Infertile mice recently produced pups with the aid of scientists. But are the science and the ethics of artificial sperm and eggs compatible?
Sex can be a slow and slippery process, especially when pipettes and petris dishes are involved. That is the experience of the various embryologists around the world who have been trying for years to create artificial eggs and sperm. Researchers in Japan recently penetrated a new barrier: they took stem cells from mouse embryos and grew them under the conditions required for their transformation into sperm-producing cells, called germ cells. These were then transferred into infertile mice, which produced healthy pups.
“This is quite a step forward in developing a process by which sperm could be made for infertile men,” said Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, “perhaps by taking as a starting point a cell from their skin or from something like bone marrow. Clearly more work needs to be done to refine this process, but it’s hugely exciting.”
Progress report
Keen-eyed sperm hunters could be forgiven for not getting overly excited about the news from Japan. This is the kind of ‘huge leap forward’ researchers claim to make every so often, and yet some experts believe the goal is no closer. “Four years ago I was saying it’s going to be 15 years,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, head of the stem cell biology and developmental genetics division at the National Institute for Medical Research. “And I’m probably still saying it’s going to be 15 years.”
Despite this, Lovell-Badge told Elements that he remains optimistic. A brief rundown of progress to date shows why. It is now established that scientists can produce early germ cells, which can give rise to either eggs or sperm, from pluripotent stem cells. These are the kind that come either from an early embryo or by reprogramming another cell back to stem cell stage – they can become any type of cell.
Two years ago, a team at the North East England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI) grabbed the headlines by claiming to have coaxed these early germ cells into sperm-like cells. To do this, Professor Karim Nayernia and his colleagues cultured human embryonic stem cells under conditions they hoped would provoke the special kind of cell division that halves the chromosomes in order to produce sperm. It worked in around 3% of the cells. The little creations were not quite sperm, but some formed tails and could swim around in dishes in their home lab in Newcastle.
Nayernia’s research captured the imagination of the public, fertility experts and the press. “Breakthrough hope of finding cure for male infertility offers”, claimed The Independent. But within a month of its publication, the research paper that announced the discovery was retracted for plagiarism. Nayernia is no longer with NESCI and his former colleagues there say they do not know his whereabouts. “I believe he’s in Iran,” said one. Elements found him at Geneocell, a Canadian biotech company. Nayernia explained that the plagiarism was the result of a mistake made by his assistant. There “was absolutely no problem with the science,” he told Elements. “We continued the study and we are testing the functionality of the cells at the moment. We hope to finish the study and resubmit it again.”
Filming fertility
The Japanese team skipped Nayernia’s step of creating sperm-like cells. Instead, they created mice germ cells and then transferred them into the testes of infertile mice. These mice went on to produce sperm and even offspring. Researchers are still a few years from creating full sperm cells that are more than just wannabe sperm with pretender tails, but the idea has set imaginations running wild. Tom Lloyd is a filmmaker particularly taken with the concept. After reading the Independent article, Lloyd applied for and won a grant from the Wellcome Trust to produce a film about the topic.
“I got interested in the subject because I now have a six-year-old daughter who is the result of five years of in vitro fertilisation (IVF),” says Lloyd. “If you’d have said to me 10 years ago, ‘what do you think about having a test tube baby?’, I’d have said, ‘Frankenstein!’. But having been in the situation where you’ll do anything to get a child, it becomes perfectly normal and natural.”
Plundering his own personal dilemma, Lloyd directed In Vitro, a 15-minute film set in the future and aimed at GCSE pupils studying science and ethics. In the film, a scientist creates artificial sperm and eggs in the lab and then combines them to form an embryo, which she implants into her own uterus. When the resulting daughter dies as a middle-aged woman, the scientist must confront her granddaughter and all the ethical issues she overlooked.
Nayernia acted as the film’s science consultant and, apparently, Lloyd’s part-time muse: one of his off-the-cuff remarks made it into the final cut. “I’ve done the science,” remarks the self-impregnating researcher, “it’s time for society to catch up.” Lovell-Badge thinks this kind of attitude is a “big mistake”. “If you step over a barrier that people find unacceptable, your work is going to be stopped,” he argues. “We want the public to be behind us because we think the potential benefits [of stem cell research] will be enormous. But if one scientist does something stupid then that could slow down the whole enterprise.”
IVF and then some
Something that will not slow down is the appetite for artificial eggs and sperm, with infertility affecting one in six or seven couples in the UK. While news reports of the various ‘breakthroughs’ have focused on the potential for artificial sperm and eggs, some remain unconvinced that they will save the day. “IVF is still not available to everyone who wants it,” says Dr Anna Smajdor, a philosopher who wrote her PhD on the ethics of artificial sperm and eggs. “And there’s very little prospect of that happening, actually. So I don’t think artificial gametes are going to solve the fertility problems of the world given that IVF hasn’t.”
Indeed, the future of IVF is somewhat uncertain, at least as far as the regulatory environment in which it operates. As part of the government’s money-saving bonfire of the quangos, the Public Bodies Bill proposes to merge the regulatory role of the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) with that of the Human Tissue Authority into a single Health Research Regulatory Agency. The move was criticised in the House of Lords (but made it through), was described in the Guardian as “a vampire law” and is now under the scrutiny of Smajdor. She says: “If the HFEA does get merged into or subsumed by some other authority, although the law still exists and the functions that it fulfils still exists, its resources to fulfil those functions will not be as great, so its powers will be curtailed somewhat.”
An HFEA spokesperson pointed out that the bill has to get through Parliament before any changes can be made. “We will cease to be once this has happened,” he said. The government is busy rearranging the regulatory furniture around current technology. It does not yet appear to have considered how on earth to regulate artificial gametes and their cousins, lab-created embryos.