going into details over which types of projects they would
permit. Nor did the institutions specify what they meant by ‘high-ranking
±è°ù´ÇÂá±ð³¦³Ù²õ’.

One explanation for the differences between Anglo-American scientists
and their German colleagues in defending embryo research is the history
of German medicine and genetics during the Third Reich, which permitted
eugenics and experiments on humans. Eugenics in Germany is a loaded term.
Many people know it better as the Nazi’s Rassenhygiene (‘racial hygiene’).

German scientists regard preimplant-ation diagnosis as a possible first
step towards eugenics. In 1987, Erwin Chargaff wrote in Nature that reproductive
medicine and embryo research could end up with a ‘molecular Auschwitz, in
which valuable enzymes, hormones and so on will be extracted instead of
gold teeth’ (21 May 1987, p 199). Chargaff, professor of biochemistry at
Columbia University, was forced to leave Europe by the rise of the Nazis.
He wrote: ‘we can already see the beginning of human husbandry. . .’ Not
surprisingly, his article fuelled opposition against embryo research in
Germany.

Old excuses

In December 1987, Rudolph Degkwitz, a psychiatrist and the former head
of the neurological hospital of the University of Freiburg, wrote an ‘open
letter to the physicians of Germany’. In it, he drew a parallel between
the arguments that Nazi physicians used to justify their experiments on
humans in concentration camps, and the arguments that scientists currently
use to support embryo research: that sacrificing one human life can save
another. Degkwitz, and others, have criticised those who back embryo research
for using this type of utilitarian argument.

The legal situation on embryo research in Germany today is revealing.
In 1975, the West German Supreme Court decided to allow abortion during
the first three months of pregnancy for medical or social reasons. In another
ruling, the court said that, from 14 days after fertilisation, the point
when the embryo normally becomes firmly fixed to the wall of the uterus,
the embryo has ‘human dignity’ and all the legal rights of an individual.
This would exclude embryos of this age from becoming the subject of experimentation.

This decision theoretically opened up a 14-day window for research on
embryos, or ‘pre-embryos’, as McLaren and many other researchers call them.
The DFG says, however, that it has so far approved no such projects and,
according to a spokesman for the DFG, not only for ethical reasons. So perhaps
the poor quality of the science, rather than the ethical implications or
a local ban is the reason why no embryo research (of the kind that eventually
discards the embryos) has been carried out in Germany so far.

Dieter Krebs from the gynaecological hospital of the University of Bonn,
offers an alternative explanation. He went through the international scientific
literature on human embryo research and could not find a single project
that would meet his standards for a ‘high-ranking project’.

Politicians from all parties attacked the DFG, because the society favoured
producing human embryos that would later be discarded for ‘high-ranking
projects with clinical relevance’. All political parties criticised this
policy: they said that because no one could define what it meant, anything
could happen. It was a ‘blank cheque’ for research in a field not generally
accepted by the public. German scientists will have a difficult time in
1991 if the draft legislation becomes law.

Rolf Zell is a freelance journalist based in Stuttgart.