President Bush's veto in July on a bill to revise US stem-cell funding boosts the bioscience business opportunities for the British government. Tony Blair has been in California seeking to strengthen links with leading biotech companies there. And co-operation with the US west coast is due to be secured in a joint conference on stem-cell research, hosted in Britain in November.
In the ethical debate over stem cells, taken from surplus embryos in fertility treatment and used to research remedies for diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer, Britain and the US apparently do not stand shoulder to shoulder. They have their view, says Downing Street, and we have ours. Bush's view is that this use of embryos involves "the taking of innocent human life," which is why he exercised his veto on a bill approved by congress that would have lifted limits imposed on federal funding in this area.
There are no such restrictions on privately funded research—indeed, Bush's critics have pointed out the incongruity of a moral stance that depends on the source of funding. But it is not hard to imagine US scientists in both the public and private sectors, fed up with working in the present oppressive climate, seeking greener pastures across the Atlantic.
Perhaps not, however, in Rome, where the head of the Pontifical Council for the Family has suggested that Catholic stem-cell scientists should be threatened with excommunication. But medieval measures are not going to avert further theological headaches on the issue. What, for example, if the embryo has been produced by the union of an egg with sperm that is itself derived from an embryonic stem cell? That is what scientists in Germany and Britain reported they had achieved in July.
It's not a very reliable way of fertilising eggs. Of 210 mouse eggs injected with the sperm created from male stem cells, there were just seven live births. And these mice all had abnormal growth rates, were infertile and died prematurely. That doesn't bode well for human applications any time soon. But this may not be the primary value of the approach; it might instead cast light on causes of infertility arising from problems with sperm development. All the same, if the day comes when both gametes (sperm and eggs) are produced from people of either sex for assisted conception, it's not just cardinals and fundamentalist presidents who will struggle with the ethical implications.
Who believes in evolution?
"The politicisation of science in the name of religion and political partisanship is not new to the United States, but transformation of traditional geographically and economically based political parties into religiously oriented ideological coalitions marks the beginning of a new era for science policy." Jon Miller of Michigan State University and his colleagues make this comment in the normally staid journal Science, in relation to the figures they have collected on public acceptance of evolution worldwide. Whereas over 80 per cent of adults in Iceland, Denmark and Sweden, and 78 per cent in Japan, believe evolution to be "true," only 40 per cent do so in the US, while a third of adults there say it is "absolutely false." Yet 78 per cent of US adults are happy with descriptions of natural selection in animals and plants that omit the word "evolution." Humans are different: a scary 62 per cent believe humans came ready-made by God.
Can there be any national measure other than belief in evolution that would rank the US 33rd out of 34, just above Turkey and in the company of Cyprus, Latvia and Lithuania? We'd be foolish, however, to interpret this condescendingly as proof of the ignorance of Americans. Rather, we should see it as evidence that, in terms of belief systems, the US is (like Turkey) qualitatively different from most developed countries. The religious leanings of the current White House incumbents are only a part of the picture. The sociology of a nation that combines extreme technological sophistication with trenchant religious resistance to reason is one that demands urgent study, not easy jibes.
Ultrasound risks
Parental fears about the marginal health risks to their babies from biomedical interventions are understandable but apt to get out of hand. So the discovery by a team at Yale Medical School that ultrasound scanning of embryonic mice can prevent the correct wiring of some neurons in the cerebral cortex creates a delicate situation. They found that mice exposed in the womb to 30 minutes of ultrasound at clinically relevant intensities during the critical final stages of brain development have a small but significant proportion of cortical neurons that fail to move into their proper final positions.
What are the chances of the same thing happening in immature human brains? They take much longer to develop, of course: 30 minutes is a relatively long exposure for a mouse. On the other hand, human cortical neurons are a similar size to those of a mouse, and have further to travel and so more time to be disrupted en route. There are too many benefits of ultrasound fetal scanning to abandon it on the basis of this small and still hypothetical risk—but it adds weight to the existing recommendations against the rather grotesque use of ultrasound by some private companies who offer prenatal "keepsake" videos.
