Donor Issue Slows Stem Cell Progress

South Korean stem cell pioneer Woo Suk Hwang, center, faces questions about allegations that he pressured women to donate eggs. (By Bae Jae-man -- Associated Press)

This is not the first time Schatten has found himself in the penumbra of an egg scandal. Ten years ago, revelations about criminal practices at a University of California fertility program led investigators to Schatten, who was then at the University of Wisconsin. He had an arrangement to obtain eggs from the clinic in Irvine, Calif., where, it turned out, doctors were impregnating women with embryos made from other women's eggs and distributing excess eggs to researchers without institutional approval.

One Irvine doctor was eventually convicted on federal charges, and two others fled the country to avoid prosecution. Schatten was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Schatten's latest close call arose from his 2004 decision to collaborate with Hwang, who had just succeeded in growing stem cells from cloned human embryos -- a "holy grail" accomplishment that for the first time proved the possibility of growing stem cells genetically matched to any patient.

For Hwang, whose English is marginal, Schatten served as an eloquent translator, spokesman and a link to the centers of scientific power in the Western world. For Schatten, whose own stem cell research had foundered, the deal offered a shortcut to the forefront of one of the hottest fields in biology and into the international media spotlight.

With great fanfare, Hwang and Schatten last month launched an ambitious effort to distribute hundreds of customized stem cell colonies to disease researchers around the world -- including U.S. researchers who have been unable to gain access to such cells under restrictions imposed by President Bush in 2001.

In an interview in his Pittsburgh office last month before the deal collapsed, Schatten's eyes brimmed with tears repeatedly as he talked about the benefits the project might bring to humankind.

The sudden collapse of that endeavor has stunned resource-hungry U.S. researchers, many of whom had been lining up to take advantage of the South Korean's techniques and enviable funding.

George Daley, a researcher at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Children's Hospital in Boston, had long-standing plans to visit Hwang in Seoul this week, for example, with the goal of setting up a collaboration.

"We want to do it here, but it's incredibly challenging" given state and federal restrictions on human embryo cloning, said Daley, one of several scientists expressing fears that the South Korean scandal might take a political toll on the field. He was still considering last week whether to cancel that trip in light of Schatten's assertions.

More generally, the evolving situation in South Korea has renewed a long-unresolved debate in this country over the ethics of egg donation for cloning and stem cell research.

With current techniques, it takes dozens of eggs to make a single cloned human embryo, which is destroyed in the process of extracting the stem cells. That means that if the field of therapeutic cloning is to advance -- a field involving the creation of cloned embryos as sources of stem cells that would be genetically matched to particular patients -- a significant number of eggs will be needed both to fuel the initial research and eventually to satisfy the demands of patients.

It is legal in the United States to pay women for their eggs, and in recent years at least two teams of stem cell researchers in Massachusetts have done so to the tune of thousands of dollars per procedure.

Scientists at Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Mass., made the decision to pay women only after a long analysis by an ethics board created by the company, said scientific director Robert Lanza. He still thinks it is the right way to go, Lanza said, given the painful injections involved, the uncomfortable egg suction procedure, and the approximately 5 percent chance of a serious case of hormonal over-stimulation, which can require hospitalization.

Others, however, say such payments cannot help but be coercive, especially for poor women who might feel compelled to take on those risks just to make ends meet.

In April, the National Academies, chartered by Congress to advise the nation on matters of science, released a report that recommended against payments for human eggs beyond expenses incurred by the donors, in part because of the "sensitivities" inherent in the creation of embryos destined for destruction.

But the report's impact remains uncertain as research institutions, fertility clinics and the biggest wild card of them all -- Congress -- mull the Academies' findings and the larger issues at hand.

At least six stem cell bills -- including one that would allow broader use of federal funds for the research and another that would allow the creation of cloned human embryos but would ban payment for eggs -- are awaiting action.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has said he intends to get to the bills early next year.