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Two
Ethical
Advisers to Advanced Cell Have Resigned
The Worcester company, Advanced Cell Technology, would not divulge to Massachusetts News the identity of its ethics advisers. However, we have learned from other sources the identity and background of four of the original eight members. Two of these advisers have resigned in protest over the company’s policies. This seems to confirm a warning from the American Life League about the honesty and objectivity of such boards. Dr. West confessed in the Wall Street Journal a week before his July 2001 Senate testimony: “I have a great burden on my shoulders. The worst thing in the world is if we as a company screw this up.” In theory, his company’s ethics board will ensure nothing serious goes wrong. So we may wonder why West is so worried. The Wall Street Journal reported that “the ethics group didn’t argue over whether embryo cloning was right or wrong” at its first meeting in August 2000. “‘We didn’t spend an enormous amount of time on that. We wouldn’t have been there unless we thought that the research had important benefits,’ Dr. Green [head of the board] says. Instead, the panel focused on how Advanced Cell could acquire and use human eggs in an ethical way.” The lack of objectivity and honesty on the part of such ethics boards in the bioethics industry is described by the American Life League: “The field of bioethics … has offered to do one thing, but done another. It offered to mediate a dialogue between bio-voices and ethics-voices, between medical and biological researchers on one side, and the traditional proponents of ethics on the other. In fact, though, the field has not mediated a dialogue; it has developed a body of argumentation defending medical and scientific developments, and deflecting criticism.” Wesley Smith has written in the Weekly Standard: “In order to have clout within the bioethics movement and seriously affect the discourse that is its hallmark, one must subscribe to its intellectual underpinnings. Pro-lifers have no influence, by definition, and those whose advocacy is rooted in religion are usually ignored. Mainstream bioethics reached a consensus long ago that religious values are divisive in a pluralistic society and thus have little place in the formulation of public policy. Those who believe in abortion rights but also hold that all born humans are equally endowed with moral worth, along with those who subscribe to the “do no harm” ethos of the Hippocratic oath, have little impact, since mainstream bioethics rejects Hippocratic medicine as paternalistic and shrugs off equal human moral worth as a relic of the West's religious past.” Another critic, Thomas Murray of the Hastings Center (a bioethics think tank), has said: “The highest purpose [of bioethics boards] is probably to foster public debate and understanding about the ethical implications … before the controversial experiment is done, and ethics committees should not be used as an afterthought … Meeting in secret and not revealing members’ identities is not accountability.” Known Members of
Board
The four known members of the company’s original board are: Arthur Caplan, Glenn McGee, Ronald Green and Anne Kiessling. Arthur Caplan, bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, resigned from the company’s ethics board last summer. “He worried about widespread societal opposition to creating embryos specifically for research. And he says that while Advanced Cell is using his name, it wasn’t seeking his advice.” Glenn McGee is a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. He served on the ethics board until last fall, “when he learned that the company had begun to clone both animal and human embryos without consulting its ethics advisors. … But since word of McGee’s resignation surfaced [this July], he has been speaking his mind about corporate ethics boards, calling them ‘rubber stamps’ created primarily to give an aura of acceptability to anything a company decides to do. … West said that neither he nor … Green … felt it necessary to tell the other members [about the endangered-animal project]” but claimed there had been a debate for a year about embryo cloning. McGee said ACT “has done everything it can to keep everything it does quiet as long as possible. They are protecting their intellectual property interest rather than the public interest.” He “complained that the company … was too focused on amassing patents.” He has also pointed out the ineffectual power of the government to control the bioethics industry: “There is no easy way to have oversight of stem cells. I am an ethicist on the FDA’s genetic panel, and the FDA has neither the money nor the staffing” to monitor stem cell research. Ronald Green is Professor of Religion, and Professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values at Dartmouth College, and head of the company’s ethics board. He served as a member of the National Institutes of Health human embryo research panel and took part in writing their guidelines for federally funded research on the human embryo. He also served as an ethicist