Germany Mulls a Leap Across Genetics Threshold
As befits a country in the global scientific vanguard, Germany is engaged in weighty debate about what limits researchers should impose on themselves when the possibilities of genetic engineering seem boundless.
But divisive moral discussions about cloning, embryonic stem cell research and screening eggs for genetic defects are ever more complicated in this nation that once turned to eugenics in a quest to build a master race.
The Third Reich and its deranged pursuits were defeated 56 years ago, and Germany today is highly sensitive to the ethical quandaries that are the byproducts of scientific progress. Still, the long shadow of the Nazi era is darkening the already emotional discussions about how much humans should be allowed to manipulate their own species.
More so than in other leading genetic technology powers, doctors and scientists in Germany are at odds about whether they have a right to impregnate the infertile, abort the imperfect or harvest from embryos cells that could generate healthy organs for adults whose own parts have failed them.
From politicians to medical professionals, in laboratories and lecture halls and church pulpits, Germans are struggling to find their proper role in advancing genetic technology without stirring fears that they have failed to heed history’s lessons.
The subject is so sensitive that a government decision on a funding request by Bonn University researchers to produce replacement tissue for defective organs was postponed this week until December. It was the third time this year that the federal research funding agency, seemingly paralyzed by the divisive debate about how much can ethically be done to improve the human condition, stepped back from its stated support for the groundbreaking project.
Research on human embryos is forbidden in Germany, as is their creation for use other than in vitro fertilization for childless couples. A loophole allowing the importation of fertilized eggs and a booming biotechnology industry are driving sentiment in business quarters for change, but opponents warn of “playing God.”
“I’m worried because the discussion right now is rather fundamentalist and divided,” said Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, head of the German Research Society, which functions like a cross between the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. “Many people don’t seem to listen. They already have their opinions that don’t permit any leeway.”
Each postponement of the decision by Winnacker’s agency on the proposal by Bonn genetics professor Oliver Bruestle has been made to accommodate the ever-expanding debate and a newly appointed state ethics council.
While government officials are taking a go-slow approach, German scientists note that they are still recovering from a biotech brain drain in the 1980s and need to keep pace with peers in the United States, Britain and Japan if they are to be a leader in the life sciences field.
The question of whether Nazi Germany’s gross abuses with human experimentation should now force this country into a less prominent role in genetic engineering went unspoken until President Johannes Rau brought it abruptly into the open this spring.
Nation Seeks to Be Held to Universal Standard
In a watershed speech May 18, Rau even called into question the appropriateness of in vitro fertilization, contending, “There is no right to children.” But while opposing such technology, he defended Germany’s right to be held to the same standard as other countries.
“Eugenics, euthanasia and selection: These are terms with terrible connotations in Germany. They therefore--rightly--provoke emotional resistance,” Rau said. “Nevertheless, I consider the argument that we Germans should not do certain things because of our history quite wrong and misleading.”
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, while praising Rau’s assertion that the dignity of the human being is inviolable, rebutted with the view that genetic engineering is “the key technology of this century, without which we could hardly secure the future well-being of our children and grandchildren.”
“It is also moral not to forget about people with serious illnesses who could be healed or comforted with medications produced through genetic technology,” Schroeder told the weekly Der Spiegel. “And it is also part of our moral responsibility to foster the creation of jobs and prosperity.”
Heeding the widespread wariness over genetic engineering, however, Schroeder applauded the latest delay in funding stem-cell research as “appropriate and reasonable” given the work’s sensitivity.
Until his appointment to the nonpartisan presidency two years ago, Rau had been a lifelong member of the left-of-center Social Democrats now headed by Schroeder. That the head of state and the chancellor have such markedly different perspectives on genetic research is telling of the deep rifts running through German political, professional and religious circles.
The opposition Christian Democrats are equally discordant in their views on how to advance genetic technology without fostering an environment in which prospective parents could pick and choose physical characteristics of their children.
