WASHINGTON — Baltimore nurse Janice Pearse recalls her long quest to become pregnant using in-vitro fertilization through a lens of pain, embarrassment, disappointment--and awe.
The first time her eggs were mixed with her husband's sperm in a petri dish and the doctor told her that embryos had been formed was an exhilarating moment because "it's the closest to having a baby you've ever been."
But for every experimentally created embryo that is successfully implanted--and Pearse was one of the lucky ones who eventually became pregnant--thousands of unneeded embryos are frozen in storage--or discarded.
If it is acceptable to create an embryo for transfer into a woman's uterus--as is now routine in fertility clinics--is it ethical to experiment on an embryo in the laboratory? Or just throw it away?
These are among the more troubling aspects of the new frontier of medical science known as human embryo research.
Many scientists believe that studying the human embryo--at one week a cluster of cells no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence--could yield infinite knowledge about nature's worst medical scourges.
But like any science involved with creating or manipulating human life, it has become the focus of an intense international debate, and has raised numerous ethical dilemmas that have yet to be resolved.
What, for example, is the moral status of a human embryo? Is it acceptable to make an embryo in the lab only to use it for research--especially when there are at least 12,000 unwanted embryos now frozen in storage and countless others that get tossed away?
How far should research embryos be allowed to develop? At what point does an embryo become a fetus? Moreover, what kinds of research are appropriate--and inappropriate?
The National Institutes of Health last year asked a panel of outside experts to wrestle with these questions, and its members are scheduled to release guidelines for federally funded embryo research Tuesday. Their report will undergo further scrutiny within NIH and be the subject of a public meeting in December. NIH Director Harold E. Varmus will then make the final decision on what areas of research are acceptable for federal funding, and which guidelines should govern the work.
While the panel is expected to endorse human embryo research generally, it will likely propose certain limitations.
