When the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) was established in 1991, no one had much inkling of the murky waters it would be required to patrol. The HFEA was envisaged primarily as a body for regulating assisted conception, and so it was given regulatory powers over human embryo research. Sixteen years later, the HFEA is having to pronounce on issues that have little bearing on fertility and conception, but rather concern research that some people say is blurring the boundaries of what it means to be human.
So far, the HFEA has remained commendably aloof from the ill-founded fears that this research attracts. Its latest permissive ruling on the creation of human-animal cells is the outcome of sober and informed consideration of a sort that still threatens to elude the British government. It belies (in Britain, at least) the belief that Enlightenment ideals are in eclipse.
Human and non-human components might be mixed in embryos in many different ways. Some research requires human genetic material to be put into animal cells—for example, to create human embryonic stem cells without reliance on the very limited supply of human eggs. There are also arguments for putting animal genes into human cells, which could offer new ways to study the early stages of human development.
Certainly, there are dangers. Eviscerating an animal cell nucleus (where most DNA is housed) to make way for a human genome does not remove all the host's genetic material. Such transfers, which produce so-called cytoplasmic hybrid (cybrid) cells, might, if used to make stem cells for medical implantation, risk introducing animal diseases into human populations. Recent findings that genomes can be altered by "back-transfer" of genetic information from non-DNA material add to the uncertainties.
But no one is intending at this stage to use cybrids for stem-cell treatments; they are strictly a research tool. The HFEA has decided that there is no "fundamental reason" to prohibit them—recognising, it seems, that protests about human dignity and unnaturalness impose misplaced criteria. It stresses that the ruling is not a universal green light, and that licensing will be made on a case-by-case basis. The first such applications are being considered, and are likely to be approved.
The ruling says nothing about other fusions, such as embryos with mixtures of human and animal cells (true chimeras) or hybrids made by fertilisation of eggs with sperm of another species. These carry a higher "yuk" factor, but on current form, we can count on the HFEA not to succumb to squeamishness, panic or the mendacious rhetoric of the slippery slope.
The best known man on the planet
Was it vanity or bravery that led Craig Venter to sequence his complete genome and make it public? That depends on how you feel about Venter, whose company Celera provided the privatised competition to the human genome project. Both those efforts constructed a composite genome from the DNA of several anonymous donors, and analysed only one of each pair of the 23 human chromosomes.
Venter's team has decoded both of his chromosomes, revealing the different versions of genes acquired from each parent. It is these variants, along with the way each is controlled within the genome and how they interact with the environment, that determine our physical characteristics. The analysis reveals other sources of difference between our "duplicate" chromosomes, such as bits of genes that have parts inserted or cut out. This is, you might say, a study of how much we differ from ourselves—and it should help to undermine the simplistic notion that we are built from a single instruction manual that is merely read again and again from conception to the grave.
Venter bares all in a paper in the free-access electronic journal PLoS Biology, joining Jim Watson as one of the first individuals to have had his genome sequenced. Some people think that this "celebrity" sequencing sends out the message that personalised genomics is for the rich and privileged. But such knowledge may prove more burdensome than beneficial—Venter has discovered a possible genetic propensity to Alzheimer's. The legal and ethical aspects of access to the information are a minefield. Venter says that his motive is partly to stimulate efforts to make sequencing cheaper. But right now, he has become in one sense the best known man on the planet.
We don't need no helium-3
Many people swear blind, without the slightest justification, that the Apollo missions gave us Teflon and the instant fruit drink Tang. New calls for a moon base are routinely supported with the claim that we can mine the lunar surface for nuclear-fusion fuel in the form of helium-3, a rare commodity on earth. BBC's Horizon bought the idea, and it's been paraded in front of the US House of Representatives. But as physicist Frank Close said recently, it has no sound basis. Helium-3 is said to be a cleaner fuel, but none of the large fusion projects use it, nor could they without a total reactor redesign. That's not even to mention the cost of it. But no straw is too flimsy that advocates of human spaceflight will fail to grasp it.
