Talkin' about regeneration
Email Printer friendly version Normal font Large font December 15,
2007
The scientist at the centre of the embryo research debate is about to
take on the world's top stem-cell job, writes Deborah Smith.
"I see myself as an ambassador for all Australian medical
researchers" . . . Professor Alan Trounson.
Photo: Joe Armao
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Alan Trounson would have looked unexceptional to passengers on the
flight from Singapore: a slightly crumpled, middle-aged traveller
like many others. But in his inner coat pocket the Australian
scientist had something extraordinary: a vial of tiny, rare cells
that were about to trigger a worldwide tsunami of moral outrage and
medical hope.
At the time, very few people knew anything about these embryonic stem
cells. Trounson's team was one of only two in the world to have
managed to get the finicky specks of life out of IVF embryos and grow
them in the laboratory - work he carried out in Singapore because it
was banned in Australia.
A coat pocket might seem a low-tech way to transport such precious
scientific cargo. "But it was warm in there," the country's leading
embryologist recalls in his matter-of-fact drawl. "And they weren't
going to come to any harm."
It was the harm done to the embryos the cells had been extracted
from, of course, that was at the epicentre of the acrimonious
ethical, scientific and political debate that was to engulf Trounson
for the next decade.
The Monash University professor was no stranger to passionate
opposition to his research. As a pioneer of IVF in Australia in the
1980s, he knew what it was like to have "Trounson is a mass murderer"
daubed on walls near his Melbourne home.
But he was still unprepared for the concerted public attack on his
integrity by opponents of embryo research in the lead-up to a
conscience vote on the issue by federal MPs in 2002. To have private
detectives trawl through his financial dealings and quiz his former
wife was also a shock. "That was very strange," he says, in a
whisper. "They were tough times."
But science is unpredictable, as is life. Last month there was
another seismic shift in research that could mark the end of the stem-
cell wars. Two separate teams announced they had turned skin cells
into cells that are virtually indistinguishable from embryonic ones,
simply by adding four genes. This does away with the contentious need
to create or destroy embryos to get the embryonic stem cells that so
excite researchers and patients because they can turn into every type
of tissue in the body.
Within the next two weeks Trounson will take up the top stem-cell job
in the world as president of the California Institute for
Regenerative Medicine in San Francisco, where he will oversee a $3.4
billion research budget to try to turn the much-hyped hope for stem
cells into reality during the next decade.
This opportunity would not have arisen if he had not embroiled
himself in the battles over embryo research and embryo cloning in
Australia and invited the Californian institute's chairman, Robert
Klein, here to help argue the case, he says.
A change of countries is not the only shift in his life. American
laws required Trounson and his Swedish partner of 20 years, Dr Karin
Hammarberg, to be married before the move. He will also have to give
up the lab work he excels at and loves, to do the new job. It's a
bittersweet decision, he says, but "these things don't happen often
to us colonials Down Under. It's just a wonderful conclusion to a
career in science. I see myself as an ambassador for all Australian
medical researchers.
Trounson, 61, the grandson of a farmer, had originally wanted to be a
vet. "I've had this fascination with animals all my life," he
says. "As a child I had to have farm animals around - the chickens in
the back of the house and the goats and the sheep."
But his father was keen for him to take up a scholarship he had won
so he studied wool technology at the University of NSW. His interest
turned to reproduction and he began experimenting with eggs and sperm
from sheep, watching how tiny embryos developed in the laboratory.
After studying cow embryos at Cambridge he returned 30 years ago to
help the Melbourne gynaecologist Carl Wood adapt these techniques to
people, to help infertile men and women conceive. "They were halcyon
days," he says. "It was exciting as a young researcher with a young
family. The translation of the animal research into humans worked
perfectly well."
Trounson was instrumental in most of the key IVF developments of the
time: fertility drugs, frozen embryos, pregnancies with donor eggs,
and injection of sperm into eggs.
"Every one of those times was a 'wow' moment," he says. " 'Gee whiz,
it works, and aren't they wonderful embryos, and when you put them
back in the mother, gosh, they turn into really lovely babies.' "
Not everyone saw it his way. Apart from the graffiti, Trounson
received hate mail and was stalked. The Catholic Church opposed IVF,
claiming doctors were messing with creation, and some feminists
argued it was exploitative. Trounson sought his own ethical advice,
from experts such as Professor Peter Singer.
"I could never see eye to eye with the feminist view that we were
manipulating women's bodies for our own interests," he says. But he
formed some unlikely friendships with Catholic ethicists such as Dr
Nick Tonti-Filippini and the Reverend Norman Ford, with whom he still
has regular chats about scientific developments.
"That was kind of nice," Trounson says, "that you can deal with
people who are very critical yet who appreciate you for having a
stand."
