Britain: Biomedical Mecca Of The Future?
Letter from London is Larry Miller's weekly, in-depth look at news from across the pond and how it relates to the United States.
During the years when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, the coal mines and steel mills closed, as did much of the manufacturing industry in the United Kingdom.
Britain stopped making things. The new wave was information technology, with California's Silicon Valley as both its physical and spiritual home.
Prime Minister Tony Blair has been in power for almost 10 years now, and from the beginning he's wanted to make Britain an epicenter for bioresearch and medical breakthroughs. He sees this as the next industrial revolution, and because he doesn't have to face moral or religious lobbyists, he's got a big jump on the United States.
While the very expression "stem cells" evokes a fierce reaction in some places, that is not so in Britain.
The government has given big grants to a wide variety of bioresearch companies carrying out all sorts of experiments — and one by one, the medical journals bring us news of breakthroughs.
We've just learned about a British company that may have developed a potential cure for baldness. Hairs from your neck are taken and, in simulated weightlessness, they are multiplied into thousands ready for transplanting.
Other British scientists have created a small human liver from umbilical cord stem cells. In the short term, the artificially grown livers will provide an alternative method of testing for pharmaceutical companies usually forced to use animals. In the long term, the scientists hope to create full human livers to save people from lifetimes of dialysis or death.
From there, to the news last week that British scientists have applied for permission to create embryos by fusing human DNA with cow eggs. These hybrid human-bovine embryos would be used for stem cell research, and would not be allowed to develop for more than a few days. The scientists say they want to use the cow eggs because there are few human eggs available for research.
The government is to consider the ethics of this procedure.
Medical ethics is a weighty subject. The ethical committee at London's Hampstead Hospital has approved a program of full face transplants — with the proviso that patient suitability and technical ability must not be the only criteria for going ahead with a face transplant: there must also be a research advantage to emerge from an operation.
When deciding the rights and wrongs of a procedure or controversial medical development, the government hands much of the responsibility to the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics. The Nuffield Web site says it has an international reputation for providing independent advice to assist policy makers and stimulate debate in bioethics.
The government has asked Nuffield to come up with new guidelines on handling births where a baby is unlikely to survive or, if it does, it will be so severely disabled that it will never have a high quality of life.
Nuffield Council is holding an inquiry into the controversial issue, and one would expect religious authorities to mount wide-scale protests. But they're not.
The Anglican Church of England — the state church headed by the Queen — has submitted its report to the inquiry. It says doctors should be given the right to withhold or withdraw treatment from seriously ill newborns, even though that would result in death.
The church says the right to life is not absolute, and there may be occasions where a Christian compassion overrides the "rule" that life should be preserved at all costs.
The church's view comes after the case of a three-month-premature baby girl who weighted just 1 pound and had severe lung and brain damage. Full medical care was given, and the child, now 3, is severely disabled.
The pressure on the parents was so great they have now separated, and so the state is now caring for her 24 hours a day. The church points to the burden of such children on families — and on the state-funded National Health Service, which could use the limited funds to keep others alive.
The issue of infant euthanasia is also of concern to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. It has called for a public debate on whether to assist the sickest babies to die.
While Britain's coal mines have long been closed, the country is now trying to finds its way through a bioethical minefield.