Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, leads a special congressional committee that has asked more than a dozen American universities for detailed explanations of their fetal-tissue research. Alex Wong, Getty Images
A high-profile congressional campaign against the use of fetal tissue in medical research is hitting a tough-to-ignore obstacle in the shape of the Zika virus, now blamed for thousands of birth defects in South America.
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Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, leads a special congressional committee that has asked more than a dozen American universities for detailed explanations of their fetal-tissue research. Alex Wong, Getty Images
A high-profile congressional campaign against the use of fetal tissue in medical research is hitting a tough-to-ignore obstacle in the shape of the Zika virus, now blamed for thousands of birth defects in South America.
Since forming their special investigative panel last October, congressional Republicans upset by claims made against Planned Parenthood have served more than a dozen American universities with demands for detailed explanations of their fetal-tissue research.
Universities have been especially alarmed by the committee’s request for names of researchers, given the history of abortion-related violence. “A lot of us are very worried about the potential of the investigation leading to harm to individuals,” said Randolph W. Hall, vice president for research at the University of Southern California.
Behind the political posturing and physical fear, however, scientific justification for the inquiry is light. One of the committee’s key pieces of evidence challenging the need for fetal tissue in medical research is a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins, Florida State, and Emory Universities that used artificially produced stem cells to investigate how the Zika virus infects fetal brains.
Zika emerged as a worrisome health threat late last year, just as the congressional committee was being formed. The mosquito-borne virus, known worldwide for decades, began taking on a more potent character in Brazil, causing some 7,000 cases of the birth defect microcephaly and associated brain damage, as well as Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the nervous system. Both the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued emergency alerts about Zika this year, with U.S. officials warning the disease could soon spread northward.
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The chairman of the House fetal-tissue panel, Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, called the Hopkins-FSU-Emory study a key piece of evidence that human fetal tissue isn’t really necessary to fight Zika and other devastating human diseases.
“Loud and clear, Democrats have abused the hopes of those who are suffering with the claim that our investigative efforts would interfere with potentially life-saving research,” Representative Blackburn, a Republican, said after her panel’s first public hearing, on March 2.
But several university experts involved in Zika research — including a leader of the study cited by the committee — disputed the chairman’s conclusion. That researcher, Hongjun Song, a professor of neurology and neuroscience and director of the Stem Cell Biology Program at Johns Hopkins, carried out his Zika studies with induced pluripotent stem cells — human-donor cells that have been genetically reprogrammed to an embryonic state, meaning they have the potential to grow into some or all of the cell types found in major body organs.
Consistent Composition
Induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, are useful in studying diseases such as Zika, Mr. Song said, because they let researchers repeatedly produce the same lab-grown miniature brain structures with a consistent genetic composition. Using brain cells from various fetal-tissue donations, by comparison, raises the risk of genetic variations that could complicate drawing conclusions from test results, he said.
Researchers using iPS cells also can make miniature test organs that have the donor patient’s same disease, he said. Such advantages are among those cited by Representative Blackburn and her political allies.
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But, Mr. Song made clear, those uses are far from showing that fetal cells have little value in research against Zika or other diseases, as the committee has suggested. “There are questions we cannot address using our approach, so that’s why multiple approaches are important,” Mr. Song said. “Fetal tissue, especially from the patient, is critical” in exploring Zika, he said.
Several other researchers affirmed that point. Karin Nielsen, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of California at Los Angeles who recently returned from studying Zika in Brazil, said fetal tissue is “ideal” for studying the disease. “It would be what is most similar to nature, to what is happening in real life,” Dr. Nielsen said. Nonhuman animal models — another of the committee’s suggested alternatives to fetal tissue — are problematic because Zika has such strong effects on the human neurological system, she said.
Using tissue from miscarriages rather than abortions is virtually impossible, researchers have shown, because lost pregnancies are typically unanticipated and more frequently involve genetic abnormalities.
Banning fetal studies, said Joseph G. Gleeson, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California at San Diego, would be like studying cancer without looking at tumor samples. “You’d have no idea what was going on — it would be a shot in the dark,” he said.
One of the institutions facing especially heavy scrutiny from Representative Blackburn and her committee is the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. That attention has been driven largely by the presence of a clinic that provides abortion services, Southwestern Women’s Options, about a mile from the campus.
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The clinic has provided fetal tissue to a researcher at the university — a relationship permitted under federal law as long as payments are limited to processing and shipping charges. Southwestern Women’s Options doesn’t recoup any expenses associated with its fetal-tissue donations, a spokesman said. And no other American clinic has been shown to be profiting from fetal-tissue sales. The committee nevertheless has dwelt on such possibilities, holding a hearing Wednesday on Capitol Hill specifically to highlight its suspicion of such violations.
The Impact of Politics
The Blackburn panel does appear to be intimidating or hindering some researchers working with fetal tissue, several university experts said. Lawrence S.B. Goldstein, a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at San Diego, and director of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program, said supplies of fetal tissue are becoming scarcer, affecting research into conditions such as multiple sclerosis. Colorado State University announced last summer that it would no longer use fetal tissue from any vendors facing the suspicion of congressional investigators.
Other universities have resisted. At the University of New Mexico, the one researcher working with fetal tissue uses it to try to find ways of helping premature babies survive. The university expects her to continue, said Richard S. Larson, vice chancellor for research at the Health Sciences Center there. “It’s completely unproven” that iPS cells are as good as fetal cells in scientific research, he said.