Tonti-Filippini says they share an interest in the truth. "When some
scientists were claiming cloned embryos were not embryos Alan was
absolutely frank that they were. He's not one to fiddle around."
Many couples undergoing the first IVF treatments were leading public
figures, but were unwilling to be spokesmen for the new technology
and left it to the doctors and scientists to justify their actions.
Staring down a microscope and facing the media, Trounson developed a
view of life as a continuum. "Human life never ceases," he
says. "Sperm and eggs are alive. They come together and an individual
develops and produces eggs or sperm."
He has no problems destroying embryos a few days old. "Their value is
in achieving something for the patient."
But he discovered in Singapore that he felt a strong resistance to
dissecting more advanced embryos, between six and nine weeks old,
from which cells, known as germ stem cells, can be extracted.
"Basically, the embryo starts to look like a small creature with a
head and heart and arms and legs. I didn't want to do it, so I didn't
do it. I never fought against it. I [just] thought, that's where my
bar is."
These germ stem cells, as it turned out, were at the heart of
Trounson's troubles during the 2002 stem-cell debate. In a brief
presentation to MPs, he described how embryonic stem cells had been
given to a crippled rat, allowing it to walk again. The problem was
that they had not come from IVF embryos, but from germ stem cells. It
resulted in headlines claiming Trounson had tricked parliamentarians,
despite assurances from other scientists that the two types of cells
were virtually interchangeable. MPs opposed to the research dismissed
him as a liar, peddling magical cures, while scientists expressed
outrage he had been smeared for political purposes.
"Scientifically, you shouldn't really cut any corner in your
explanation,
an awful long time to explain these matters to people, to get the
nuances across."
Trounson now thinks it is probably better if informed politicians,
rather than scientists, lead such intensely fought battles. But at
the time, as the founder and head of the new, $60 million Australian
Stem Cell Centre in Melbourne, he felt a responsibility to be a
spokesman for the research.
"I think I was a bit naive. I thought we were just meant to give
people information and they could then make a decision," he says.
After private detectives began to trawl through his personal life, he
realised that destroying a spokesman's reputation in any way possible
was "a way of trying to win the argument" for some unknown opponent.
The scientist was sometimes his own worst enemy. While a long talk
with John Howard helped cement the then prime minister's important
support for embryo research, Trounson had to apologise again to MPs
for saying he had divested shares in a Singapore company, when the
sale had not fully gone through. An outburst in which he labelled
Catholics "irrational hypocrites" didn't help.
He was in hospital having his heart stopped and restarted - a medical
procedure he has endured several times since as part of his treatment
for an abnormal heart rhythm - during the 2002 parliamentary debate
that led to embryo research being allowed.
"The doctors' advice was to get unstressed," he recalls, so he was
able to grab only snippets on the radio news.
In recent years he has turned his attention back to IVF, helping set
up low-cost clinics in Africa that allow people with HIV/AIDS to have
children without passing on the virus. "That was something I thought
was really important closure for my IVF activities."
While he took a lesser role in the parliamentary debate last year
that led to a lifting of the ban on embryo cloning, and concentrated
instead on his research, he was keen to see it happen. But Trounson
has always worried about where the hundreds of human eggs required
for therapeutic cloning would come from.
"Being able to access that many eggs without any payment to the
patients was very unlikely," he says, which is why he argued,
unsuccessfully, for the use of animal eggs to be permitted.
He was proved right when a scandal hit the stem-cell field in 2005
and the South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk was found to have not
only paid for eggs and made his staff donate them, but fabricated
results to support his claim to have cloned human embryos and
extracted stem cells, a feat which had made him a national hero.
A senior Monash scientist who Trounson appointed and oversaw was
cited last month for a lesser case of "research misconduct" after an
inquiry found he was negligent in his record keeping and produced
inaccurate results.
While Trounson was not investigated, and the doubtful findings were
not published, he says he accepts ultimate responsibility.
Tonti-Filippini is not surprised by the cases. When so much money is
going into a frontier science and expectations are so high, "there
are pressures to get results", he says.
Despite a decade of hope, no one has been cured with embryonic stem
cells. And Trounson knows he will be in the hot seat, working out how
best to spend his $3.4 billion budget to get results as quickly and
efficiently as possible.
His reputation is as a scientist who can convert laboratory
discoveries into clinical treatments. He has done it before, with
IVF. And a lot of people are hoping he can do it again.
http://www.smh.
regeneration/
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StemCells subscribers may also be interested in these sites:
Children's Neurobiological Solutions
http://www.CNSfoundation.org/
Cord Blood Registry
http://www.CordBlood.com/at.cgi?a=150123
The CNS Healing Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CNS_Healing
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