Word: cline
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ANGELES--Officials at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) have asked Dr. Martin Cline to step down temporarily as chief of the hematology and oncology division pending an investigation of Cline's genetic engineering experiments...
...July, U.C.L.A. Hematologist Martin Cline and colleagues at Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus and at a clinic of the University of Naples performed gene transfers on two female patients. Both had severe thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder in which the bone marrow produces red cells with defective hemoglobin (the molecule that carries oxygen to body tissues). Victims need frequent blood transfusions, but this leads to a buildup of iron in the body, particularly the heart, that can eventually cause death...
...Cline and his collaborators treated their patients by removing a small amount of bone marrow and mixing it with genes capable of directing production of normal hemoglobin. The genes had been manufactured by bacteria altered by recombinant-DNA techniques. The marrow cells, now bearing the new genes, were then injected back into the patients. There is as yet no sign that their reconstituted marrow cells are producing healthy hemoglobin. But the story of the experiment, which was broken by the Los Angeles Times, has raised questions about whether the effort was premature. U.S. regulations require investigators to get approval...
...Cline says that safety guidelines similar to those in the U.S. were followed in Israel and Italy. But, observed one Israeli hematologist, "if this type of research is forbidden in the U.S., a world model for such work, I would hesitate to approve it in my own country." In Washington, the National Institutes of Health's Office for Protection from Research Risks has asked U.C.L.A. for a full report. Declares Cline: "After consideration of all the scientific and moral aspects, I'd do it again...
Last spring's U.C.L.A. development has prompted similar questions, but the medical payoff from it may come a bit sooner. In that experiment, a team of scienlists led by Martin Cline and Winston Salser isolated genes that help produce an enzyme resistant to methotrexate, a drug used to treat cancer. The researchers added the genes to cell cultures of mouse bone marrow. The cells that picked up the foreign material, along with cells that had been incubated with genes that do not confer resistance, were then injected into mice whose own bone marrow had been destroyed...