Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,
Subject: The Fetal Tissue Ban
From: <SECBH@CUNYVM.BITNET>
Date: Saturday, 19 Dec 1992 12:24:46 EST
Organization: City University of New York/ University Computer Center

Although an expert panel has recommended using fetal tissue for
research, the government has banned federal funding of research
involving transplantation to humans of tissue from aborted fetuses since
1988.  This ban was forced on federally funded researchers despite
rigid protocols which forbade payment for fetus tissue to donors
or the use of solicited donor tissue.

This policy was put in place by President George Bush
and his advisors who were wooing Right Wing Christian forces.

This political action to appease Right Wing extremists may have
closed seriously hampered research into what may be a promising
treatment for AIDS, a disease which has infected hundreds of thousands
of Americans and millions of others around the world.
Meanwhile the November 26, 1992 New England Journal of
Medicine reported important progress in using fetal
tissue in treatment of Parkinson's disease, in a series of three
articles and accompanying editorials.

Technically, the fetal-tissue ban only prevents Federal
funding of research on transplanting fetal tissue into humans
 --  not other work with the tissue, such as laboratory studies.
But the real impact has been greater than the wording of the
policy would suggest, because the ban cast a stigma of Federal
disfavor over the whole area of fetal- tissue research, causing
scientists to avoid promising studies they would otherwise have
conducted.  The ban is still in place, and researchers interested
in doing fetal-tissue studies are reluctant to discuss
the issue, apparently because they do not want to become
involved in the politics surrounding it.

Science is highly politicized because it is heavily dependent on
Federal funding, permissions, and other decisions.

The interest in pursuing the use of  fetal tissue in the treatment of
AID stems largely from a paper on thymic transplantation published
in 1987 by researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine.

The paper reported on tissue that came from young children who had to
have part of their thymus removed during a heart operation.
The use of fetal thymic tissue would have provided a more abundant
source of tissue needed for additional research.

It was transplanted into 15 volunteers with late-stage AIDS.
The transplanted tissue survived,  for several months at least,
in eight of them.  A total of nine patients exhibited clinical
improvement two months after the operation.

In one case, cytomegalovirus retinitis cleared up spontaneously, tuber-
culosis control improved in two cases, "but the clearance of resistant
Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in case 12 and a cessation of the
previously intractable diarrhea in case 13 may be more significant," the
researchers said.  T-8 cells (different from T-helper cells, which may
be important in controlling HIV) showed substantial increases in all
eight of the patients in whom the transplant was successful, more than
doubling in every case, and often increasing several fold.

The Clinton administration is expected to take a humanitarian
view of the issue and to lift the ban so that federally funded
researchers may use fetal tissue transplants in research into treatments
for persons with Parkinsons disease, AIDS, etc.

Jack Carroll
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc