Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [66]
There were no end of comments, in fact: Venter has seemingly limitless power to provoke. Most impressive, though, was the response from the White House. In a letter dated 20 May 2010 – the same day as Venter’s press conference and publication in Science – the President requested the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to undertake a study of ‘the implications of this scientific milestone, as well as other advances that may lie ahead in this field of research’.
President Obama specifically wanted faith communities to be asked for their perspective on Venter’s work. The request is unsurprising, given the nature of the work. But all the faith communities will be able to do in the face of Venter’s work is to accept it as a defeat or to splutter and frown, for he has pulled the rug from beneath their feet. As Caplan wrote in Scientific American, to many scientists, theologians and philosophers, life is ‘sacred, special, ineffable and beyond human understanding’. But Venter, Caplan suggests, has now shown that life isn’t that way at all. ‘What seemed to be an intractable puzzle, with significant religious overtones, has been solved.’
It will only get more difficult for any religion to compete with what science has to offer. Quoted in the journal Nature, Georgetown University’s Kevin FitzGerald, a Jesuit priest with PhDs in molecular genetics and bioethics, remarks that we are now only at the beginning of the problems for religious interpretation and guidance. When everything we work with to create life has been reduced to molecular formulae, the current issues surrounding stem cell research will seem mundane. ‘The stuff that’s coming down the pipe will make this look like child’s play,’ FitzGerald says.
Muslims, for instance, are permitted to use IVF if they are married, but there can be no donor insemination: the sperm and egg must both come from the couple themselves. Donor insemination is regarded as adultery by the wife. That seems pretty straightforward, a nice simple solution, but it is not future-proof. What if the husband is infertile, but sperm could be derived from embryonic stem cells taken from a donor? That would not involve accepting sperm from anyone – would that be acceptable? And what if their baby could be cultured in an endometrium derived from, as in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision of the future set forth in Brave New World, a sow’s peritoneum? Where is the line to be drawn?
This is not an idle question: such innovations are coming. A human being self-assembles (in the right conditions) from just two cells: a sperm and an egg. And, thanks to scientists such as Karim Nayernia, we are already learning how to make those.
Nayernia was raised and trained in the region of Shiraz in the south-west of Iran. This is where the oldest known sample of wine, sealed in clay jars more than 7,000 years old, was found. Shiraz is famous the world over as the source of the Shiraz grape: the fruit used to make, say, a Californian Shiraz owe a debt to – and still have some distant genetic link with – the original Iranian grapes that ripened in the Shiraz sun thousands of years ago. Nayernia would argue that it is the same with reproductive technologies.
Just as the Shiraz grape has been exported and combined with technological developments to meet a worldwide demand, Nayernia has taken his expertise in the basics of natural human reproduction, exported it and combined it with some of the greatest innovations in biomedical technology. The result has been an adaptation that will also meet a global demand: Nayernia has made artificial sperm.
The research first came to the attention of the world’s press on 13 July 2006. That was the day Nayernia announced that he had managed to produce live baby mice