Stem-cell research?- cure or curse?

Europe has for a long time been worrying about losing its best researchers to the US. While waiting for new rules to encourage research in the EU, many universities have to watch all their best scientists leave for better paid jobs across the Atlantic.

But, for one emerging health technology, the scientists might find themselves with nowhere to go. When it comes to stem-cell research, the EU is currently slightly more liberal than America. Rumours of breakthroughs in Asia are heard of occasionally, but for now the leading laboratories are European. Politicians face delicate choices if they want the Union to make the most of its lead.

Stem-cell research has suffered badly at the hands of science-fiction writers. It is described with words like ‘chimera’ and ‘hybrid’.

This language, fed by stories from Frankenstein to War of the Worlds, has helped create many common stem cell myths. Some believe that that stem-cell research involves taking half-developed babies out of the mothers’ womb for laboratory experiments. Another myth is that recognisable embryos are destroyed when they have served their purpose and that if they were not destroyed, they would grow into cloned human beings.

International laboratories are also thought to be creating human-animal hybrids to save time and money. And researchers are believed to be clamouring for money to market their stem-cell derived therapies to an unwilling public.

Even the name ‘stem cells’ conjures up images of weird plant-like growths swaying under microscopes and on Petri dishes. None of these ideas is true.

The reality is far different. It is an emerging health technology which, supporters say, could one day offer cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes and even heart failure.

All cells start off as stem cells. They get their name not from their shape but from the fact that all life stems from them. These early cells can then develop into any cell type, from red and white blood cells to bone cells.

The stem cells at the start of life, in an embryo, are of the greatest interest to scientists because they can in theory be forced to develop into any cell type many thousand times.

The ‘embryos’ used for embryonic stem cell research do not grow inside a womb like conventional embryos, but in a laboratory.

And they do not look like tiny human babies: each microscopic embryo is less than half a millimetre wide. Scientists prefer to call them ‘conceptuses’.

Tiny conceptuses are used for a few days to generate more cells, and not to build a cloned human being.

Human-animal ‘chimera’ embryos, even if they were in a womb, would never grow into a creature that looked half-man, half-beast. The chimera is built by removing all the animal DNA from an egg before fertilising what remains with a human sperm.

Scientists cannot guarantee that the animal egg would have absolutely no effect on the resulting stem cells for the simple reason that they have not been allowed to find out yet. Controversy today centres not on whether chimera embryo technologies should be marketed to cure human disease, but on whether or not they would work.

EU legislation stipulates that it is up to member states to decide whether or not to allow embryonic stem-cell research. Countries including Belgium and Spain say ‘Yes’. Following intense lobbying led by Germany and Italy last year, the rules underpinning the EU’s seventh framework programme for research (FP7) state that EU-level funding would not be approved for research into three branches of life science. These are: genetically modifying an embryo to produce ‘designer babies’, cloning human beings after birth, and cloning embryos solely for research purposes, including stem cell research.

No country anywhere in the world has so far authorised chimera embryo research. That could soon change in the UK, a country widely thought to lead the world when it comes to life sciences. British scientists in the 1970s were the first to find a way of fertilising human eggs in a laboratory, leading to the world’s first ‘test-tube baby’. 20 years later a Scottish laboratory produced the world’s first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep. A decision from the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), on whether not animal eggs can be used to create conceptuses, is now anxiously awaited.

Europe has for a long time been worrying about losing its best researchers to the US. While waiting for new rules to encourage research in the EU, many universities have to watch all their best scientists leave for better paid jobs across the Atlantic.