Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [57]
The outcome of this reckless study was a shrill and false claim that the MMR vaccine can cause behavioural problems. The doubt this raised in the public mind about the vaccine has created a dangerous situation. In some regions, not enough parents are inoculating their children to reach ‘herd immunity’ – the level of immunity at which, though cases might still arise, a disease won’t spread. Measles has again emerged as a killer disease.
The Korean cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-suk has admitted falsification and fraud, but he also stands accused of recklessness. He needed human eggs for his experiments, and took what he could get without asking too many questions. But perhaps the recklessness was not entirely his. The Korean Health Ministry paid women thousands of dollars for ‘expenses’ associated with donating their eggs – a hugely questionable practice, and one that has since been made illegal. Those involved in the eggs’ end use are also not allowed to donate, in case there is undue pressure from superiors. Nevertheless, two of Hwang’s female colleagues were so keen for the research to proceed that they donated their own eggs. They made their donations under false names, but Hwang is not guilt-free: when he found out about the eggs’ provenance, he kept it from the journal that was publishing his results.
There are plenty more examples of questionable practices by well-intentioned researchers. National Institute of Mental Health psychiatrist Jay Giedd, for example, carried out brain scans on his own children for four years before the NIMH ethics committee found out and put a stop to it. Giedd was trying to plot the way brains change through adolescence, and his children seemed the perfect subjects. The NIMH’s Institutional Review Board begged to differ: scientific ethics says that scientists should not use dependents, or those in some kind of authority-based relationship, in their experiments.
And what are we to make of the extraordinary story of Henrietta Lacks? This woman’s cervical cancer provided a line of stem cells that has been used in medical research ever since her death in 1951. The ‘HeLa’ cells were the first human cells to be cultured outside the body, and have seeded a host of breakthroughs for medical science. Scientists have grown more than 50 million tonnes of Lacks’ cells, and put them to work in research that has yielded more than 60,000 scientific papers. Every day, on average, ten new studies are published that owe a debt to Henrietta Lacks. They have earned scientists five Nobel Prizes. However, the original cells were removed without her informed consent. Though her cells have helped to make pharmaceutical companies many millions of dollars, the disposable parts of Henrietta Lacks lie in an unmarked grave in Clover, Virginia. As Rebecca Skloot observes in her acclaimed account of Lacks’s life, the complexities surrounding the ownership of donated genetic material make it difficult to know whether there is any way to avoid what some see as exploitation: scientists can and do make money and careers out of their subjects.
Scientists who experiment on themselves, though, cannot be accused of gain without pain. What is most interesting about the phenomenon is that