Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [45]
In the end, none of this will matter to Stanley Prusiner, because he never said what his prion was, and he certainly never said that it was purely protein. Anyway, he has his Nobel Prize for getting us this far. Like Murray Gell-Mann with his quarks, Prusiner created a unifying principle that has proved invaluable in focusing research. But after Gajdusek and Prusiner, it is likely that there will one day be a third Nobel Prize associated with the prion diseases – a prize for actually pinning down the infectious agent that causes them.
No doubt this will entail further anarchy. Perhaps it will be in the invention of a new construct, the new ‘prion’, to bring researchers together. It is even possible that the anarchy will be in the form of bold and extraordinary experiments, the like of which no normal person would dare to perform. After all, as we are about to discover, people working on matters of life and death don’t always stop to ask what the ethics committee has to say.
PLAYING WITH FIRE
No pain, no gain
L
ondon’s Northwick Park hospital looks tired, its dreary façades an uninspiring composition of concrete and metal-framed windows. The hospital had a bright moment when it was opened in 1970 by the Queen, but it quickly became a desolate sight. Perhaps that’s why, just a few years after it opened, it was chosen as a location for the iconic horror film The Omen.
The hospital’s most terrifying moment was yet to come, however. On 13 March 2006, TV camera crews filled the hospital grounds. Images of the building were broadcast to millions of fascinated – and horrified – viewers around the world. What could not be broadcast was the scenes within those walls.
That morning, eight young men who had each been paid £2,330 allowed researchers to inject them with an experimental drug. It was called TGN1412, and had shown promise in fighting multiple sclerosis, some cancers and rheumatoid arthritis. Within a few minutes of receiving the injection, six of the men ‘went down like dominoes’. The men tore at their shirts to relieve the fever that had struck them immediately. They vomited, they writhed in agony, they fainted. Their faces started to swell up – press reports referred to them as the ‘elephant men’. All six suffered multiple organ failure and were hospitalised for weeks. One had to have toes amputated because of the frostbite-like symptoms induced by the drug.
By the end of the year, the company behind the drug had gone bust, but the tribulations of the six trial patients continued. Mohamed ‘Nino’ Abdelhady, for instance, was covered in dozens of potentially cancerous lumps that had popped up all over his arms, chest and stomach. The lumps were surgically removed, but the fear of unknown future health problems remained. A year later, others reported memory lapses, stomach problems and severe headaches. David Oakley had been diagnosed with lymphoma.
The UK’s Medical Research Council’s immediate reaction to the incident was that the risk was worth taking: such clinical trials were essential for the development of new and better treatments. The British Government commissioned a group of scientific experts to report on the lessons that could be learned, but an analysis of this group’s report in the British Medical Journal is telling. Though things ‘could have been done better’, their task was supremely difficult, the analysis says: they were charged with ‘creating a balance between improving safety without being accused of “stifling innovation”’.
It is an impossible dilemma. Innovation is what scientists do – and it seems they will do it, whatever it takes.
In 2005, ethicists