Juergen Ruettgers, an education minister in former Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Cabinet, drafted a position paper for the conservatives advocating changing the current restrictions. But no sooner was his vision outlined for party colleagues in May than fellow Christian Democrats were sounding the alarm against “clearing the path to selection” and creating life for experimental purposes.
In the worlds of business and science, the promise of longer, healthier lives through gene therapy and organ replacement outweighs the fears of abuse. Especially in eastern Germany, which has become a magnet for biotech start-ups because of its highly skilled yet affordable work force and generous investment subsidies, life sciences are seen as an important contribution to growth.
“Biotech is not an industry where thousands of people are employed, but it’s important to the development of a whole range of other industries,” said Hans Christoph von Rohr, head of the Industrial Investment Council, which is charged with drawing investment into the formerly Communist eastern states. “Biotech is the little bit of spice in big industries like pharmaceuticals, plant genetics and health care.”
Since Germany introduced a law in 1996 allowing human gene studies, many of the native scientists who had moved to the United States in the 1980s have returned to initiate a biotech boom in their homeland.
Research centers in the east, namely Gatersleben, Rostock and the Berlin suburb of Buch, have shot to the fore with the infusion of capital from state and private investors, less constrained than their western colleagues by religion or a feeling of collective guilt for World War II abuses.
While popular resistance may be stronger in the west, many in the scientific community are keenly interested in an easing of restrictions.
Companies such as Schering recognize the need for broad public discussion of the ethics of human engineering, said pharmacology spokeswoman Claudia Schmidt, noting that the intensity of the debate here “has something to do with our past.”
“But other European countries are able to do this research, and we believe Germany should have the same standards as in the United States or the United Kingdom,” she said. “Otherwise we will be unable to develop the medications and therapies that will become available elsewhere.”
Schmidt noted that German scientists need only a few embryos for developing cell lines and generating tissue, and that thousands of fertilized eggs that will never be used for implantation are already frozen and stored in the country.
“There’s no need to produce more for at least 10 or 20 years,” she said, adding that the swift pace of advancement in genetic technology could well overtake the need for human embryos in the laboratory by then.
Opponents, however, argue that quantity is irrelevant to the moral issue. Any interference with an embryo violates the sanctity of human life, defined in the 1990 law banning embryo research as beginning from the moment of fertilization.
Both Evangelical and Roman Catholic clergymen used their Pentecost Sunday sermons last month to urge parishioners to reject all forms of embryo research. Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne contended that production of human tissue constitutes “a type of cannibalism.”
“The genetic heritage of mankind is common property and not trade goods,” the German Doctors Congress declared at its annual meeting in Ludwigshafen in late May. The gathering urged the German Parliament to refrain from following European Union legal moves to allow patenting of human gene, cell or organ production.
“Human life begins with the fusion of egg and sperm. Once that happens, we’re dealing with the early stages of a human being. And we say that no human being should be slaughtered for the benefit of another,” said Joerg-Dietrich Hoppe, the president of the government’s Federal Chamber of Physicians.
Objections to Stem Cell Research
The chamber’s human rights monitor, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, likewise used the congress to lobby for the restrictive status quo. He accused Schroeder of putting economic interests ahead of ethical considerations and creating “enormous political pressure” for allowing embryonic stem cell research and pre-implantation diagnosis.
“When one can destroy a human embryo on certain grounds, then it will be just as simple to put down an ill person who has no chance of recovery,” Montgomery told the Frankfurter Rundschau daily during the doctors congress.
The genetic ethics debate is shaping up to be as divisive as past discussions on abortion rights, which remain highly restricted in Germany. But those who watched German scientists flee to Britain and the U.S. 20 years ago to escape the self-imposed biotech shackles say they hope another exodus can be averted.
“Discussion of the Nazi abuses is always correct. We are living in a democracy,” Winnacker of the research society said. “But that shouldn’t be the deathblow to the issue.”
