Era of 'unborn mother' looms as
scientists use aborted foetuses to grow human eggs
By Steve
Connor, Science Editor in Madrid
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_medical/story.jsp?story=420607
01 July 2003
Almost every day a
scientific or medical development seems to bring
new promise and controversy
to mankind; none more so, perhaps, than in
the field of human fertility.
A quarter of a century ago the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was
born. Now scientists have raised another startling prospect - "unborn
mothers".
The notion that children can derive from human matter that
has not
itself been born sounds the stuff of science fiction. Yet it has
moved
a step closer with research showing that it is possible to extract
ovarian tissue from aborted foetuses for in-vitro fertilisation (IVF)
treatment.
Scientists announced yesterday that they have been able
to remove
immature ovaries from four- month-old foetuses. The theory is that
they can then be stimulated in the test tube to go through the later
stages of development before the creation of fully mature eggs.
But
such a scenario raises grave ethical questions about the
possibility of
creating children whose biological mothers were never
born. When a
high-powered committee of British ethicists considered
this possibility in
the early 1990s it took the view that any child
created by such a procedure
would not be able to come to terms with
the idea of deriving from aborted
foetal tissue.
However, it is clear that the increase in demand for a
supply of
healthy human eggs - which are not easy to "harvest" from even the
most fertile women - is causing several groups of scientists around
the
world to explore the possibility of using aborted foetuses.
Medical
researchers from Israel and the Netherlands have now gone
further than any
previous attempt at experimenting with ovarian tissue
from human foetuses.
They artificially stimulate fluid-filled sacs or
follicles within surgically
removed ovaries to undergo several stages
of development.
Normally
an egg develops within the follicle as it goes through four
developmental
phases - the primordial, primary, secondary and pre-
ovulatory stages -
before it is released from the ovary into the
Fallopian tubes.
The
scientists said they had managed to culture foetal ovaries in test
tubes to
enter the start of the secondary stage. This is when the
ovarian follicles
begin to produce the female sex hormones necessary
to develop and mature the
eggs.
Tal Biron-Shental, a gynaecologist from Meir Hospital-Sapir
Medical
Centre in Kfar Saba, released the findings of the study at the
annual
meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology
in Madrid.
Dr Biron-Shental said that the researchers obtained
ovarian tissue
from seven aborted foetuses aged between 22 and 33 weeks and
managed
to keep slices of the ovaries alive for four weeks, long enough for
the follicles to develop to the stage when they began to produce the
female hormone oestradiol.
"We didn't have mature oocytes, we had
follicles that changed from
primordial follicles and survived. We had E2
[oestradiol] secretion
which means that we had more secondary follicles
which means there was
a development," Dr Biron- Shental said.
"This
is the first report showing survival of second and third
trimester human
foetal ovarian follicles in culture with E2
production. E2 was probably
secreted from the few secondary follicles
in the cultured slices," she told
the meeting.
The study in Israel was run with the veterinary department
of Utrecht
University, which supplied some of the culture medium for the
test-tube development of the ovarian tissue. Full ethical approval was
obtained prior to the study being carried out, the scientists
confirmed.
"The local ethical committee of our medical centre approved the study
and informed consent was obtained from the mothers," Dr Biron-Shental
said. "We had different kinds of aborted foetuses with all kinds of
malformations. Of course we could not use normal foetuses for such
experiments because it is controversial enough," she explained.
However, there was one exception. "We had one aborted foetus that was
completely abnormal and the abortion took place because the mother of
the foetus had severe psychiatric problems. There are a lot of ethical
questions on this point. Since it is still preliminary results we
don't
have all the answers for those ethical questions," she added.
Asked how
long it would be before she was able to produce fully mature
eggs from
foetal ovaries, Dr Biron-Shental said: "It will still take a
long time. I
don't know exactly.
"We have an end goal and we continue to culture
follicles from aborted
foetuses. We have tried to improve the culture media
and to prolong
the culture period. We hope to get better results and more
follicles,"
she said. "I am fully aware of the controversy about this, but
probably, in some places, it will be ethically acceptable."
Anti-abortion groups were quick to denounce the research yesterday.
Nuala Scarisbrick of the organisation Life said the study was morally
repugnant. "Who would want to know that their mother was an aborted
baby?" she said.
Françoise Shenfield, an ethicist at University
College London and a
former member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Authority,
also voiced concerns about where this sort of research was
leading.
"I would be very troubled by this not only for ethical reasons
but for
psychological reasons, because what is the public going to think
about
where the eggs come from?" Dr Shenfield said.
A spokeswoman
for the HFEA said that the use of ovarian tissue from
foetuses was
considered by a committee of ethicists in 1994, which led
the authority to
decide that it would be difficult for a child to come
to terms with the idea
that it had been created from aborted foetal
material because of prevailing
social attitudes.
"The authority does not consider the use of tissue
from this source to
be acceptable for infertility treatment. But the
authority does allow
the use of foetal material to produce eggs for research
provided that
it is taken only with full, explicit consent," she said.
Roger Gosden, a leading fertility specialist working at the Jones
Institute in Norfolk, Virginia, said the ethical issues centre on the
issue of informed consent - the foetus cannot give its consent.
Dr
Gosden also questioned whether the research was necessary because
he had
demonstrated that it is possible to obtain ovarian tissue from
adult women
with the aim of culturing the follicles in vitro to
produce mature eggs.
"I would say that we don't need to use foetal material. The only
advantage in doing so is that there are a huge number of eggs there,
but
obviously we have to be very sensitive to ethical issues," he
said.
"We should be able to study foetal ovaries for research purposes, but
it's the application in reproduction that I have concerns about," he
added.
Experiments with mice have shown that it is possible to
mature foetal
eggs fully, fertilise them in a test tube, implant them into
an adult
mouse and produce healthy offspring. Some scientists hope to be
able
to do the same with human material.
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