Quote of the Week:
Today's market is "totally manipulated" by the major economic and political powers, "is blind to the poor, who have needs but do not represent demand, blind to the future generations who are not present, and blind to creation, to life" - Jos' Lutzenberger, former environment minister of Brazil
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1. Selling cloning in the naked economy - ngin
2. HUMAN CLONE NOT WORTH DEVELOPING? - Edmonton Sun
3. Patients drive cloning research - Montreal Gazette
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1. Selling cloning in the naked economy
Why has embronic cloning taken off in Britain, "where scientists are regarded with suspicion", rather than elsewhere? Answer: the big pharmas stayed in the background forging relationships with patients' groups who were helped to see the "vision":
``I'm not saying the drug companies `bought' the British patients' groups, but they were very good at exchanging information and making sure the patients had all the latest research news available to them. They shared their vision of what is possible with the patients, and together they dared to think big thoughts and promote big visions.'' -Erik Larsen, a Danish cystic-fibrosis sufferer who is seeking a "working relationship" betwen pharma co.s and patients groups elsewhere in Europe (see item 2)
Investors are drawn into biotech ventures in a similar fashion, according to Alberta embryologist, Brian Shea (item 1):
"In biotech, the selling point is the potential of the technology - not what it can actually do at the time. Once you end up with a real product, you frequently realize that it's not going to do what you expected it to do." -Alberta embryologist, Brian Shea
You only have to look at gene therapy to see what Shea is getting at. According to Henri Termeer, chief executive of U.S. biotech firm Genzyme General Corp, "Since the early 1990s, the amount of money spent by commercial operations in developing this very exciting field is at least $3 billion".
Successes from "this very exciting field"? Nil Deaths? Several Major adverse effects? At least a thousand.
''In the past, if you didn't deliver to a customer, they might tell a few of their friends. Today when you don't deliver, it's on the Web.'' - James Schiro, chief executive of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Schiro calls this phenomenon "the naked economy", but outside of agbiotech the emperor's transgenic new clothes are still mostly clinging on.
For more on human genetics: http://members.tripod.com/~ngin/gmhuman.htm
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2. HUMAN CLONE NOT WORTH DEVELOPING?
BY DOUG BEAZLEY
The Edmonton Sun, Monday, January 29, 2001
Here's humbling news: in the big-money world of biotech, a cloned cow would be worth a lot more cash than a cloned human being. While gobs of development cash await the scientist who finds a cheap, reliable way of cloning cattle, says Alberta embryologist Brian Shea, nobody's going to get rich cloning people. Not soon, at any rate. "I can't see it," he said yesterday. "I can't see any commercial application from making multiple copies of a person. "You can clone Michael Jordan if you want. But you can't guarantee he'll play basketball, let alone be any good at it."
As a scientist, Shea's medium is cattle, not people. But he knows something about the commercial limits of cloning technology. For six years his former employer, Alta Genetics, tried to make cloning pay. They couldn't do it.
SELLING POINT IS POTENTIAL
"In biotech, the selling point is the potential of the technology - not what it can actually do at the time," said Shea. "Once you end up with a real product, you frequently realize that it's not going to do what you expected it to do."
Which is what happened with Alta Genetics, the former parent of Shea's current company, Alta Embryo Group. In 1986, backed by a Montreal investor group, Alta Genetics started researching a cheap, reliable way to clone cattle.
Why clone cattle? For the same reason people have been breeding cattle for millennia - to grow animals that provide more meat, or more milk. Top-quality breeding bulls can command $50 for a single dose of semen; embryos from valuable cattle bloodlines can fetch prices of $50,000 to $100,000 on international markets. Imagine the kind of money you could make if you could cheaply clone costly breeding stock - make as many copies as you wanted. The mind boggles. That's what the Montreal investors were buying.
Alta Genetics brought Danish scientist Dr. Steen Willadsen as their head of research. Willadsen had already done the world's first cloning of a farm animal (a sheep) in 1984.
"If you take an embryo and cut it in two, you can make twins ... artificially," said Shea. "That's cloning. "What we did was take a (cattle) embryo of maybe 32 cells and an unfertilized egg, take the nuclear material out of the egg and fuse the genetic material from one of the 32 cells into that egg. That's the method we were using in the '80s and '90s."
But Alta Genetics' cloning technique turned out to be too expensive and too unreliable to do what the company wanted it to do: turn out numberless copies of perfect cows.
Between 1986 and 1992, when Willadsen left to do research in the States, the company turned out just over 100 cloned calves. It never managed to get more than three clones from a single embryo - something that crippled the commercial applications of the process. And then along came Dolly. In 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first large animal to be cloned from an adult animal's cell, rather than an embryo cell. Since adults have a lot more cells than embryos do, the 'Dolly' method opened up the prospect of making many more copies of an animal known to have the right kind of traits. "An adult is a known quantity, and you can sell a known quantity," said Shea. "And with adult cells it's easier to introduce (genetic) changes into the cell, because you've got so many cells to work with."
The "payoff" with adult cell cloning, said Shea, is in the drug business. Someday, cloning firms will be breeding cattle genetically engineered to produce valuable pharmaceuticals in their milk.
NOT YET COST-EFFECTIVE
But because of the 'Dolly' method's poor track record of actually producing pregnancies that go to full term, it's still not cost-effective for the cattle-breeding business.
Which is why Alta Genetics got out of cloning in 1992. In 1998 it sold its embryo division - Alta Embryo Group - to its employees. These days, Alta Genetics is concentrating on its bread-and-butter business: frozen bull semen. Shea said that, ethical objections aside, human cloning will never become widespread because it can't be controlled.
Valuable human traits, like intelligence, are based on such a mysterious combination of nature and nurture that there's no way of guaranteeing results. Einstein's clone might be a brilliant physicist. Or he might end up working in a car wash. "So many things go into human nature," said Shea. "It's not like breeding cows at all."
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3. Patients drive cloning research
BRUCE WALLACE
Montreal Gazette, Monday, January 29, 2001 EDITION
So why has embryonic stem-cell research taken off in Britain, where scientists are regarded with suspicion, rather than elsewhere? Until this week, hanging out your sign as a biotechnology scientist in Britain seemed to be a poor - possibly even life-threatening - career choice.
Animal-rights terrorists had used violence and intimidation to come within a whisker of driving one of the largest drug-testing companies into bankruptcy. Other activists were showing their hostility to genetically modified foods by vandalizing fields where modified crops were being tested and, if arrested, were being acquitted by juries sympathetic to their cause. In the past year, British distrust of what the people in lab coats might be up to has become so deep and widespread that Prime Minister Tony Blair felt obliged to warn the country against falling into the grip of an ``anti-science'' hysteria. So British scientists breathed huge sighs of relief when the House of Lords voted by a surprisingly comfortable margin recently to legalize the highly controversial technique of cloning human embryos for research. The move thrust Britain into the forefront of the cutting-edge science that creates human embryos to extract their nascent stem cells. Stem cells are in huge demand by medical researchers anxious to steer those undeveloped cells into specialized ones - such as blood, organ or nerve cells - which might grow into new body parts that could repair or replace damaged ones. But many people are opposed to the artificial creation of a human life form - no matter how primitive - simply for the purpose of mining its cells. The result has been a deep ethical divide that shows no easy way to be bridged, and that has left governments from Europe to Washington and Ottawa paralyzed over how to respond to the promising new technology. Yet the British, despite their horror at any tinkering with the genetic form of wheat or corn, have now given stem-cell research the go-ahead. The reason, according to experts, is because those who desperately want the technology succeeded in defining the debate as one where the sympathetic ends - cures for such scourges as Parkinson's disease, cystic fibrosis, or cancer - justified any uncomfortable means to acquire them. Took Away Fictional Spectre ``People here said simply we want this technique because it offers cures for these diseases,'' said Keith Campbell, the blunt, affable scientist whose innovative thinking led to the historic cloning of Dolly, the sheep at the Roslin Institute, just outside Edinburgh.
``GM foods failed because it got caught up in anti-big business emotion. ``We took away the frightening science-fiction spectre of cloning, proving to people we were not going to be growing babies and keeping them in the cupboard to take their organs,'' said Campbell, who is setting up a new School of Biosciences at the University of Nottingham. ``It was a matter of telling people of its advantages, educating them, and explaining what we might be able to achieve.'' But the advocates of embryonic stem cells learned from the mistakes made by agribusiness companies like Monsanto in the GM food fiasco. This time, the drug and bio-tech companies stepped aside to allow patients' groups to spearhead the political battle. ``The most important factor in our success was that we did not leave it to pharmaceutical companies or big business to promote it, but let the patients lead,'' said Simon Best, another Roslin alumnus who now chairs the ethics committee of Bio, the American bio-industry association. ``And we were patient,'' Best said. ``Monsanto showed everyone you cannot launch a surprise into the European or U.K. media and political environment - you'll get eaten up.'' But to those worried about the ethics of cloning embryos, that approach circumvents the tough metaphysical questions it raises.
`We are now facing the profound question about how we transmit human life, and we have to be careful to understand that we could destroy the human spirit,'' said Margaret Somer-ville of Montreal's McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. ``What has happened in Britain is a totally intense individual approach that says: `But I'm only trying to fix up their heart.' It argues there is nothing inherently wrong. It only depends what good I'm trying to do,'' she said. But for many patients suffering from incurable illnesses and who have now had hopes raised where before there was only despair, that is exactly what has been missing from the debate outside Britain. Erik Larsen, a Danish cystic-fibrosis sufferer who has started a pan-European umbrella group of patients' groups, complains that Europe is ``ages behind the British'' in forging a working relationship between patients and drug companies.
``I'm not saying the drug companies `bought' the British patients' groups, but they were very good at exchanging information and making sure the patients had all the latest research news available to them,'' he said. ``They shared their vision of what is possible with the patients, and together they dared to think big thoughts and promote big visions.'' Larsen complains that European countries have submerged the hope for cures in the morass of ethical arguments. He argues that Europe needs to get on with pooling resources if it hopes to unlock the potential of stem cells. EU Divided on Research But even the most ardent Europeans find the idea of a common policy wishful thinking. The European Union itself, while striking committees to examine approaches to embryonic stem-cell research, has acknowledged that ethical issues will always remain the purview of national governments. And the response to cloning embryos reflects the usual European checkerboard of opinion. Countries with large Roman Catholic populations such as Italy tend to be firmly opposed, although Catholic Spain is divided. And countries with strong Green parties tend to reflect that party's deep ethical opposition. Germany is a particular case. Mindful of its gruesome Nazi legacy of eugenics experiments, the country passed a embryo-protection law in 1991. And several ministers in the current government responded to the new British law by recommitting the country to stopping at this ``ethical boundary.'' But Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, while sticking closely to the traditional German script, has also cautioned against prematurely tying the hands of German scientists and industry, suggesting that the changing technology may require revisiting the 1991 law.
``Of course Germany will always be more careful than other countries because German doctors did so many things against human dignity,'' said Peter Liese, a 35-year-old German member of the European Parliament who also holds a doctorate in human genetics. ``But we are now more liberal. The historical argument is still there, but it is not the only argument in Germany today. Many of us share the same reservations about cloning as people in the rest of the world,'' he said. Liese heads a parliamentary study of the issue. Although he pronounces himself broadly in favour of genetic research, he argues cloning human embryos is a step too far. ``I don't think the future of biotechnology depends on working with embryonic stem cells,'' he said, holding out the widely held hope that researchers will find ways to reprogram adult stem cells, which would alleviate the need for embryos. But he also admits that trying to come up with a pan-European policy now is like bolting the barn door with the British filly long gone. ``Yeah, the British have sort of changed the rules,'' he said. ``But we need to discuss this anyway,'' he argued. ``I can't accept that it is possible to create a European free market, but on the question of the future of human beings, we have no common policy.'' -Bruce Wallace's E-mail is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.