Pensylvania Bioethicist launches 'j'accuse'
17 July 2001, 1 pm GMT
"Corporate ethics boards are rubber stamps created to give an aura of acceptability to anything a company decides to do" according to Glenn McGee, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist, who served on the ethics advisory board of Advanced Cell Technology, a small Massachusetts biotechnology company, before he resigned the board last fall.
Last Octoberhe found out that the company was cloning both animal and human embryos without consulting its ethics advisors, and resigned from the company's ethics panel of the privately held company that is cloning endangered animal species hoping to keep them from extition, it claims, and human embryos as sources of stem cells for medical research.
Michael West, the founder and chief executive officer of Advanced Cell Technology admits
that the ethics panel had not been given specific information about the endangered-animal project.
West said neither he nor the panel's chair, Ronald Green, a Dartmouth College bioethicist, felt it necessary to tell the other members because it had started before the ethics advisory board was formed and we didn't see it as a priority.
McGee, left the Advanced Cell Technology board when the company announced it had cloned an Asian gaur, an oxlike animal that is in danger of becoming extinct in its native India and Myanmar. The gaur embryo, cloned from a skin cell taken from a dead gaur, was implanted and gestated in a cow.
The gaur died of dysentery two days after it was born.
Recent announcements by Advanced Cell Technology and Virginia Medical School's Jones Institute say that they had created or intended to create human embryos for the express purpose of harvesting their stem cells
According to reports despite claims that internal ethics board are consulted, companies do not reveal who is on the ethics committee, and meeting are held in secret.
Observers, including Content-wire, think the consultation process should be public and
open.

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