Stem cell pioneer does a reality check

Q: What are some of those guesses about other technologies?

A: Well, if you take a nucleus and you put it into an oocyte [egg cell], the oocyte knows how to reprogram things. That’s a problem that we can study, to understand how that happens. We don’t really have a lot of information about how that works, so it’s hard to predict how long it’s going to take to solve that problem. I’d be surprised if within 10 years we didn’t have another way to solve the problem, but it could be that it’s a very, very hard problem and it’s going to take a long time to do it.

Q: To find a way for a normal cell to reprogram itself?

A: Right. The message of Dolly is less about cloning, that we can clone Dolly or we can clone people or even do nuclear transfer to make embryonic stem cells; it’s that the differentiated state is in principle reversible. And while that was known for a lot of model organisms, and there was even some evidence for that in mammals, Dolly really drove the message home that it was simply a question of time before we understood how to do that.

Prior to Dolly, we thought it was just impossible, we thought biologically it was not a reversible process. So Dolly does have implications for cloning animals and people, but really the biological message of Dolly is that the differentiated state is reversible under some conditions. …

Q: What’s your view of the idea that the moral issues may become moot because of the things people might be able to do in the future, with blastomeres, or embryos that are altered so that genetically they cannot get beyond a particular stage?

A: I’ve talked to the guy from Stanford [William Hurlbut] who has been a big proponent of that. The basic problem is that we haven’t really thought through the implications of Dolly. It will take a while to do that. It was 1978 when the first IVF [in-vitro fertilization] child was born, and basically all these issues have to do with that, they have nothing to do with stem cells. It all goes back to IVF. The problem with IVF is that it affects a relatively small part of the population, so society pushed it to the side and didn’t deal with it, even though it was controversial at the time. With embryonic stem cells, that affects most people, and suddenly society has to deal with it. So most of the issues go back to IVF and the creation of embryos, and nothing has changed. The moral debate hasn’t really changed. If you read the Warnock Commission report, sometime in the ‘80s, all those issues were brought up.

‘There’s no inherent reason why a liver cell can’t form a baby.’ — James Thompson Stem-cell researcher

So Dolly came along, and that did change the moral argument in ways that people haven’t fully appreciated. The bottom line is that any cell in your body has a latent potential to form a human being. If I told you there was a frozen cell in liquid nitrogen, and I thawed it out, and I manipulated it, and I put it back into a woman’s uterus and it formed a child, could you infer what the moral status of that cell was? Well, no – because that could be true of any cell in your body now. Granted, you have to do a fair amount of manipulation. But in terms of potential, the potential is there. There’s no inherent reason why a liver cell can’t form a baby.

So arguments based on potential alone are kind of suspect now because of that. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to say, “OK, you have this one-cell embryo, how is it fundamentally different from another cell in your body?” If you have a one-cell embryo in a freezer, you have to intervene to actually make it become a child. You have to do a lot to it. …You have to thaw it out under very technical conditions and you have to prepare the mother. There are a lot of interventions there. So I think the fundamental problem is that people haven’t come to terms with that. This idea that you’ll pre-engineer it to fail seems disingenuous to me. At what point is it failing, and just because it’s failing, why is that not an embryo? I don’t know.

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