Baby Brown of Oldham, the world's first child form an egg fertilised outside the womb, created reverberations throughout the Western world yesterday. "All hell will break loose," was the prediction seven years ago of Dr James Watson, of DNA fame but he was thinking of the and ethical outrage which some though might accompany the proof of successful scientific tampering with the process of procreation. There are no signs of outrage.
Over in the UUS gynaecologists are already seeing this as a great boon to the tiny percentage of infertile women to whom it may be of value, and you can almost hear the cash registers ringing with joy. For after all, if you can pop an undamaged blastocyst - fertilised and nurtured through its first cell divisions in the laboratory - back into its mum's womb and bring it happily to full term, you can probably bring it to full term in somebody else's womb. The surrogate mum, if that is the appropriate term, could make quite a decent living for a decade or so. That will worry our administrators.
The fact that it is 13 years since the first human oocyte was (probably) fertilised in the laboratory (since the egg did not go through multiple divisions the fertilisation was observed but not proven), and the work of Dr Robert Edwards on the biochemical complexities of the reproductive cycle began a decade before that indicates that we are not dealing with a "breakthrough" as everyone seems to think but rather the steady advance of knowledge and techniques. Mice were having "test tube babies" in 1966, and the Steptoe-Edwards collaboration on the human development - recorded at length in the Guardian on February 22, 1966 - has been a long haul.
The great difficulties lie in providing the right environments in the laboratory for the various maturation and division phases of the sperm, the oocyte and the fertilised egg and manipulation and surgical procedures which preclude - or at least minimise - the possibility of damage to the germ cells and to the growing blastocyst.
This, in conjunction with techniques for monitoring the growing foetus, pushes down the risk of bringing a laboratory-deformed infant into the world. The enormous care and great caution and patience which has characterised the Edwards-Steptoe collaboration is itself a demonstration of the scientific integrity of their purpose.
But what happens after the full publication of their techniques, when a full spectrum of the medical and biochemical professions can practise on mice and then have a go? How do you control that worldwide? And since natural biological processes lead to a vast wastage of human oocytes and sperm, a loss which nobody worries about, why should not some of this loss be turned to genuine scientific use? Chick embryos are a crucial component of many research and pharmaceutical operations but there are a vast range of research areas in which human embryos would be preferable. Many disease organisms for example will not grow satisfactorily in culture - but they would grow in an embryo. And if you want to test a substance for its effect on the growing foetus, why not do it in batches in the laboratory?
The revulsion that we feel about such a possibility, which would open up an enormous range of research into genetic and developmental effects, which at the moment are barred, cannot rest on logic. Women are endowed with about half a million oocytes at birth and discharge most of them into the sewers, a fate which we accept. And the annual volume of sperm which never gets within a wiggle of an oocyte would probably sink the Ark Royal.
Surely given the technique which blessed us with Baby Brown, we can put this enormous wastage to important use? In the clinical and anonymous isolation of the laboratory any sense of personal attachment is lost since no "life" is created (the life resides in the oocyte and spermatozoa) and no additional humans result (experimental animals are disposed of at the end of an experiment) there appear to be great advantages.
The unsavoury prospect is real. Then add in the existing technology of sperm banks, extend it to oocyte banks and we can have surrogate mums carrying the offspring of famous, highly gifted or merely deceased persons, as a matter of highly paid routine. You do not need the still distant possibility of human cloning to begin to get worried. Today's cheers and congratulations however warm and appropriate have little to do with implications. As Dr James Watson said, all hell will break loose politically and morally. In a world already grossly overcrowded it is not easy to understand the joy. Perhaps that is because knowledge and wisdom are far from synonymous.
