Dr. David Adamson, Chair and CEO, Advanced Reproductive Care, Inc. (ARC)

Etopia Media Medical News Network spoke today with Dr. David Adamson, Chair and CEO, Advanced Reproductive Care, Inc. (ARC), about the process of, and issues surrounding, the donation of human oocytes (eggs) for use in embryonic stem cell research.

You can listen to Dr. Adamson discussing this subject by clicking here.

This conversation deals with, among other things, Dr. Adamson's medical background and the activities Advanced Reproductive Care; his testimony in Sacramento before a California Senate committee considering SB 18, a bill to regulate egg donations whose current version restricts payments to women donating eggs for embryonic stem cell research to their "direct expenses," and disallows the typical $5,000 per process payment that Dr. Adamson believes is necessary in order to motivate sufficient numbers of women to participate in the egg donation process; Lupron, a pharmaceutical product from TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc. that is used to stop ovulation before the administration of drugs that stimulate it for purposes of egg collection; Ovarian Hyper Stimulation Syndrome, or OHSS; and the fact that ongoing fertility treatment practice and research, along with the financing of $3 billion dollars in "human therapeutic cloning" (somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, without implantation of the embryo) by Proposition 71, the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee (ICOC), and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) will pave the way, technically speaking, for "human reproductive cloning," (SCNT followed by uterine implantation and bringing a child to term), which Dr. Adamson strongly opposes.

On this last point, and the related one of the philosophical implications of the "constructive human immortality" that reproductive human cloning might make possible, Dr. Adamson expressed a position deeply in accord with a remark William Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Hamlet, in lines 72-73 of Scene 2 of Act I of the eponymous play:

"Thou know'st 'tis common, all that lives must die,
Passing through nature into eternity."

What Dr. Adamson said this afternoon, four hundred years or so after Hamlet had his say, was:

"I'm not a philosopher, or an ethicist but in general I would find that a fairly disturbing concept and certainly wouldn't be supportive of it ["constructive human immortality" produced by human reproductive cloning]. Everything in life, you know, is born, lives and dies and it seems to have worked in the universe, not only people but animals, plants, planets, suns, so it seems to me that it would be unnatural, as it were, to do that and on that basis alone I wouldn't be able to support it."

To listen to Dr. Adamson comments about human egg donation in the context of embryonic stem cell research in their entirety, click here.

To visit the Advanced Reproductive Care, Inc. (ARC) web site, click here.

To access additional audio interviews on the subject of egg donations for embryonic stem cell research, from alternative points of view, click on the guest's name: Betty Poirier, member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives; Judy Norsigian, Executive Director, Our Bodies, Ourselves.

To listen to an interview with Jonathan Moreno, co-chair, National Academy of Sciences Embryonic Stem Cell Research Guidelines Committee, in which he discusses those guidelines, click here.