Sydney Morning Herald, September 11, 2005
Human embryos have been created in Britain for the first time without using sperm.
This raises some pretty big issues.
If you can make an embryo without sperm, at what point in that process is human life considered to be created? What does “conception” mean in this scenario? If you accord the status of human life to a blastocyct created by conventional conception (and I think there are probably mixed views about that even within the Christian community), do you make the same judgement about one created by “tricking” a cell into dividing? And if not, what does that imply about the humanity of a blastocyst created by conventional conception?
But there’s more. Assuming it is technically possible to achieve full term pregnancy by this method (not that anyone is actually proposing this as far as I know), Is it ethical to create a person who has no father? If you consider family to be something instituted by God, then the answer would have to be no.
And if it’s true that a creating a father-less person is exposed to the same genetic problems as inbreeding, is it ethical to do so? I think this last question is probably the most straightforward – no.
Article follows:
Human embryos have been created in Britain for the first time without using sperm.
The “virgin conception” embryos mark a new way to grow a woman’s cells for a range of treatments.
The development, revealed by an Edinburgh research team, is the second in as many days in which British scientists have pushed back the boundaries of reproductive science.
On Thursday, approval was given to experiments to create embryos from three women to develop a novel treatment for a class of genetic disease.
The new work will shed fresh light on hereditary diseases, the problems caused by cloning and on what happens when the regulation of genes in development goes awry.
The human embryos in question result not from a fertilised egg but from an egg that has been tricked into dividing, Paul De Sousa told the British Association meeting in Dublin.
Dr De Sousa did the work at the nearby Roslin Institute, where Dolly the sheep was cloned.
Dr De Sousa used about 300 human eggs to create half a dozen blastocysts – human embryos that comprise about 50 cells, which can be used as a source of stem cells that can be grown into all 200 or so cell types in the body.
Although attempts to grow stem cells from the blastocysts have not yet succeeded as they have in non-human primates, Dr De Sousa was confident it was only a matter of time.
The embryos were grown by a process called parthenogenesis – “virgin birth” in Greek.
Although most plants can multiply by parthenogenesis, humans do not because a gene-regulation called imprinting
ensures genes from the mother and father must contribute if development in the womb is to reach term.
There are no plans to implant the embryos to create a pregnancy, Dr De Sousa said.
Parthenogenesis also offers the opportunity to grow cells from a woman who is suffering from a serious genetic disease, to help study that disease.
But associate professor Richard Boyd, deputy director of Monash Immunology and Stem Cells Laboratory at Monash University, said he did not believe the breakthrough would provide sustained long-term treatment of disease in humans.
Dr Boyd praised the discovery but said the embryos “contained only one copy of each of the genes of the mother, which could expose diseased cells in the same way in-breeding exposes diseased cells”.