'Science is a wonderful thing, but we need to be patient. False promises do not help'



Dolly the sheep, who died in 2003


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View GalleryBy Sarah Freeman
He was the man who brought the world Dolly the sheep, but 10 years on why has Professor Ian Wilmut turned his back on the cloning of human embryos? Sarah Freeman reports.
Professor Ian Wilmut has grown used to his reputation being overshadowed by a sheep.

It was 10 years ago that the scientist unveiled Dolly – a perfectly normal looking Fin Dorset ewe hailed as one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of recent years – but she still casts a long shadow over his career.

The first animal to be cloned from an adult cell, Dolly not only became a pin-up for stem cell research, but for opponents who feared it was the thin end of a very large wedge, she also became a symbol of everything which was wrong with allowing scientists to play God in laboratories.

Despite the furore, which heightened when he was granted a licence to pursue cloning of human embryos – a decision met with disbelief from pro-life groups – Prof Wilmut insists the publicity, both good and bad, helped to trigger an important debate, which otherwise may never have taken place.

"I quickly learned not to take the criticism personally," he says ahead of a talk at the University of Sheffield on the 10 years since Dolly. "However, I have no doubt the publicity which followed was useful, it raised important issues, it got people to talk about where scientific research was heading and it also helped people doing similar work link up and share knowledge."

Dolly, who is now on display at the National Museum of Scotland, died prematurely in 2003 after a veterinary examination showed she had progressive lung disease and a form of arthritis. Coming only a week after the sudden death of the first sheep cloned in Australia, it seemed to add weight to the arguments against cloning.

Prof Wilmut wasn't to be dissuaded, but it was perhaps his decision to put his head down and continue with his research, which made his recent announcement that he was to distance himself from the technique even more surprising.

In what seemed like a major scientific U-turn, he claimed scientists in Japan had convinced him stem cells could be better created using fragments of skin rather than embryos. Put simply, the idea is that by harvesting a patient's own cells they can be reprogrammed to repair damage caused by diseases like Parkinson's or even a heart attack and reinjected back into the body more effectively than using embryos.

It would be easy to suggest that after all these years Prof Wilmut's conscience had finally been pricked by the ethical questions surrounding the use of human embryos, but his decision to switch his attention to less controversial research wasn't something he came to overnight.

"It's very exciting, but it took quite a few months for me to decide to switch my area of focus," he says. "I first heard about the technique in June, but it took a while for me to have the confidence that it would work. It is a much longer term project, but I honestly believe it will be much more useful

"Certainly using skin cells is much easier to accept socially than the use of embryos, but this was very much a personal decision and I still think we need to continue to work in both areas. For me the only ethical debate in terms of the use of human embryos was the risk, albeit a small one, in harvesting the eggs and the fact they are needed for fertility treatment. It was that ethical dilemma which seemed increasingly hard to justify."

Recent research in America into the cloning of primates which used 300 eggs to produce just one successful strain showed the inefficiencies of current embryo research and the work which has already been done in Japan seems to offer more hope in the treatment of terminal degenerative conditions, such as Motor Neurone Disease, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, which has always been Prof Wilmut's priority.

However, despite having apparently opted for the path of least resistance, the Edinburgh University academic is never far from controversy and his calls to allow the dying to help in stem cell research has unsurprisingly started yet another ethical debate.

"The work being done at this very moment could ultimately have a much wider application in terms of inherited diseases because it's about working out what goes wrong in cells and looking to see if it is possible to identify a trigger and then finding a way of stopping or reversing that change," he says. "However, if we wait until things have been absolutely analysed in laboratories and then tested on animals, we will be denying some people possibly important treatment.

"Most people suffering from these kind of conditions would be more than happy to be involved in research and to take drugs which haven't been properly tested even if they thought it might not help them, but the results may help people in the future. Take Motor Neurone Disease, it's a particularly horrific condition which leaves the sufferer's alert mind trapped in their body, unable to talk and ultimately unable to breathe. If you've got no movement below the neck and you heard reports about the potential benefits of stem cell research, I imagine you would be very enthusiastic to take part in trials.

"Clearly, there has to be informed consent and we have to make sure the person understands the risks and that we ensure trials are properly supervised. There is no question of science not abiding by regulations, but it is something that we need to look at."

Prof Wilmut is more than aware of the difficulty of balancing hope and expectations with the long process of research and testing, a balancing act not helped when every new development, however small, is branded a major medical breakthrough and he stops short of predicting when his latest work will become anything more than just a scientific possibility.

"If you look at the history of immunisation, it was 150 years between the first experiments with cow tissue to fight smallpox to the kind of sophisticated inoculation techniques of today, I think sometimes we forget how complex this kind of work is.

"There are so many different elements to the research that if you started working with a patient say on January 1, 2008 it would probably be 10 years before you were at the stage where treatment was anywhere near possible .

"Science is a wonderful thing just look what's happened with antibiotics, with IVF and organ donation, but we also need to be patient. False promises don't help anyone."

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/featu...ing.3555334.jp