FROM THE EDITOR
This week’s announcement by Chinese scientists that they had cloned macaque monkeys prompted a walk down memory lane for me. The scientists aver that they have no interest whatsoever in human cloning. One must take them at their word, I suppose, but the impulse to clone humans is a recurring lunacy.
Remember the Raelians? In 2002 Rael, the French-Canadian founder of the sect which believes that mankind was created by extraterrestrials and that cloning is a way to immortality, announced that his scientists had cloned a baby.
Remember Severino Antinori? The Italian gynaecologist announced that he had cloned babies in 2002. No proof was ever given. He is currently battling charges of kidnapping and forcibly removing eight eggs from a Spanish nurse.
Remember Hwang Woo-suk? The veterinary scientist claimed that he had cloned human embryos in 2004 and was featured on a South Korean stamp. Much of his work was fraudulent.
Remember Panayiotis Zavos? The Cypriot-American claimed in 2009 that he had implanted cloned 14 embryos and implanted them in four women. He has faded from the limelight in recent years.
I would wager that if the Chinese experiment is confirmed, there will be another wave of cloning attempts by rogue scientists. Watch this space.
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Michael Cook Editor BioEdge |
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The first cloned monkeys made with somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) were born recently, according to Chinese scientists.
Although Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, two genetically identical long-tailed macaques, are not the world's first cloned monkeys, they are the first to be born using SCNT. This technique involves inserting DNA from one monkey into an enucleated egg of another to create an embryo.
Dr Mu-ming Poo, co-author of the research and director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Neuroscience, says that a population of genetically identical monkeys will be very useful for genetic research and drug development.
The results were published in the journal Cell.
The first successful SCNT monkey clones immediately sparked interest in in the dream of human cloning. Dr Poo told The Guardian:
“There is now no barrier for cloning primate species, thus cloning humans is closer to reality. However, our research purpose is entirely for producing non-human primate models for human diseases; we absolutely have no intention, and society will not permit, this work to be extended to humans.”
The process is quite inefficient at the moment. In the Chinese experiment, 79 embryos were created and implanted into 21 surrogates. Only two live births resulted.
“The work in this paper is not a stepping stone to establishing methods for obtaining live born human clones,” commented Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, of the Francis Crick Institute, in London. “This is so inefficient, so hazardous and unsafe, that I am not sure it is really justified, to be honest.”

Ivo Poppe in court
A Roman Catholic deacon and nurse may be Belgium’s worst serial killer. Taking advantage of his work in a nursing home, Ivo Poppe, 61, may have killed up to 50 people by injecting air into their veins. The deaths took place between 1978 and 2011.
His last victim was his own mother, who was suffering from depression, but he also dispatched his stepfather and two uncles. He normally gave his victims an injection of Valium with a bubble of air, which caused an embolism.
Poppe’s trial began this week in the city of Bruges. He has been formally accused of at least ten deaths, but police believe that there are many more. Poppe has made several partial confessions, admitting to different numbers of victims, ranging from 10 to 100.
He was arrested in 2014 after he consulted a psychiatrist about nightmares and confided that he had “euthanised dozens of people”. He told the court, “I wanted to end their suffering, these people weren’t really living anymore.”
Poppe also admitted that none of his patients had requested him to shorten their lives. He also expressed regret over his actions. “Now, I would seek assistance from a palliative care team,” he added.
Poppe, a married father of three, was ordained as a deacon in 1996 and was employed as a pastoral worker until 2011.
The Belgian trial coincides with further charges against a German nurse, Niels Högel, who has already been convicted of killing six patients in the northern German city of Oldenburg. He is now being charged with 97 further counts of murder.

