Seizure

author’s note

I think of my novels as “faction,” a coined word meaning that the fact and fiction are so mixed that the dividing line between the two is often hard to discern. What does this mean for Seizure? Certainly the characters are all fictional, as is the storyline. Also, unfortunately, the HTSR procedure is not yet part of the biomedical armamentarium. But just about everything else is factual, including the parts about the Shroud of Turin, from which specific genes have been isolated from its bloodstains. I must admit, like Daniel and Stephanie, I became fascinated by the shroud. The reference Stephanie cites is also real, and for those interested in pursuing the subject further, I recommend it as a start.

It is also fact that a number of U.S. politicians have involved themselves in the debate about bioscience, a field whose rate of discovery has become geometric. Indeed, it seems as if the twenty-first century will belong to biology, just as the twentieth century belonged to physics and the nineteenth century belonged to chemistry. Unfortunately, in my opinion, some of the politicians have been drawn into the debate, like my fictional Senator Ashley Butler, for demagogic purposes rather than as true leaders with the public weal at heart. And even those politicians, who seek to ban research of these twenty-first century therapeutic technologies in the United States for what they believe to be legitimate moral reasons, I suspect would not hesitate to fly to another country where such treatments were allowed to develop if they or a member of their family were stricken with an illness capable of being cured.

In the congressional hearing room scene in Seizure (Chapter Two), Senator Ashley Butler shows his true colors by playing to public fears about embryo farms and atavistic Frankenstein mythologies. The senator also refuses to separate reproductive cloning (cloning a person, about which there is almost universal repugnance) from therapeutic cloning (cloning cells from an individual for the purpose of treating that individual). Senator Butler, like other opponents of stem-cell and therapeutic cloning research, suggests that the procedure requires the dismemberment of embryos. As Daniel points out to little avail, this is false. The cloned stem cells in therapeutic cloning are harvested from the blastocyst stage well before any embryo forms. The fact is that in therapeutic cloning, an embryo is never allowed to form and nothing is ever implanted in a uterus.

Most of my readers are aware that my medical thriller stories have significant sociological issues at their core. Seizure is no exception, and obviously the issue here is the regrettable collision of politics and rapidly advancing bioscience. But it is one thing to use a cautionary tale to delineate a problem and quite another to suggest a solution. However, Daniel does allude to one, and it is one I personally would like our country to adopt. As Daniel questions in Chapter Six, “We [meaning the United States] took a lot of our ideas about individual rights, government, and certainly our common law from England. Why couldn’t we have followed England’s lead in how best to deal with the ethics of reproductive bioscience?”

In response to the often difficult and disturbing ethical issues arising from molecular genetics and human reproductive research underscored by the birth of the world’s first in vitro fertilization baby in 1978, the British Parliament in their wisdom created the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which has been operational since 1991. This organization, among other functions, licenses and monitors infertility clinics (something lacking in the U.S.) as well as debates and recommends policy to Parliament in regard to reproductive technologies and research. Interestingly enough, the chairman, deputy chairman, and at least one half the general membership are statutorily neither doctors nor scientists involved in reproductive technology. The point is that the English have managed to form a truly representative body whose members reflect a wide range of the general public’s interests and which can debate the issues in an apolitical environment. Of note, the HFEA issued a report in 1998 that clearly differentiated between reproductive cloning, which it recommended be banned, and therapeutic cloning, which it recommended as holding promise for the therapy of serious illnesses.

The fact that bioscience in general and reproductive bioscience in particular is advancing so quickly begs the issue that the field needs some form of oversight. There is no doubt that completely unfettered bioscience can be a threat to human dignity, if not our identity, as Dr. Leon Kass, the current chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics has suggested. But partisan politics is not the appropriate arena to deal with this problem. In such a setting, any committees formed would invariably become stacked with members of a particular political bent.

It is my belief that if the U.S. Congress were to set up a nonpartisan standing commission like the English HFEA to recommend policy, the U.S. public would be well served. Not only could the current debate about therapeutic cloning be resolved in an intelligent, apolitical, and democratic fashion (there is already consensus against reproductive cloning), but also infertility clinics could be monitored appropriately. It is even conceivable that the related abortion issue could be taken out of politics, to our collective benefit.

Robin Cook, M.D.

March 12, 2003

Naples, Florida