Brad Pitt and the ethics of induced pluripotent stem cells
Who would have thought there could be serious ethical issues with induced pluripotent stem cells – or iPSC.
These are your bog standard skin cell or any other adult cell that scientists have learnt to reprogram to have similar abilities to embryonic stem cells. That is, they have the ability to become pluripotent, or turn into any cell in the human body.
Yes there are issues with the fact iPSCs are genetically engineered to enable the reprogramming, and yes it appears likely there other issues surrounding their real ability and safety, but these are technical issues rather than ethical issues such as those that surround the use of embryonic stem cells.
The ethics
Sitting in on a workshop at the recent Australian Science Teacher conference I was listening to Dr Andrew Laslett from CSIRO when almost anecdotally he mentioned that another issue with iPSC is one of privacy.
For example, one day the possibility might exist for me to grab a few cells from a person, let’s say Angelina Jolie, (Dr Laslett used Brad Pitt as an example, but insert appropriate hero/villian here), re-program them into pluripotent cells and then direct them to become sperm or egg cells and use them for nefarious purposes.
It is total speculation that our knowledge will enable us to do this … or is it. See this story from Science Daily
Yuk factor
But just because we can or might be able to apply such knowledge this way it is a long way from reality if nothing else because of the technical issues mentioned above, but possibly a bigger hurdle will be the yuk factor. By that I mean society’s intuitive repulsion to something even though they may be unable to explain why that repulsion exists. This is why we invented psychology, philosophy and ethics so we could create employment for those that like to analyse, rationalise and define such repulsion, among other important things.
My gut feeling is the yuk factor in this situation won’t be as dramatic as human reproductive cloning, but it will have an affect on the research, its applications and regulation.
Stem cells for teachers
By the way, the workshop I was in was run by the Australian Stem Cell Centre who were promoting and getting some feedback on a splendid new teacher resource on stem cells. I will give a proper appraisal of this resource down the track, but the resource will be launched during National Science Week next month, so teachers stay tuned.