By Hilary White
A California-based biotechnology company, StemLifeLine, is making a special offer to parents of children conceived through in vitro fertilisation techniques: “We’ll turn your spare embryos into embryonic stem cell lines tailored to your child’s potential future medical needs.”
StemLifeLine’s website calls it “a novel service for individuals who have undergone in vitro fertilization, fulfilled their childbearing needs and now have to decide what to do with their remaining stored embryos. We can help transform these embryos into individual stem cell lines that our clients may one day use to create personalized therapies for themselves and their families.”
“Until now, there have been only three options for embryos remaining after individual childbearing needs have been fulfilled. They could be donated to research, given up for ‘adoption’ to other couples or discarded. We provide a fourth option for these embryos which is to generate personal stem cell lines that can one day be used to create personal therapies.”
The fact that no therapeutic application of embryonic stem cells has yet to be found by researchers anywhere in the world, has not dampened the company’s money-making enthusiasm for the project. The company’s website mentions “hundreds of published studies” that it claims show the potential of embryonic stem cells, but actually cites only seven.
In the meantime, others are calling the company’s claims a “gimmick”. Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, was quoted by ABC saying that StemLifeLine’s claim was not unique, “In fact any clinic can do it, just like any clinic can freeze embryos. The problem is no one has made anything useful out of stem cells.”
Other voices have decried as “hype”- the sort of media publicity that will likely create sales for the company. In some cases embryonic and other types of early cells are being promoted as beauty cures at internationally patronised spas. In 2005, the UK’s Independent Online revealed that some Britons are going to Barbados, Ecuador, Russia and Ukraine to receive injections of stem cells derived from aborted children. Some British women have paid as much as ₤15,000 for the “treatments.”
The same year, one of the UK’s most prominent fertility experts, Professor Robert Winston, called on researchers to be more realistic in their claims for treatments from stem cells.
Winston told delegates at a British Association for the Advancement of Science event in Dublin, “I view the current wave of optimism about embryonic stem cells with growing suspicion. Embryonic stem cells replicate very slowly in culture, and it may well be that in the culture systems where you want to grow them the selective pressure is in favour of the faster growing cells, the ones of course which are most likely to be genetically abnormal.”