Old documents related to Japan's Eugenic Protection Law
A Japanese woman in her 60s is planning to sue the government over her forced sterilization under a 1948 law. This will be the first time that state compensation has been sought for sterilisation. The mentally disabled woman in Miyagi Prefecture was a teenager when she was forced to undergo the procedure.
Records of 2,700 people who were sterilized under the Eugenic Protection Law — which was in force until 1996 — have been found in local government archives, a development which could help victims seek state compensation.
Like some Western countries, Japan has a dark eugenic past.
A 1948 Eugenic Protection Law (EPL) was intended to prevent the births of “inferior descendants” and to foster the health of mothers and pregnant women. It provided for both voluntary and involuntary sterilisation. Doctors could apply for permission for sterilisation to a regional board if a patient suffered from a range of conditions which were believe to be hereditary, including schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, epilepsy, abnormal sexual desire, "remarkable criminal inclination," Huntington's disease, muscular dystrophy, albinism, achromatopsia, deafness, haemophilia, and so on.
The Ministry of Health issued guidelines in 1953 clarifying what doctors could do: "It is permissible to restrain the patient's body, to administer an anesthetic, or to deceive the patient, etc."
According to government statistics, between 1949 to 1994, 16,520 involuntary sterilizations were performed, 11,356 on women, and 5,164 on men. Most were performed on inmates of psychiatric hospitals and institutions for intellectually disabled people.
Compulsory sterilisation lapsed in 1996 with the passage of the Mother's Body Protection Law. However, the Japanese government has refused to apologize to the victims of the law or offer them compensation.

from 'Reflections of the Past', a photo series by Tom Hussey
Canada’s new euthanasia legislation does not permit binding advance directives. However, there is pressure to incorporate them into legislation. Supporters argue that some people choose euthanasia too soon because they fear lingering on in a demented state.
In an acute analysis of the situation in the blog Impact Ethics, Valentina Romano points out that the “legalizing dementia-related advance directives ... is problematic because the justification rests on the assumption that dementia patients are simpler, faded versions of the healthy persons they once were. In reality dementia patients are not abridged versions of their past selves; they are different persons facing new challenges with a different set of interests.”
It is impossible to predict what the wishes of a person with dementia will be, as the disease is “enigmatic and unpredictable”. Romano argues that dementia patients slowly become two different persons as their disease progresses. Therefore “a prospective end-of-life decision made through an advance directive affords too much power to the present person and none at all to the future one.” She concludes:
For a person facing dementia to make a life-ending decision for a future self is more equivalent to that patient making such a decision for a complete stranger. This is, in my mind, the most problematic aspect of advance directives for dementia-related MAiD. By the time they are effective, advance directives for MAiD are to implement wishes that may be utterly irrelevant and completely forgotten by the late-stage demented patient.

Baroness O'Loan, former Police Ombudsman in Northern Ireland
A Northern Ireland peer has introduced a bill into the House of Lords to guarantee the controversial right to conscientious objection. Baroness Nuala O’Loan says that her Conscientious Objection (Medical Activities) Bill is needed to protect medical professionals:
Reasonable accommodation of conscientious objection is a matter both of liberty and equality: of individual freedom and social inclusion. No one should be coerced by the risk to their careers into violating their conscience, and it is plainly inconsistent with the principles of equality legislation to exclude whole sections of society from areas of medical employment simply because of their moral beliefs. I hope this excites support from across the country that allows us to fix this deficit of legal rights and protections".
According to the Free Conscience Campaign, a recently launched lobby group, existing law is inadequate for protecting the conscientious rights of medical professionals. A parliamentary inquiry in 2016 found that some doctors and nurses face difficulties due to their conscientious objection to practices that they believe end a human life, such as withdrawing food and fluid from a dying patient in end of life care.
The conscience rights of midwives were also undermined by a 2014 Supreme Court judgment, which held that the conscience provision in the Abortion Act 1967 did not cover aspects of their employment.
The bill is sure to create debate as it gains momentum in Parliament. When it was first proposed in 2015, the chair of the Secular Medical Forum, Dr Anthony Lempert, commented:
"The risk is that granting doctors and nurses wider freedoms to withdraw from providing care risks compromising the provision of care; this is something we have seen in other countries such as Italy where some patients have been unable to access abortion services."

Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka has been dragged into a case of stem cell research fraud in his laboratory. This week Kyoto University found that the lead author of a 2017 paper in Stem Cell Reports, Kohei Yamamizu, had fabricated all six main images, which were “pivotal in the conclusions the author drew”.
Yamamizu is an assistant professor in a research group led by Yamanaka at Kyoto University’s Center for iPS Cell Research and Application. There is no suggestion that Yamanaka was involved, but apparently he has even considered resigning from his position.
“[The fraud] is something that shakes the people’s trust in research activities and is extremely regrettable,” Japanese education minister Yoshimasa Hayashi told the media. “We would like to instruct Kyoto University to do its utmost to prevent a recurrence.”
It is unlikely that Yamanaka will be forced out. “Resignation doesn’t sound like the right thing to happen in this situation,” commented Alan Trounson, a leading stem cell scientist at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne.
The field of stem cell research has been marred by a series of spectacular examples of fabrication and falsification, from Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk in 2004 to Japanese scientist Haruko Obokata in 2014.

Dr Simon Bramhall
A British surgeon who branded the livers of two of his patients with his own initials has been fined £10,000 and ordered to perform 120 hours of community service. Dr Simon Bramhall, a liver, spleen and pancreas surgeon, admitted the two incidents, which occurred in 2013. His registration has not been suspended. He now works for the National Health Service in Herefordshire.
Although he seared his initials into the surface of the liver, no physical harm was suffered by the patients. In sentencing the surgeon, the judge said:
“Both of the operations were long and difficult. I accept that on both occasions you were tired and stressed and I accept that this may have affected your judgment. This was conduct born of professional arrogance of such magnitude that it strayed into criminal behaviour.
“What you did was an abuse of power and a betrayal of trust that these patients had invested in you. I accept that you didn’t intend or foresee anything but the most trivial of harm would be caused.”

Syrian medical facilities have experienced a dramatic increase in attacks, particularly in opposition-controlled areas of Hama and Idlib, according to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
PHR has received reports of 16 attacks between December 26 and January 8, concentrated in southern Idlib and northern Hama, eight of which PHR has independently verified. Medical workers have confirmed with PHR that most, if not all, facilities in the areas affected by the recent bombing campaign have been forced to close down or are operating at a very limited capacity.
“We haven’t seen this many facilities targeted in such a short period of time since last May, when the area was ostensibly put under protection,” said Marianne Mollmann, director of PHR’s research and investigations team. “These illegal attacks are basically herding civilians from one area to another with bombs.”
One of the facilities hit by the recent airstrikes was Idlib’s al-Salam Maternity Hospital, in an incident on January 3 which killed several civilians, including a newborn. According to field sources contacted by PHR, the hospital was targeted more than once, with two airstrikes landing meters away and putting the hospital out of service indefinitely. This hospital was one of only two hospitals in the area providing paediatric and gynaecological medical services.
“It is really frustrating that never before in the history of conflicts have health facilities been destroyed in this savage way – and yet the world is silent,” a Idlib Health Directorate representative said. “People are killed twice – once when they are targeted and once when they are deprived of their right to get health care and medical services.”
The Hasan al-Araj Hospital in Hama was impacted by at least three separate airstrikes during one week between December 28 and January 5. The assault blocked one of the entrances, forcing the facility to suspend operations. This hospital was built into a cave to provide some measure of protection, but it has not escaped being the target of airstrikes. In October 2016, PHR documented a wave of attacks on Hasan al-Araj Hospital, which forced the temporary evacuation of staff and patients.
“At this stage of the Syrian conflict, even fortified hospitals are not secure,” said Dr Homer Venters, PHR’s director of programs. “If ever there was an indication that this is a deliberate attack on health care workers who risk their lives to provide care, this is it. It is incomprehensible that the international community is allowing these unthinkable war crimes to continue unabated.”
The beginning of January also saw several reported attacks on medical facilities in eastern Ghouta, as well as suspected chemical attacks affecting civilian populations there. In addition, on January 19, a psychiatric hospital was reportedly struck in Afrin in northern Aleppo.
