MICHIGAN MESSENGER — New Stem Cell Controversy: Harvest Sperm From Woman, Eggs From Man
“Gary Glenn, director of the American Family Association of Michigan, told the Michigan Messenger: ‘The ideal that’s in every child’s best interests is to have both a mother and a father. Selfishly denying a child one or the other on purpose, by whatever means, is obviously not in the child’s best interest. Obviously, being able to harvest male sperm cells from a woman’s bone marrow doesn’t make her a father, which every boy needs and deserves, any more than harvesting unfertilized eggs from a man’s bone marrow will make him the mother that every little girl needs.’”
MICHIGAN MESSENGER
Lansing, Michigan
February 28, 2008
New stem cell controversy: Harvest
sperm from woman, eggs from man
by Ed Brayton
Just when new developments hold out the promise of doing embryonic stem cell research without any destruction of embryos, a new research study has rekindled another fierce controversy over the ethical uses of such research.
Researchers in the UK and Brazil have announced that they believe it will be possible in the future to use adult stem cells from a woman to produce sperm cells and to use adult stem cells from a man to produce eggs with their own DNA. If that becomes a reality, it would allow gay or lesbian couples to produce their own 100 percent biological offspring. Currently, it is possible for a female couple to reproduce using an egg from one of them and sperm from another male, or for male couples to reproduce by inseminating a surrogate mother, but only one of the couple in each case is a biological parent to the child.
This announcement has caused something of an uproar, particularly in conservative Christian circles. Gary Glenn, director of the American Family Association of Michigan, told the Michigan Messenger: “The ideal that’s in every child’s best interests is to have both a mother and a father. Selfishly denying a child one or the other on purpose, by whatever means, is obviously not in the child’s best interest. Obviously, being able to harvest male sperm cells from a woman’s bone marrow doesn’t make her a father, which every boy needs and deserves, any more than harvesting unfertilized eggs from a man’s bone marrow will make him the mother that every little girl needs.”
Ed Rivet of Right to Life of Michigan argues that such research is evidence that scientists must be restrained by society, saying: “We can’t as a society presume that science will properly monitor itself or regulate itself. There will always be scientists that will cross whatever ethical lines we draw. We as a society do have an important obligation to provide oversight to the scientific community.”
But in this case, the scientific community seems highly skeptical of the feasibility of such research even before getting to the ethical questions.
The research team at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK has so far managed to coax stem cells from mouse embryos to become sperm stem cells, or spermatogonium. These cells contain two sets of chromosomes, not one, and have to go through a complex series of cell divisions in order to become actual sperm cells capable of fertilizing an ovum. So far the researchers have only managed to use a combination of vitamins and chemicals to induce the first two divisions, not all the other divisions needed.
Reed Cartwright, a Ph.D. geneticist at North Carolina State University, told the Michigan Messenger that he has doubts that they will even be able to reach the point of a viable sperm cell:
I don’t think it will be feasible at all with cell culture technology. It’s wishful thinking to propose that a solution of “chemicals and vitamins” will be enough to replicate the complex adaptations that our bodies have to produce and nurture perfectly healthy, mature sperm and eggs. This technology will probably become feasible only after “artificial organ” technology is functional, but it will still have difficulties even then.
And even if they do manage to overcome those difficulties, Cartwright points out, the real problems come after fertilization and implantation, where the interaction of mother and father genomes has been finely honed by millions of years of evolution to work in concert with one another:
“The major problem in my opinion is getting the genes of the artificial gamete to properly imprint. Our reproductive biology is the result of millions of years of evolution to balance the different needs of fathers and mothers while maintaining compatibility and offspring viability. There are hundreds of genes in a human body that get turned off or on based on whether they are inherited from Dad or Mom; this is called imprinting. Failures in getting the correct imprinting pattern have been linked to diseases such as cancer, schizophrenia, and autism. You may be able to produce mature sperm from a female cell line, but you might be unable to set the correct “Dad” imprinting on the sperm cell, and any resulting child will have two “Mom” imprinting patterns, which is not healthy. This is probably the major reason why the mice in the Newcastle experiment have health problems.”
The genetics of reproduction is enormously complex, as is the crucial interplay of different genes. There are genes in the maternal DNA that must be turned off or on by other genes in the paternal DNA, and vice versa. Absent those regulatory genes, the whole process of recombination and imprinting may become hopelessly distorted. Cartwright notes that the unique danger here is that the researchers “are trying to turn those adult cells into something that runs counter to their biology and evolutionary history.”
