House to Open Hearing on Fetal Tissue Research Sales
The price list is macabre: Fetal eyes cost $75 apiece, pituitary glands go for $300 and brains fetch $999. Almost as disconcerting are researchers’ orders for livers, thymuses, tracheas and spleens.
Nobody quarrels with the goals of the tissue research--to find cures for the likes of Alzheimer’s disease, juvenile diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.
But the medical promise is running into trouble as some businesses are beginning to look at supplying fetal tissue as a money maker.
Anti-abortion activists always have opposed fetal tissue research for fear that it would encourage abortion and reduce the fetus to nothing more than a source of raw material. They persuaded Congress in 1993 to prohibit doctors from altering abortion procedures to accommodate the demands of researchers and to allow the suppliers of fetal cells to charge only “reasonable” fees to cover the costs of cell preparation and delivery.
Now anti-abortion groups charge that the federal law is being broken. Some doctors, they say, are altering the way they perform abortions to satisfy researchers’ demands for intact body parts, and some tissue procurement companies are charging whatever the market will bear. Miles Jones, head of an Illinois company named Opening Lines, for example, apparently sent out the price list that valued brains at $999.
“There are certainly some things that cry out for further investigation,” said Douglas Johnson, national legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.
The House Commerce Committee plans a hearing on the questionable practices today, and the Senate Judiciary Committee may do so later this month.
All this is highly distressing to the researchers who do the work and the patients who hope desperately for cures. They are beginning to fear that the revelations will stop the research in its tracks.
“It’s hard to know what unscrupulous people would do,” said Lynn Fielder, vice president of medical services for a Planned Parenthood affiliate in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has 35 clinics, two of which allow women having abortions to donate the tissue for research.
For Fielder, the issue is deeply personal. At age 38, she has been coping with Parkinson’s disease for seven years.
But Fielder, like Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt, believes that if there is wrongdoing, those responsible should be prosecuted. “Bad actors . . . should be dealt with accordingly,” said Feldt.
Although fetal tissue research is hardly new--Jonas Salk relied on it in the development of the polio vaccine--scientists have only recently discovered that the tissue can be transplanted into diseased organs and used to grow new tissue to replace that destroyed by degenerative conditions.
Parkinson’s Research Shows Promise
The National Institutes of Health spent $18.6 million last year on research projects that used fetal tissue and another $1.8 million on research involving fetal tissue transplantation. Additional research is done by scientists using nongovernment funding and by pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
In treating Parkinson’s, for instance, scientists at the University of Colorado have taken fetal brain cells that produce dopamine, a chemical necessary to control movement, and implanted them in the brains of Parkinson’s patients, whose dopamine-producing cells have been largely destroyed. The research, still in its early stages, is particularly promising for younger patients such as Fielder.
“Those fetal cells can be transplanted into an adult person who has Parkinson’s and they grow like seeds in a garden,” said Curt Freed, director of the neuroscience program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “They grow a root network that is the key to resupplying the brain with dopamine cells.”
But science will take a back seat to horror stories at today’s congressional hearing, which will feature a dramatic undercover report broadcast Wednesday night by the ABC-TV news magazine show 20/20. The show focused on Miles Jones, whose company appears to sell the tissue for as much as doctors or researchers are willing to pay for it.
Seller Sets Prices by ‘Market Forces’
In an undercover interview by an ABC producer in which Jones thought he was talking to an investor, he described fetal tissue procurement as a profitable product line. When asked how much he charged for fetal liver or kidney, he replied: “It’s market forces. It’s what you can sell it for.”
Efforts to reach Jones for comment were not successful.
The federal law that governs fetal tissue procurement says that it is unlawful “to knowingly acquire, receive or otherwise transfer any human fetal tissue for valuable consideration.” The only permitted charges “are reasonable payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control or storage of human fetal tissue.” Violations carry fines of as much as $250,000 and 10 years in prison.
As written, the law seems to allow tissue transporters only to cover their costs but leaves murky whether the term “reasonable payments” includes room for profits. Members of Congress involved in crafting the law said privately that they never anticipated that private companies would view tissue transport as a lucrative business.
In subsequent comments on the television report, Jones also made it clear that he advocated coercing women into consenting to donate the tissue.
Related allegations stem from an undercover investigation by a flamboyant anti-abortion group named Life Dynamics, based in Denton, Texas. The group videotaped an interview with a person identified as “Kelly” (a man disguised as a woman to protect his identity) who worked for two tissue transport companies.
“Kelly” reported seeing as many as 40 post-viability abortions a week. In some cases, the fetuses were dissected while still moving, he said, and doctors frequently altered abortion procedures to ensure intact specimens, which Kelly said were more valuable for research.
However, “Kelly,” whose real name is Lawrence D. Alberty Jr., admitted in an affidavit filed in January as part of a lawsuit with his former employer that most of what he said on the video was false. He is also quoted on the 20/20 segment, but his allegations are different from those in the video and the affidavit.
All this could leave Congress wondering how widespread violations of the law may be. Little is known about the fetal tissue industry. No government agency tracks how many fetal tissue transport companies are in business, how many abortion clinics participate in tissue donations or how many researchers work with fetal tissue.
The Justice Department has responsibility for enforcing the criminal sections of the law, but it so far has not investigated or prosecuted any tissue transporter, according to a spokesperson. The NIH also has responsibility for overseeing compliance with other parts of the law, but it has not done any investigations.
This much is known: The demand for fetal tissue is high, making the market ripe for companies that want to skirt the law and charge what the market will bear.
“We have unlimited demand for it,” said James Bardsley, vice president of Anatomic Gift, a Maryland-based company that until the end of last year supplied fetal tissue to researchers. Bardsley’s company charged a set price for specimens: $90 for a second trimester sample and $220 for a first trimester sample.
Bardsley sold to university researchers funded by the NIH and to private companies. He got out of the business because of attacks by anti-abortion groups, including efforts to break into his offices.
“We were picketed like an abortion clinic, people with signs saying ‘Babies killed here,’ pictures of gruesome abortions . . . ,” Bardsley said. “We had people trying to come in and talk to us about why we were sinning.”