for the Human Genome Project. Green has said that the company “will not let any of the [cloned human] cells develop past 13 days, and that at this early stage of development, the grouping of cells should not be considered an embryo.” He wrote an editorial defending Roe v. Wade and stated his “belief that the early embryo or fetus lacks many of the qualities we normally identify with being a protectable person: sentience, consciousness, and a sense of self. … Each individual remains free to hold and act on their [sic] most profoundly held convictions. …We should honor Roe’s elimination of state intervention from the abortion arena. This allows abortion to be the moral issue that it is.” Green also seems to favor eugenics. The Boston Globe reported that he said, “ ‘Even those of us who don’t take Genesis literally see a vast mystery in the origin of our species and in each of our destinies.’ Now, he said, we are learning how to change, almost at will, the blueprint for building a human being. ‘We can fashion new life forms; we are already doing that,’ Green said. ‘Some of us see us taking the evolution of our species into our own hands.’ ” Power is appealing to Green: “I love policy. It brings you from the idea to the action.” One of the professor’s students said, “Green’s most impressive attribute is his ability to discuss so many moral issues without ever offending anyone.” Concerning Green, Doerflinger (of the Conference of Catholic Bishops) writes: “Peter Singer is not at the most radical fringe of modern bioethics. He at least believes that some people (and animals) deserve to be respected as persons because of an attribute they possess, like the ability to feel pleasure and pain. More radical bioethicists assert that all claims of personhood are merely social constructs, that there is no objective quality in any human being that requires us to treat him or her as a person. This is the view of Professor Ronald Green … Green’s ‘revolution’ amounts to the stunning insight that those of us who wield power in society can band together and define other people (especially the very young and very old) in and out of personhood, depending on how urgently we feel the need to do lethal experiments on them to benefit ourselves. …His essay was cited by the [NIH Human Embryo Research] Panel as providing an ethical foundation for the policies it recommended …” Is “mother” a dirty word for Green? He has said: “There was a time when a ‘mother’ was the genetic mother, the gestational mother, and the birth mother. But now technology, like surrogate motherhood, is separating out things that used to go together. The same is true for what we’ve been calling the ‘embryo.’ ” Green told The Scientist magazine, “The best way of fostering responsible research in human reproduction is to federally fund it by supporting the best and most responsible researchers and by making sure there’s continual dialogue on the moral guidelines affecting it.” Ann Kiessling: M.D., is Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery at Beth-Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, specializing in fertility research. Kiessling told the Boston Globe, “My mother has Parkinson’s. I know my goal.” But she’s confused about how Advanced Cell should proceed: “We’ve been chewing and stewing about how to do this right.” She told the Wall Street Journal that “because of the embryo research, ‘there’s no way’ that Beth Israel would ever approve the Advanced Cell cloning project. So she holds the interviews [with potential egg cell donors] in her free time at a private sperm-analysis lab above a Starbucks in the nearby town of Somerville.” Kiessling is at the forefront of a “sperm washing” technique which impregnates women with laboratory-treated sperm from their HIV-positive partners. The degree of risk to mother and baby in the procedure is still unclear. “We’ve run into extreme institutional caution and resistance about the program. We’ve gotten it started two different times, and then been shut down when the clinics it was residing in have merged into other institutions and the new management didn’t want anything to do with us.” Her Assisted Reproduction Foundation does the sperm washing. Minnesota Public Radio has reported that epidemiologist Scott Holmberg of the federal Center for Disease Control, says of her work: “My colleagues and myself [sic] have not yet seen this enough to feel real comfortable. At least initially, it will be a gamble on the part of the people using the technique.” Kiessling replies “she is taking all the proper steps to establish a scientifically and ethically valid program.” Gay men are now hopeful there is a clinic which will help them produce offspring of their own. “Some critics grumble privately that Kiessling is too much a maverick … [and] used to scientific conflict,” said the report. Kiessling has called for a “federal oversight committee of scientists … to help guide projects and shape ethical issues, particularly where it relates to research on human embryos.” The staff of MassNews also contributed to this article.
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