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              WILL HEADLESS HUMAN CLONES GROW ORGANS IN 10 YEARS?
                                       
     'Human Cloning' graphic October 19, 1997
     Web posted at: 8:39 p.m. EDT (0039 GMT)
     
     LONDON (AP) -- Headless human clones will be used to grow organs and
     tissues for transplant surgery in the next five to 10 years, a
     leading authority on the ethics of human cloning predicted Sunday.
     
     Dr. Patrick Dixon, author of "The Genetic Revolution," which
     forecast the cloning of animals, made the prediction after The
     Sunday Times reported that British scientists have created a frog
     embryo without a head.
     
     Scientists believe the technique used to create the headless frogs
     could be adapted to grow human organs such as hearts, kidneys,
     livers and pancreases in an embryonic sac living in an artificial
     womb, the paper said.
     
     Many scientists believe human cloning is inevitable following the
     July 1996 birth of Dolly, the world's first cloned mammal. She was
     created at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh using cells from a
     sheep's udder.
     
     "I predict that there will be great pressure to combine cloning
     technology with the creation of partial fetuses, missing heads, arms
     or legs as organ factories for tomorrow's people," Dixon told the
     British news agency, Press Association.
     
     "These will be developed on an experimental level somewhere in the
     world in countries where there is little or no gene legislation
     within the next 5-10 years because of the overwhelming demand," he
     said.
     
     "The demand is there, the technology is almost there as well," he
     said.
     
     Dixon called for an urgent global biotechnology summit to examine
     every aspect of genetics, and provide the foundations for
     international agreements. International inconsistencies on various
     aspects of genetic engineering, including human cloning, urgently
     need to be ironed out, he said.
     
     "Genetic engineering is a very exciting technology, it has the power
     to feed the world, cure disease but you do have to ask fundamental
     questions before it is too late," Dixon said.
     
     "The headless frog embryo is another example of the way the
     technology is racing far ahead of public understanding," he said.
     
     "We must get the thinking in place which looks over the horizon
     beyond today's headlines to what tomorrow will bring," Dixon said.
     "Scientists have been making up the rules as they go along."
     
  Genes manipulated to suppress frog's head
  
     
     
     Jonathan Slack, professor of developmental biology at Bath
     University, told The Sunday Times that he created headless frog
     embryos by manipulating certain genes -- and used the same technique
     to suppress development of a tadpole's trunk and tail as well.
     
     The headless frog embryos have not been allowed to live longer than
     a week because under British government rules, embryos are not
     considered animals until they are a week old, the paper said.
     
     Slack believes the breakthrough could be applied to human embryos
     because the same genes perform similar functions in both frogs and
     humans, The Sunday Times said.
     
     The newspaper said the lamb and frog techniques could be combined so
     that people needing transplants could have organs "grown to order"
     from their own cloned cells.
     
     These organs would exactly match the patient and there would
     therefore be no danger of rejection. It would also ease the shortage
     of organs for transplant, The Sunday Times said.
     
     Slack told the paper that using intact human embryos would not be
     possible because they would have to be killed.
     
     "It occurred to me a half-way house could be reached," he was quoted
     as saying. "Instead of growing an intact embryo, you could
     genetically reprogram the embryo to suppress growth in all the parts
     of the body except the bits you want, plus a heart and blood
     circulation."
     
     Growing parts of human embryos to cultivate organs could bypass many
     legal restrictions and ethical concerns, because without a brain or
     central nervous system the organisms may not technically qualify as
     embryos.
     
  Professor: 'No ethical issues'
  
     
     
     Lewis Wolpert, professor of biology as applied to medicine at
     University College London, called Slack's suggestions sensible and
     feasible.
     
     "There are no ethical issues because you are not doing any harm to
     anyone," The Sunday Times quoted him as saying.
     
     But Oxford University animal ethicist Professor Andrew Linzey told
     the newspaper: "It is morally regressive to create a mutant form of
     life."
     
     "It's scientific fascism because we would be creating other beings
     whose very existence would be to serve the dominant group," he was
     quoted as saying.
     
     Copyright 1997   The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
     material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
     redistributed.
     
    
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     CNN Plus 
     * Message Board: Cloning
   Health Special: Cloning 
       
  Related stories:
     * Report: Cloned sheep has human gene - July 24, 1997
     * Embryo splitting caught in cloning controversy - June 25, 1997
     * Scientists grow monkeys from cloned embryos - March 2, 1997
     * Firms team up to make cloned cattle with special milk - October 7,
       1997
       
  Related sites:
  
     Note: Pages will open in a new browser window
     * Genzyme Transgenics
     * Genetics and Ethics - Biomedical Ethics Unit, McGill University 
     * Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy - Animals as
       Inventions: Biotechnology and Intellectual Property Rights
     * Genetic Engineering Home Page
       
     
     
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