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BREAKING THE CODE
APRIL 3, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
Fred De Sam Lazaro of KCTA-TV in Minneapolis reports with an update on the scientific advances in genetic research and the ethical questions that they are raising.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The field of gene therapy has been brought into a new realm with the work of Dr. Ralph Brinster. He's a leading expert on infertility at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine. Brinster is the first scientist to successfully transplant the cells that produce sperm, called stem cells, from a fertile mouse into an infertile one.
DR. RALPH BRINSTER, UPENN Veterinary School: This is a testes of a recipient. These are actually transplanted cells. You see how dark they are? They're carrying the blue dye or the blue stain that marks them as coming from donor cells. These are--
MR. LAZARO: The blue dye or stain is a genetic marker, a gene inserted into the donor cells. It not only proved that the transplanted cells produced sperm but also helped Dr. Brinster track the crucial next step in his experiment.
DR. RALPH BRINSTER: I wanted to have live young because that shows you unequivocal that the sperm are functional, that these cells are functional, that you don't have a partially functioning cell that can just make sperm which can't fertilize an egg. I wanted the infertile animal to sire or to have children of his own.
DR. RALPH BRINSTER: This is the first mouse that produced young that we did. This is the testes taken out of the mouse, and these are the tubules that carry the donor cells. And this is the son of one of those mice. And he carries the marker gene. You can see it if you were to stain his testes or look at any cell, he has it in every cell in his body. This is his son, so this is the grandson of a cell that we transplanted, if you would like to look at it that way.
MR. LAZARO: The way many ethicists look at it, Brinster's work is not just a potential cure for infertility but also offers a chance to alter the genes of the sperm stem cells before they're implanted. That would change the genetic make-up of not just one animal but of all its descendants. Medical ethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan, who called this recent conference on genetics, said this once tedious science is moving at break-neck speed. He said the new prowess of manipulating genes comes at a time when knowledge about the location of genes responsible for various diseases and conditions is exploding.
DR. ARTHUR CAPLAN, Medical Ethicist: They're a sort of gene of the week phenomena. The BACR 1 and 2 breast cancer genes, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, some forms of Alzheimer's, depression, homosexuality, alcoholism and on and on the disease of the week reports go.
MR. LAZARO: What excites Caplan and others if Brinster's work is applied in humans, and it's a big if that could be decades into the future, it could someday be used to eradicate many genetic diseases. Men who carry the genetic flaw for Huntington's or Tay-Sachs, for example, could have them removed from their stem cells. The worry, however, is that the search for genetic perfection could extend beyond fatal diseases to mere traits or conditions, like the dwarfism with which Ruth Ricker was born.
RUTH RICKER: We could see dramatically fewer dwarf children being born to average size parents and pressure on parents of all sizes to screen for and prevent the birth of what we would call healthy dwarf babies, kids that would grow up to be like me.
MR. LAZARO: Ricker said people with dwarfism have only in recent years been assimilated into larger society after a long struggle to overcome a history of being at its margins, targets for abuse, ridicule, and in Nazi, Germany, annihilation.
RUTH RICKER: We're still getting a feel for this dilemma, just as we have like a first generation of us where a majority of us have had these opportunities, that we're now presented with the prospect that, umm, that we may be gradually eliminated.
MR. LAZARO: Others at the conference like the Reverend Walter Brandon oppose any genetic manipulation on religious grounds. Brandon suffers from sickle cell disease, a fatal blood condition that affects people of African and Mediterranean ethnicity.
REV. WALTER BRANDON: If you're a creationist, and you believe in the order of creation, then you say to yourself, God created everything, and everything that he had created, He made it good, because it says so in the Holy Scriptures. If we as men believe that man can be improved through the control of hereditary or the gene factor or genetic or eugenic engineering, should we follow our assumptions, should we follow our assumptions no matter where they lead? I don't know.
MR. LAZARO: Caplan is not surprised at such reactions to the idea of genetic engineering.
DR. ARTHUR CAPLAN: I think the history of eugenics in the 20th century with murder and genocide and sterilization and racism, that frightens people, and they want to know what happens when these worst aspects of human value come into play with these new abilities to, to change our germ line.
MR. LAZARO: The eugenics Caplan fears for today is not the racist, Nazi style campaigns. Rather, it's one that reflects cultural values. For example, he fears there will be pressure on parents to enhance their children's capabilities by infusing them with genetic traits society considers desirable like tallness, mathematical ability, or musical aptitude.
DR. ARTHUR CAPLAN: What would be dangerous and risky is if someone was forced or coerced into doing that, if society shamed people into doing that, if there was a penalty for those who chose not to do that, and we said, we're not going to insure your child, you should have not had one that was sick or we're going to penalize you because we don't like brown-eyed kids and you picked one. In other words, it's more the consequences for social policy and social interaction that seem to be, to me to be scary.
MR. LAZARO: For his part, Dr. Brinster says his work is far more likely to be used to study infertility and to design certain animals, not children. These animals would be useful models to study human diseases.
DR. RALPH BRINSTER: If it would be possible to make mutations, for example, in an animal such as a rat or even a larger animal, like a dog, and create models in several species that would be affected by the HIV virus, then I think we would have models in which to test AIDS that would shed information on what's happening in humans. And the same can be said about cancer, various types of cancer.
MR. LAZARO: If and when his technique is ever applied in humans, Dr. Brinster is confident there will be safeguards built into the system.
DR. RALPH BRINSTER: If restraints need to be established, they'll set up committees like the recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, which passes on how genes are used on the fetal research committee that passes on how human fetuses can be used, and they will decide how to do this.
MR. LAZARO: As Brinster prepares to apply his experiment on larger animals, rats, domestic animals, perhaps primates, his employer, the University of Pennsylvania, plans to apply for a patent on what's become known as the Brinster technique.
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