Cloning, ethics and Scarlett Johansson
By Richard P. Grant
6 July 2011
How could you resist Scarlett Johansson?
Let me rephrase that: how could you resist an evaluation featuring Scarlett Johansson?
F1000 Member
Stefan Bielack in Stuttgart is reminded of Johansson, or rather the 2005 film
The Island, in which she stars alongside Ewan McGregor as a clone grown for body parts.
Stefan has evaluated an article just out in Pediatric Blood and Cancer,
Successful bone marrow transplantation in a pediatric patient with chronic myeloid leukemia from a HLA-identical sibling selected by preimplantation HLA testing10.1002/pbc.23007. A team from Athens treated an 11-year-old boy for chronic myeloid leukemia by transplanting bone marrow from his 19-month-old brother. But this brother is an IVF baby, chosen specifically to match his elder sibling’s HLA type. The mother went through standard IVF, and ten fertilized embryos were cultured and biopsied three days after insemination–at the 8-cell stage. The embryos were genotyped using nested
PCR of of HLA-DRB1 alleles. Then,
Two embryos identified to be HLA identical to the patient were transferred 6 days after fertilization to the mother’s uterus and one singleton full-term pregnancy resulted in the birth of one healthy male sibling. –from Goussetis et al., 2011
As Stefan says, this is not the first example of preimplantation genetic diagnostics used to select donors for transplants. And of course, we’re not (quite) at the level of cloning humans. But it does focus attention on the ethics of breeding humans as organ donors. Stefan has a number of questions: is it acceptable to expose putative donors to the extra risks associated with IVF? What psychological consequences arise when a donor learns that his reason for existence as a spare parts depot? Will the designated donor be called upon to sacrifice a part of their body if the recipient requires a solid organ donation?
And finally, how far removed is this from the scenario in
The Island (and countless other science fiction stories)?
Tags: cloning, ethics, HLA.
Filed under Editor's Choice, Ethics.
Originally Posted by yermom
