US survey sees support for embryos in stem cell work

WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) About 60 per cent of people with frozen embryos stored at US fertility clinics would be willing to donate them for use in human stem cell research, according to a survey.

The survey, made public on the day US President George W Bush vetoed legislation to expand federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research, tracked the attitudes of the people in a position to donate these embryos to create stem cell batches, or lines, for research.

The findings indicated perhaps 10 times as many embryos may be available for research as previously estimated, and that they could yield 2,000 to 3,000 usable stem cell lines, the researchers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said yesterday.

That would be 100 times the number of these cell lines now available for use in federally funded studies, they said.

These embryos are created at fertility clinics for in vitro fertilization procedures to help infertile couples have babies.

Typically, more embryos are created than are needed, and many are simply discarded after the donors no longer want them.

An estimated 400,000 sit in frozen storage at US clinics. But experts say couples who want to donate these embryos for research have very few options available.

The researchers questioned 1,020 people who have embryos stored at nine fertility centers in California, Colorado, Washington, DC, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon and Pennsylvania.

Sixty per cent said they would be very or somewhat likely to donate their frozen embryos for use in stem cell research --far higher than previous estimates, the researchers reported in the journal Science.

About 28 per cent said they would be similarly willing to donate embryos to improve cloning techniques for medical science. Only 22 per cent were willing to donate embryos to other couples for adoption to make babies -- something Bush has advocated as a better use of the embryos.

'COLLISION COURSE' ''We have a kind of collision course between the current public policy at the federal level in the United States and what the people who are responsible legally and ethically for these embryos would like to do with their embryos,'' Ruth Faden, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, said in a telephone interview.

Bush's policy allowed federally funded research on only a small number of cell lines in existence in 2001 that many scientists now see as obsolete or contaminated.

Dr David Grainger, president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, said the study showed that fertility patients have given careful thought to what they want to do with their unused, stored embryos.

''The continuing lack of opportunity to donate to embryonic stem cell research forces patients who want that option to keep their embryos in storage indefinitely,'' Grainger said in a statement.

''Unfortunately, some of them may give up and decide to discard them instead.'' Supporters of human embryonic stem cell research call it a promising avenue for potential cures for ailments such as diabetes, Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injuries. Because it involves destroying human embryos, opponents call it unethical and immoral.

Stem cells are a kind of master cell for the body, capable of growing into various tissue and cell types, offering the possibility of repairing tissue damaged by disease or injury.

REUTERS RKM BST0425