Leftover embryo quandaries

Posted by Marcy Darnovsky October 7, 2008
Biopolitical Times
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A set of three articles in Monday’s Los Angeles Times discusses the often difficult dilemma faced by people who have frozen embryos that they don’t want to use for their own reproductive purposes. Their options: discard them; give them to someone else who wants to try an IVF pregnancy; or donate them for research, usually to derive stem cells.

Though these decisions are of course deeply personal, they are also – especially in the U.S. – intensely political. Typically, the hot button that's implicated is abortion rights. But there are other issues involved as well, and these non-abortion matters often go unnoticed.

The LA Times report on donating embryos for research is a case in point. It does a good job exploring the obstacles faced by people who want to give their embryos to researchers – “piles of paperwork,” getting the consent of third parties whose gametes created the embryo, and the like. Another difficulty, the article says, is that many IVF clinics don’t have close connections to researchers; the implicit suggestion is that these sorts of ties should be encouraged.

Here’s where some additional consideration is warranted, in order to minimize conflicts of interest that could adversely affect people using IVF services. Doctors' first responsibility should be to their patients, not to their research – and unfortunately, violations of this principle are all too common.

In the California stem cell arena, we’ve already seen a case that raises eyebrows. Recently, two medical professionals at an IVF clinic were co-authors of a scientific paper [PDF] about the first successfully cloned human embryos. The doctors at The Reproductive Sciences Center actually report to the head of the biotech company conducting the research, Stemagen Corporation.

What this means is that these doctors, who may well have been responsible for determining the dosages of hormones received by the women who provided the eggs for the cloning technique, had a significant interest in the positive outcome of the research.

As with other kinds of conflicts of interest, the problem goes beyond the integrity of anyone’s conduct or the virtuosity of intentions. The fact of this matter was that the more eggs retrieved, the better the chances of the research's success and the researchers' plum byline.

This particular sort of conflict of interest is more worrisome when the biological material in question is eggs, rather than embryos. Embryos aren’t as scarce as eggs; and whereas eggs must be used very soon after they’re extracted, embryos are almost never available for many months (until the parents have completed their family or given up).

Nonetheless, and notwithstanding the need to ease the way for people who wish to donate their unused embryos for research, the potential for conflicts of interest should not be overlooked.