On The Morality Of Altered Nuclear Transfer

The second Westchester Institute Scholars Forum delved into a controversial, but potentially significant proposal for acquiring pluripotent stem-cells without creating and destroying human embryos.  The context for the discussion was, of course, the great public attention and political controversy surrounding embryonic stem-cell research.  The heated nature of the discussion stems from two issues.  First, there is a widespread hope that stem cell research will lead to incredible medical breakthroughs and reparative technologies that could potentially cure conditions which are now untreatable.  Understandably, support for funding of such research is quite strong.

There is a dark side to this issue, however.  It is that the standard technique for obtaining stem-cells for reparative therapy would entail the creation and destruction of cloned human embryos.  This prospect, unfortunately, does not bother a great number of people.  They see no problem with destroying what they take merely to be a clump of cells in a Petri dish.  However, there is no question that a human embryo is a living, developing member of the human species.  To take the life of such an embryo is to take a human life.  For those committed to protecting such life, embryonic stem-cell research as it is now practiced is not a viable option.

As a possible way out of this clash of concerns, the second Westchester Institute Scholars Forum examined the philosophical, ethical, and scientific dimensions of a proposal known as Altered Nuclear Transfer (ANT).  This technique, broadly conceived, would attempt to obtain pluripotent stem-cells without bringing into being a human embryo.  It proposes to do so by genetically re-programming the cellular components used in nuclear transfer.  Through such intervention, scientists would seek to suppress or force gene expression in either the somatic cell nucleus or the enucleated egg in such a way that the conception of a new human embryo could not take place.  What would take place?  The creation, its advocates hope, of a cellular entity which is not a human organism, but some product or defective part of a human organism from which pluripotent stem-cells may be derived.  A concrete example of such a procedure, around which much of the conversation revolved, was the proposal to delete the gene cdx2 as a means of preventing embryogenesis, but making possible an artifact from which one can derive stem-cells.

The scholars gathered at this event naturally debated the central question: given that one is attempting to re-program the expression of genes in this new cellular entity so as to make it impossible, from the very beginning, for it to ever become an embryo, how does one know that one has succeeded?  In other words, how can one be certain that what is being created using ANT is just a kind of cellular artifact, and not some radically defective embryo that is pre-programmed for very early death?  Answering this question entails that one develop proper criteria for discerning the difference between a radically defective human embryo and a partial cellular entity that is pluripotent (able to be many kinds of human cells), but not totipotent (able to be a whole human organism).

After a lot of back and forth discussion, the forum did not seem to be making a lot of consensual headway.  However, toward the end of the sessions, one of the participants and senior fellows of the Institute, Dr. Markus Grompe, proposed a revised version of ANT that came to be called ANT-OAR (Oocyte Assisted Reprogramming).  The intention behind ANT-OAR is to manipulate certain genes (nanog and Oct4 were proposed) so that the product of the nuclear transfer would immediately be recognizable as a pluripotent stem-cell, without going through any process of development and cell-division which rendered the identity of the new cell ambiguous.  This new proposal was met with general approbation as something worth more consideration as well as lab experimentation using non-human, animal cells.