Cell division

The UK biotech industry is growing. Though it still lags some way behind its American competitors, it is enjoying better health today than it has ever sustained before. Last year, biotech investment in the UK and Europe rose by 20 percent to 1.4bn, reflecting a new era of stability for the industry.

Barring the mini-boom of investment some five years ago, fuelled partly by the hype surrounding the human genome project, the pioneering days of the industry saw very little investment, and when the bubble burst on the overvalued science of the HGP, the biotech start-ups were once again painfully short of money, leaving some of the industry’s most talented scientists out of jobs.

As low-tech manufacturing drifted east, the UK government focussed more and more on the ‘knowledge economy’ and the manufacture of high-tech and scientific products. Extra government spending and increased investment helped nurture biotechnology through a long and tentative recovery period. Investor confidence has now finally returned, largely in response to biotechs taking better account of commercial demands and focussing on projects with shorter lead times. But it is partly this commercial maturity – and scientific conservatism – that has left potentially vast wells of investment into controversial embryonic stem cell research untapped. The research promises to test the parameters of bio-medical ethics, and most of the newly commercialised biotechs have been unable to steel themselves to enter this dangerous and confusing moral landscape before legal, regulatory and intellectual property issues have been resolved.

The potential impact of his findings could hardly be exaggerated. It was a discovery that in any other field would have resulted in a major federal research project. Instead, it sparked a violent dispute about human life and human progress that spread around the world. The big decisions over stem cell research have since been wrestled from the hands of scientists. The progress made is no longer to be decided by dithering biotech companies or their reluctant investors. The decision belongs to the policymakers and governments of the world. It is for them to draw the line, to mark the limits of progress and of moral behaviour, and many have already made their decisions.

Thomson’s announcement dragged biotechnology into a maelstrom of religious and political arguments. Religious leaders, congressmen, and finally the Oval Office wanted to know where the needed embryos would come from and how many would be consumed by the demand of the world’s sick. Many in the US insisted that embryos are just as fully members of society as adult humans, and that their vulnerability demands they be protected more than most. Some compared the harvesting of embryonic cells to cannibalism and hyperbolic phrases like ’embryo farms’ and ‘cloning mills’ became commonplace. The same reaction was repeated in many other countries, as religious and moral anger raged across the globe.

The attitudes of those opposed to the research were summed up by a Greenpeace protest against human embryo patents outside the Reichstag in Germany. Protesters carrying placards with the uncompromising slogan ‘Stoppt Patente Auf leben’ marched around hundreds of frozen blocks of ice, each one with a plastic baby doll inside. The Greenpeace representatives were probably aware (unlike many of those who saw their protest) that the embryos being discussed were no bigger than the full point at the end of this sentence. They have no identifying features, and not even the merest hint of a nervous system. But shock tactics are from rare when discussing issues as important and emotive as this.

Richard Branson has just launched a much-publicised Virgin-branded cold-storage operation where parents can store their newborn’s umbilical cord and placental blood for use in later life. The stem cells thereby retained could be used to grow tissue or organs much less likely to be rejected by the body than cells imported from another donor, and the project might prove to have huge medical potential. But research carried out on pigs and mice suggests these types of stem cell could not match the versatility of embryonic stem cells, which have already been used to replace injured or dead cells in these animals to cure heart disease, diabetes, spinal cord injuries and many more afflictions. Research on human embryonic stem cells could yet prove to be modern medical science’s biggest discovery.

Clearly, this area could be a potential goldmine for biotechnology, and crucially – given the massive polarity of views globally – a chance for biotechnology to find strongholds in the scientifically liberal countries willing to embrace, promote and invest in the resulting technologies. Branson’s step is a brave one. Private storage, of the type he is offering, is opposed by the EC’s European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies and is now unlawful in France and Italy. But Branson’s courtship of controversy might be just what biotechnology needs. Much of the discussion and legislation surrounding stem cell research so far has been squeamish of commercialism to say the very least. Of course Branson has tried to show that his motivation in this venture, as with the research he is privately funding into biofuels, is born of corporate conscience – half of the donated blood will be stored in a national bank for research purposes – but the company will be run for profit. And biotechs can’t afford to be afraid of turning profit from progress.

Boundaries, of course, have been drawn, but the UK is keen to achieve the best results possible within the parameters of public approval. To that end, Science and Innovation Minister Malcolm Wicks has announced that the UK’s two major public funders of stem cell research, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Medical Research Council (MRC), will run a national public discussion on the issue funded by the Sciencewise unit of the DTI. The dialogue programme will aim to bring scientists and the public together to identify public expectations, aspirations and concerns about stem cell research, and will be paid for by a £300,000 government grant. When the announcement was made at a meeting of leading experts in the field in London recently MRC Chief Executive, Colin Blakemore, made it clear that the dialogue was as much about moving forward as gauging opinion. He said: “Discussion will help to make scientists understand the potential of their work and policymakers aware of the public’s views. In turn, this might lead to laboratory discoveries being applied more quickly in the clinic.”