GET ready for a new wave of medical tourism鈥攄esperately ill people heading to countries where cloning and embryonic stem cell technologies offer them treatments that are forbidden at home.
That could be the consequence of the growing division between countries that have given these technologies the green light and others that are trying to prohibit them. Therapeutic cloning, for instance, promises to yield new鈥攊f expensive鈥攖reatments for everything from Alzheimer鈥檚 and Parkinson鈥檚 to diabetes and autoimmune disorders.
Last week news leaked out that Chinese scientists had made a big advance, harvesting embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from dozens of cloned human embryos. Yet while Britain is granting the first licences to carry out similar research, the US is pushing the UN to ban therapeutic cloning and Australia might block the creation of new ESC lines.
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If the trend continues, people who live in anti-ESC countries will have no option but to go abroad if they needed treatments that involve therapeutic cloning, says Robin Alta Charo, a legal expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 鈥淚f you want it, you better have the air fare,鈥� she says.
While a UN ban is unlikely, the US government is not only discouraging research on its own soil, but is also considering laws that prohibit the import of cells derived from cloning. This would stop American doctors from offering any new treatments developed elsewhere.
The controversy centres on whether it鈥檚 justified to destroy five-day-old human embryos to obtain ESCs. And there鈥檚 an additional worry surrounding therapeutic cloning, in which the ESCs would be derived from a cloned embryo of a patient to yield immune-compatible tissues: the technology could be hijacked by rogue scientists wanting to create cloned babies.
As long as the benefits remained largely theoretical, the debate had seemed deadlocked. The few cloned human embryos that had been created hadn鈥檛 grown past a few cells, far too early to harvest ESCs. Then The Wall Street Journal reported that Lu Guangxiu of the Xiangya Medical College has derived dozens of ESC lines from cloned human embryos at the 200-cell stage. At least three other Chinese groups are rumoured to have made similar or greater advances.
The Chinese team appears to have benefited from looser regulation, which allowed Lu to collect many human eggs for her research. The difficulty of obtaining eggs has held up research in the West. Although none of the results has appeared in a peer-reviewed publication, scientists familiar with the Chinese work told 快猫短视频 the claims are very credible.
Experts believe major papers have been submitted to Western journals. 鈥淚 hope they are published soon,鈥� says Xiangzhong (Jerry) Yang, a Chinese-born cloning scientist now at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. 鈥淭heir work is the most advanced out there and they should let the world know about it.鈥�
Meanwhile, researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have just shown for the first time that therapeutic cloning and genetic therapy can be used together to partially correct a serious immune defect in mice. The team obtained ESCs from cloned embryos created from the mice鈥檚 tail cells, corrected the genetic defect in the cells and injected the new cell line back into the mice.
The study is an important proof of principle. Team member William Rideout thinks that if the science continues to advance at such a blistering pace, critics and lawmakers are bound to change tack. 鈥淚f we get good and effective treatments in animals, it will overwhelm the opposition,鈥� he says. 鈥淗ow could you remain against it?鈥�
But it might be too late by the time that happens, warns Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology based in Massachusetts. 鈥淐hina or another country may lock up all the key intellectual property in the field.鈥�
