CANADA: Embryos And The Law

[Murray Charters <mcharters@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Embryos and the law
Thursday, October 30, 2003 - Page A22

The problem with the bill on assisted human reproduction adopted Tuesday by the 
Commons is not that it goes too far. It
is that it does not go far enough.

Its provision to create an agency to let researchers experiment on surplus 
embryos from fertility clinics ran into
heavy opposition from a minority of Liberals and from Canadian Alliance MPs, 
who felt it morally wrong to use human
embryos in this way. (The Bloc Québécois opposed the bill because, quelle 
surprise, it felt the federal agency would
intrude on Quebec's jurisdiction.)

The irony is that the federal Medical Research Council issued guidelines in 
1987 permitting experiments on those
embryos (as long as they were not kept alive past 14 days from conception) and 
that the bill would place new limits on
that activity. So, if the bill dies on the order paper because of delays by the 
critics, the critics will actually have
made it easier to experiment on the embryos.

No, the real trouble with the bill is that it blocks a potentially crucial 
avenue of medical research that might
alleviate the suffering of a great many people with degenerative diseases such 
as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. That
avenue is somatic cell nuclear transfer, also known as human therapeutic 
cloning (to distinguish it from the
reproductive kind that could theoretically lead to living human clones, and 
should be outlawed). It involves replacing
the nucleus of a fertilized human egg with a donor's DNA, encouraging the 
resulting embryo to divide into at least 100
cells, and then removing the stem cells, a process that kills the embryo. Stem 
cells are building blocks with the
potential to become any cell in the body: blood, bone, skin, the lot.

The hope is that one day patients, having donated their DNA, would be treated 
with stem cells their bodies would be
less likely to reject. It is not the only avenue of hope. There is a chance 
that adult stem cells, which can be
extracted from the patient's own body, might make the embryonic process 
unnecessary. But it is as yet unclear whether
the adult cells are up to the task.

Certainly the creation and quick destruction of early human cells raises moral 
questions, which must be weighed against
the good that could come of this research. For one thing, it would be essential 
to enforce the 1987 rule that no embryo
could be allowed to survive past 14 days. Before that point, it has not begun 
to develop even a rudimentary nervous
system. Given that protection, we would argue that human therapeutic cloning 
should be explicitly permitted in law, as
it has been in Britain.

The bill that was passed by the Commons yesterday -- which has yet to receive 
Senate approval, and will probably go
into suspended animation when Jean Chrétien prorogues Parliament -- contains 
much that is admirable, including a long
overdue move to regulate fertility clinics in this country. But it can't be 
accused of going too far on embryonic stem-
cell research. It stops at the first hurdle.

SOURCE: The Globe and Mail


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