Harvard's stem cell care
HARVARD researchers are proceeding very deliberately on one of the great scientific quests of the new century. Whether they succeed or fail in creating cloned embryonic stem cells, they are acting in ways to protect people essential to their experiments -- the women who will be donating their eggs.
This is more complex and ethically challenging than experimenting on embryos left over from infertility treatments. Those embryos are already formed from the union of sperm and egg, and the male and female donors have given their consent.
Douglas Melton and Kevin Eggan want to use donated eggs, which they would inject with DNA from a disease-stricken person. The hope is that this will yield new information about the disease and perhaps eventually a cure.
Judy Norsigian, executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves, a women's health and advocacy organization, worries that there is no way women can give informed consent to the egg donation because no one knows the long-term risks of the drugs needed to induce ovulation. It's reasonable to be concerned, but the Harvard researchers are doing their best to minimize risk. They will not be using Lupron, the drug that worries Norsigian the most, and they will be regulating doses of other drugs to minimize danger.
They also will not be offering the kind of inducements that might cause women to cast aside caution in the interest of financial gain. Egg donation for use in infertility treatment typically earns a woman $5,000 in Massachusetts. State law forbids this kind of payment for stem-cell research. A state advisory commission recently decided that women could be reimbursed for time off from work.
The Harvard researchers won't even allow that. All a woman will get is reimbursement for such immediate expenses as cab fare. It's unclear whether any women will be willing to take part in these experiments. Harvard is running an ad in the Metro to seek volunteers. If a woman calls the phone number in the ad, she will receive a booklet by mail explaining the procedure and the risk. Eggan, in a phone interview yesterday, said he hoped women would take part in the interest of furthering an exciting field of scientific inquiry.
George Daley, another Harvard researcher, is working with eggs that did not accept sperm in fertility treatments. Perhaps this will make progress without raising the issues of the Melton-Eggan work.
Research on human stem cells is at an early stage. It will take many different approaches to determine which, if any, yield useful results. This is the way science advances, and Harvard is moving it forward in an ethically sensitive way.