The University of New Mexico and several other institutions have answered the committee’s requests for information, while deleting names of staff workers from the documents they’ve submitted. For Dr. Larson, that has led to a formal subpoena from the Blackburn committee, after his staff provided more than 3,000 pages of documents but refused to include the names of people — both researchers and staff workers — involved in handling fetal tissue.
Violence aimed at abortion providers has included 11 murders, 26 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 185 arsons, and thousands of other incidents since 1977, according to the National Abortion Federation, which represents the clinics. Universities are wary of giving names to the committee without a compelling reason for the information, Dr. Larson said. “It’s clear that people whose names are released in this way are being put in a potentially dangerous situation,” he said. The Association of American Medical Colleges, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities have all complained about the request for names.
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Rep. Janice Schakowsky of Illinois, the top-ranking Democrat on the Blackburn committee, said she understands the concern. Fetal tissue already has proved its value in a wide range of life-saving vaccines against diseases that include measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, polio, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rabies, and shingles, she said. “We support their right to fight back,” Representative Schakowsky said of the universities.
University of Minnesota researchers are using fetal tissue to study Parkinson’s disease, HIV, and other infectious diseases, said Brian A. Herman, the system’s vice president for research and a professor of cellular and structural biology. For some studies, iPS cells or those taken from umbilical cords or placentas can be useful, Mr. Herman said. For other cases, such as Zika, “knowing when the virus affects the fetus is absolutely essential,” he said.
States including Ohio, North Dakota, and South Dakota already have laws restricting fetal-tissue research, and lawmakers in more than a dozen other states are pushing for them.
Yet the congressional committee’s own theses suggest an underlying contradiction on the political agenda. Last month’s initial committee hearing emphasized Representative Blackburn’s contention that fetal tissue isn’t especially valuable to science. This week’s second hearing centered on her message that providers of the tissue are getting unreasonably wealthy supplying it.
Asked after the second hearing how fetal-tissue suppliers could be getting wealthy from a product that’s understood to have little value, Representative Blackburn answered: “It’s one of the questions on our list to get an answer for.”
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Two researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin, both of them opposed to fetal-tissue research, offered one explanation: Scientists face peer pressure from funding agencies, medical journals, and fellow researchers to use fetal tissue in their work. “In many cases, in order to succeed in science,” said Tara Sander Lee, an associate professor of pediatric pathology, “you’re being expected to use this tissue.”
Kathleen M. Schmainda, a professor of radiology and professor of biophysics, said, “We are being addicted to something that we don’t need to be addicted to.” Both professors were recommended as experts by Blackburn committee advisers, and both asked that their comments not be portrayed as reflecting their institution’s point of view.
Such a theory, said Arthur L. Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University, is “absolutely insane — it makes no sense.” Researchers study fetal tissue because they’re interested in fetal development, said Mr. Caplan, director of medical ethics at the NYU Langone Medical Center, “not because somebody’s plotting to put them up to study something they don’t want to.”
On the Decline
In fact, Mr. Caplan said, fetal-tissue research has been declining in recent decades for a number of reasons: the political hostility and correspondingly higher levels of scrutiny given to federal grant applications that involve the material, as well as the growing promise of genetic engineering. Fetal-tissue research accounted for just $76 million in NIH grant support in 2014, according to a study by the journal Nature. Such research has increasingly been limited to areas where there’s no good alternative, Mr. Caplan said. Zika, he said, appears to be one of those areas.
The fears of negative health effects from the committee’s action spread well beyond Zika. Targets of the committee’s criticism include Eugene Gu, a California doctor who hopes to help the 120,000 Americans waiting for life-saving organ transplants. He is trying to grow fetal organs inside nonhuman animals to make them large enough for adult human recipients. Dr. Gu, founder of Ganogen Inc., said private research is his only hope. “The limitation of doing this type of work in a university setting is the political controversy, which can be insurmountable,” he said.
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Mr. Caplan helped the government create federal guidelines for fetal-tissue research two decades ago — requiring that a woman not be asked about tissue donations before she decides to have an abortion, that the abortion technique not be modified because of the decision to donate, and that those involved in transferring the tissue to researchers be paid nothing beyond reasonable processing costs.
Members of the Blackburn committee have alleged violations of those principles. Some of those suspicions might prove warranted, Mr. Caplan said, but federal and state officials have been lax for years about oversight. The committee so far does not seem interested in improving compliance with those principles, he said. It seems driven more by a desire to arouse a public “yuck factor” against abortion than to stimulate a scientific evaluation of the merits and shortcomings of fetal-tissue research. The hearing process, he said, is about trying “to bash Planned Parenthood and abortion providers into the dust.”
The committee, if ultimately set on reducing abortion rates, could directly examine the societal factors that lead to unplanned pregnancies, Mr. Caplan said. That, however, would be politically difficult, he said, because many opponents of abortion also oppose the expanded use of contraception, and because one of the most obviously knowledgeable witnesses to summon for such a hearing would be Planned Parenthood.
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
Correction (4/22/2016, 2:57 p.m.): This article originally quoted Rep. Janice Schakowsky as naming diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough among a group of vaccines developed with the help of fetal tissue. She was relying on information provided by the American Society for Cell Biology, which has corrected its list to remove those vaccines. This article has been revised to reflect the correction.
Paul Basken was a government policy and science reporter with The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he won an annual National Press Club award for exclusives.