BRITAIN鈥橲 only researcher licensed to experiment on human stem cells from
embryos is keen to get the green light for tissue research following the
publication of the Donaldson report
(鈥淧ut it to the vote鈥�). Austin Smith, director of the Centre
for Genome Research at the University of Edinburgh, stresses that only through
research on stem cells from human embryos can we learn how to refashion tissue
without creating embryos in the process.
Smith is licensed to experiment on human stem cells in Britain because his
objective is to improve infertility treatment鈥攐ne of five categories of
research for which human embryos up to 14 days old can legally be used. He finds
it frustrating that the cells he extracts for infertility experiments can鈥檛 be
used to develop tissues for transplant.
Smith worries that the current limits on government-funded embryo research in
Britain and the US push the research into the American private sector, which is
not governed by regulations. 鈥淚 want to know I鈥檓 going forward with public
support and public confidence, and that everything I do will be transparent and
published, and not part of some commercial enterprise,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 vitally
important to have a public effort too.鈥�
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One way to bypass the ban would be to import ready-isolated human stem cells
from abroad for experimentation. But Smith says even this might not work: 鈥淵ou
don鈥檛 know what the cells might have been treated with or their history.鈥�
He hopes it might soon be possible to grow tissue without creating a
short-lived human embryo in the process. The holy grail of stem cell research
would be to pluck cells directly from a patient, 鈥渞eprogram鈥� them with chemicals
and convert them straight into tissue for transplant.
But the chemical recipes for this direct cell reprogramming can only be
learned through experiments on stem cells from human embryos, Smith says. Animal
cells can never reveal how to reprogram human cells because they use different
chemical signals. Only by isolating the substances from empty human eggs that
rewind adult cells back to zero鈥攚hich is what happened when Dolly the
sheep was cloned鈥攃an we learn how to do the same thing by chemical
manipulation, he says.