Vaccines Were Made With Cells From Aborted Babies
After
decades of ignoring the issue, Nature, the
world’s leading science journal, has finally acknowledged that creating
life-saving vaccines from tissue from aborted foetuses is a deeply
controversial ethical issue.
In 1964,
an American researcher obtained cells from a Swedish foetus aborted because her
mother already had enough children. He coaxed them into multiplying into a cell
line which he called WI-38. Since they were normal and healthy, they were
ideal for creating vaccines. Two years later, scientists in the UK obtained
cells from a 14-week male fetus aborted for “psychiatric reasons” from a 27-year-old
British woman. This cell line is called MRC-5.
It is undeniable that the vaccines made from WI-38 and
MRC-5 cells have saved millions of lives. Scientists have made vaccines against
rubella, rabies, adenovirus, polio, measles, chickenpox and shingles, as well
as smallpox, chicken pox and hepatitis A.
But protests by opponents of abortion have been largely
ignored by the scientific community. If you Google “vaccines” and “abortion”,
only Catholic groups, right-to-life organisations and sites warning about the
dangers of vaccinations mention the topic. The US Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention barely alludes to it even though it has
abundant information on vaccines. A website called Vaccine
Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics
fails to mention it.
The reason is clear: vaccines save lives and the abortions
happened a long time ago. Get over it. Who cares? “At the time [the fetus] was
obtained there was no issue in using discarded material.
Retrospective ethics is easy but presumptuous,” says
Stanley Plotkin, the American scientist who developed the rubella vaccine. “I
am fond of saying that rubella vaccine has prevented thousands more abortions
than have ever been prevented by Catholic religionists.”
But now even Nature – which supports abortion rights and reproductive technology – has
expressed its misgivings. “More than 50 years after the WI-38 cell line was
derived from a fetus, science and society [have] still to get to grips with the
ethical issues of using human tissue in research,” its editorial declared in
June.
What has changed?
If you could single out a reason, it would be the intensely
moving 2010 best-seller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,
by Rebecca Skloot. This book has nothing to do with abortion, but it highlights the deep respect, almost sacredness, that the body
of a human person must command, even something as insignificant as discarded
tissue.
Henrietta Lacks was an
African-American woman who was 31 when she died of cervical cancer in
1951. Cells from her tumour became the first human cells cultured
continuously for use in research. HeLa cells have helped to make possible some
of the most important medical
advances of the past 60 years, including modern vaccines, cancer treatments, and IVF techniques. They are
the most widely used human cell lines in existence. More than 300
scientific papers are published every month using HeLa cells.
There is no question about their usefulness – but were they
obtained ethically? Is it ethical to continue using them?
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks raises
disturbing questions which transcend “usefulness”. Henrietta Lacks was poor and
black. Her children, it seems, are even poorer. A doctor at Johns
Hopkins removed her cells without asking her. He cultivated the cells without
informing her. He distributed the cells without asking permission of her family.
Companies became rich by using
her cells without paying royalties.Her family only learned that their
mother’s cells had been scattered around the world in 1973. Their complaints
were ignored for many years – after all, they were only poor, uneducated black
folks.
No one cared about the woman called Henrietta Lacks who was
overdosed with radium, who died leaving five children behind, one of them an
epileptic housed in a filthy, chaotic institution called The Hospital for the
Negro Insane. Some people even thought that HeLa cells originated with a woman
named Helen Lane. Her daughter wrote in a diary, “When that day came, and my
mother died, she was Robbed of her cells and John Hopkins Hospital learned of
those cells and kept it to themselfs, and gave them to who they wanted and even
changed the name to HeLa cell and kept it from us for 20+ years. They say
Donated. No No No Robbed Self.”
It was only earlier this year that the US National Institutes of Health
(NIH) negotiated an agreement with the
family. All researchers who use or generate full
genomic data from HeLa cells must now include in their publications an
acknowledgement and expression of gratitude to the Lacks family.
Incredibly, despite all the publicity,
scientists continued to ignore the concerns of the Lacks family. Just
a few months ago, German researchers published the first sequence of the full
HeLa genome. This compromised not only Henrietta Lacks’s genetic privacy but
also her family’s. (The researchers have removed the sequence from public
view.)
The story of HeLa cells, in short,
is twofold: a story of towering scientific achievement and a story of
exploitation by ambitious and callous scientists.
Less famous, but even more important,
says Nature, have been WI-38 cells [from an aborted
Swedish baby]. HeLa cells multiply prolifically, but
they are cancerous. WI-38 cells are
healthy and normal and have been used to develop vaccines against rubella,
rabies, adenovirus, polio, measles, chickenpox and shingles. Their
origin is even more controversial than the dark story of Henrietta Lacks.
 | ||
| Leonard Hayflick examines WI-38 cells which were derived from an aborted Swedish girl. |
After he successfully multiplied the WI-38 cells,
Hayflick created more than 800 batches and distributed them freely around the
world to drug companies and researchers. He eventually
quarrelled with Wistar authorities because he thought that his contribution was
being ignored. Without permission, he took all the remaining
batches to California and his new job at Stanford. This led to
years of bitter legal battles over who owned the cells. No one worried about
where they had come from.
The abortion connection is beyond dispute, although,
as Nature points out, “until now, that story has failed to
reach the broad audience it deserves.” As in the Henrietta Lacks
case, no informed consent was given by the Swedish mother. Her
identity is known but she refuses to talk about the case. The doctors involved
are all dead. A Swedish medical historian told Nature that
in Sweden, “research material like tissues from aborted fetuses were available
and used for research without consent or the knowledge of patients for a long
time”, both before and after consent rules were
tightened later in the 1960s.
The drug companies and institutions which have used
WI-38 deny that there are serious ethical concerns either with the use of cells
from aborted foetuses or with the lack of consent.
The institution which has examined this issue most closely
is the Vatican. In 2005 it released a meticulously researched study of the ethical issues
involved in using vaccines which had been developed with tissue
from aborted foetuses. Even though it contended that parents could have their
children vaccinated with a clear conscience, it did not dismiss the question as
irrelevant or absurd. On the contrary, it concluded that “there is
a grave responsibility to use alternative vaccines and to make a conscientious
objection with regard to those which have moral problems.”
And it said that the existing situation was completely
unjust. “Parents… are forced to choose to act against their conscience or
otherwise, to put the health of their children and of the population as a whole
at risk. This is an unjust alternative choice, which must be eliminated as soon
as possible.”
What is the way forward?
I am writing from suburban Sydney which long ago lost its
connection to the Aboriginal tribes who once lived here. Yet at every civic
ceremony we acknowledge the memory of the Cammeraygal and Wallumedegal peoples.
It is a form of reparation for the dispossession, disease and death which
carried them away, leaving neither names nor descendants.
Doesn’t the story of Henrietta Lacks suggest that drug
companies should do something similar with their vaccine products? From now on,
the NIH says, scientists who use HeLa cells must include “an acknowledgment and
expression of gratitude to the Lacks family for their contributions”.
Why shouldn’t drug companies and researchers who use the
WI-38 (or the MRC-5 cells) do the same? “This vaccine was developed with the
cells of a Swedish child who was aborted in 1964. We are grateful for her
contribution and grieve at her absence.”
