London Sunday Times October 19 1997 BRITAIN

Headless frog opens way for human organ factory

by Steve Connor and Deborah Cadbury

SCIENTISTS have created an embryo of a frog without a head, raising
the prospect of engineering headless human clones which could be used
to grow organs and tissues for transplant surgery.

The headless frog embryos have not been allowed to live longer than a
week, but the scientists believe the technique could be adapted to
grow human organs such as hearts, kidneys, livers and the pancreas in
an embryonic sac living in an artificial womb.

If human cloning becomes possible and many scientists believe it is
inevitable following the birth of Dolly, the first adult sheep clone
the two breakthroughs could be combined so that people requiring
transplants could have organs grown to order from their own cloned
cells.

The advantage of using human clones is that organs could be grown that
would perfectly match the patient requiring a transplant and there
would be no need for drugs to prevent tissue rejection. It would also
solve the increasing shortage of transplant organs.

Growing parts of human embryos to cultivate organs could bypass many
legal restrictions and ethical concerns, because without a brain or
central nervous system the "organ sacs" may not meet the technical
definition of an embryo. The scientists nevertheless accept that many
people would still find the research repugnant.

Jonathan Slack, professor of developmental biology at Bath University
and a leading embryologist, says he can now create headless frog
embryos relatively easily by manipulating certain genes. Using the
technique, he has been able to suppress not only development of a
tadpole's head, but also its trunk and tail. Under current Home Office
rules, they are not considered animals until they are a week old, when
they have to be destroyed.

He said the breakthrough could be applied to human embryos because the
same genes perform similar functions in both frogs and humans.

Using intact cloned human embryos to grow organs would be out of the
question because they would have to be killed and this would be
equivalent to murder, Slack said.

"It occurred to me a half-way house could be reached. Instead of
growing an intact embryo, you could genetically reprogramme the embryo
to suppress growth in all the parts of the body except the bits you
want, plus a heart and blood circulation," he said.

Neither would it be acceptable to grow parts of a human embryo as an
organ sac inside a woman's womb. "More acceptable might be taking a
single cell and somehow growing a complete organ in a bottle from it,"
said Slack.

He nevertheless believes the enormous technical problems can be
overcome. It was the cloning of frogs 30 years ago that led to the
cloning of Dolly. Scientists at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh,
who created Dolly, said earlier this year that the first human clones
could be produced within two years.

Slack's ideas have angered some academics. Professor Andrew Linzey, an
animal ethicist at Oxford University, denounced his research.

"This sort of thinking beggars belief. It's scientific fascism because
we would be creating other beings whose very existence would be to
serve the dominant group. It is morally regressive to create a mutant
form of life," Linzey said.

Other scientists, however, support Slack in raising the profile of
such controversial research, which is described for the first time in
a BBC2 Horizon documentary this week.

Lewis Wolpert, professor of biology as applied to medicine at
University College London, said Slack's suggestions were perfectly
sensible and could in principle be possible. "There are no ethical
issues because you are not doing any harm to anyone.

"It is a question of whether it is acceptable or not to the public and
that depends on the 'yuk' factor."

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