Scientists are getting closer to the possibility of making a new person from skin or blood cells, without the need for sex.
This approach goes well beyond in vitro fertilization — which combines egg and sperm in a test tube — because it doesn’t require natural eggs or sperm.
Called in vitro gametogenesis, or IVG, it promises to someday provide a cure for many types of infertility, to slow or even turn off biological clocks, and to enable the kind of embryo selection that sends chills up many spines.
In a three-day meeting last week at the National Academies of Sciences, researchers eagerly discussed their work, advocates laid out their vision for making IVG useful, and ethicists squirmed in their seats.
“The search for a ‘perfect’ race, ‘perfect’ baby, ‘perfect generation’ is not science fiction,” Amrita Pande, a sociologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told the group Thursday.
The technology for making babies from cells other than eggs and sperm still remains a decade away or more.
But now — before the science turns possibility into reality — is a good time for the public to consider the implications of IVG, said I. Glenn Cohen, an expert on the intersection of law and bioethics at Harvard Law School.
“There’s certainly a lot of publications and a lot of interest in the scientific community and it’s great that we’re introducing it to a larger community,” Cohen said after the first day’s presentations. “If people have serious ethical concerns, this is the time to spell them out.”
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Making eggs from male mice
In one of the latest advances in the field, Japanese researcher Katsuhiko Hayashi showed in March that he can transform skin cells from adult male mice into healthy eggs.
Only a tiny fraction of the mouse eggs he made were viable, but the mice successfully grown from these egg cells were healthy and able to have pups and grand-pups of their own.
He envisions eventually using this approach to treat infertility in people who have extra sex chromosomes, such as XXY or XYY, as compared to the typical XX for females and XY for males. It could also enable single-sex couples to have a child who is biologically related to both parents.
Hayashi has also developed a method of making viable sperm from adult male mouse cells, and he and others are working to mature eggs made from adult females — all of which fit under the rubric of IVG.
“My primary wish is to contribute to helping people suffering from infertility,” Hayashi said in an interview last month. “What I am doing now is very basic biology.”
In animals, IVG could be used to conserve species in danger of extinction, said Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at Harvard Medical School and director of life sciences at Boston’s Museum of Science.
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But whether IVG could ever be considered safe in humans, and how many embryos would have to be sacrificed in the process, remain open questions.
And while the science may be driven by curiosity, everyone agrees it will be used to make money from people desperate to continue their biological line or just willing to pay for the offspring of their choice.
“It is a perversion of the sanctity of procreation as a fundamental aspect of human life,” said Ben Hurlbut, a bioethicist and historian of science at Arizona State University, before the meeting. “It makes it into an industrial project that responds to and also inspires and cultivates the desires of their future customers.”
Already several startups backed by private venture capital are looking to commercialize the creation of lab-made eggs and sperm, perhaps first in farm animals.
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The ethical perspective
One ethical question raised by IVG is who benefits from this kind of work.
“The child that would be created exists not for its own sake, but for the sake of others,” Hurlbut said. “That child is the expression of other people’s desires.”
Several people at the conference raised the specter of 90-year-olds having offspring in this way, or babies having babies, or long-dead people.
Researchers and ethicists alike agree that it’s OK to tinker with genes for the sake of curing a sick child. Those genetic changes won’t be passed down to future generations.
IVG doesn’t tinker with genetics, it just uses the programs already in place in a cell to give it a different function — turning a skin cell into a sperm cell, for instance. But once this can be done in an unlimited way, people could choose among dozens, hundreds or thousands of embryos, compared with IVF in which just a handful of embryos are created.
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The perspective of history does not make the fertility field look good, Hurlbut said, and the “Wild West” approach doesn’t seem to be changing.
In vitro fertilization, for example, was introduced without the standard clinical trial process.
Reproductive technologies have long been a biological, social, legal and moral experiment, Hurlbut said.
“We really still do not understand the subtleties even of IVF itself, which is 45 years old this year, let alone all of the other things we’ve layered on top of it,” he said.
A similar non-scientific process established the hormonal regimen that women still routinely get to generate eggs for IVF, he said.
“It’s a quite fundamental norm that you don’t experiment on children and yet this in vitro cultivation of a technology is also cultivation of desires and of a potential market that at the end of the day fundamentally entails experimentation on children,” he said.
Pursuing this work also sends a mixed message to families that result from adoption, said Françoise Baylis, a philosopher at Dalhousie University in Canada, before the conference. Pursuing a biologically related child, regardless of the financial, scientific and ethical cost, devalues families based on other relationships, she said.
Reining in science
The public tends to assume scientists only pursue worthwhile research, said Katie Hasson, associate director of science for the Center for Genetics and Society, an advocacy group that argues for responsible use of genetic technology.
But once something is possible, she said, the presumption becomes “now that we can do it, how can anyone say we should not do it?”
Meetings like this week’s are intended to foster discussion before it becomes too late to stop scientific “progress.”
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Dr. Peter Marks, an official with the Food and Drug Administration, laid out the many regulatory hurdles and issues IVG would likely face in the U.S. just to reach the stage of a clinical trial.
Federal funding cannot be used for the creation of embryos, and currently, embryos can’t be allowed to develop for more than 14 days in a lab, which limits the ability to test their safety, Hyun said.
Many conference attendees worried aloud that other countries, perhaps with less scientific and regulatory oversight, will pursue the work first.
“There’s ego and also the structure of incentives in science,” Hasson said. “That also feeds into arguments like, ‘If we don’t do it, X country is going to do it, therefore we should do it first.’ … The profit potential and the push to commercialize these technologies can be a big motivation.”
To Baylis, the question about pursuing IVG is also one of priorities.
“There are only so many scientists, so much money and time to solve dramatic problems,” she said.
Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
