
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 16, 1991                   TAG: 9104160352
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

PARENTS DEFEND FETUS-TO-FETUS TRANSPLANT

In poignant testimony, a husband and wife who oppose abortion told a congressional subcommittee Monday how they nevertheless agreed to use tissue from an aborted fetus in a desperate attempt to save their unborn son from a fatal genetic disease.

The experiment, carried out last May on the son of Guy and Terri Walden of Houston while the child was still in the womb, was the first fetus-to-fetus tissue transplant to be tried in the United States.

It is not yet known whether the experiment succeeded, but if it does, it would raise the possibility that a number of fatal diseases could be cured before birth with relatively uncomplicated procedures, Dr. Morton Cowan, a leading pediatric researcher, said in a telephone interview.

A similar procedure, for another genetic disease, was tried in France in 1988, but Cowan said it had failed.

The testimony came as the panel took up the financing of the National Institutes of Health. Research using fetal tissue has been a contentious issue at the NIH since the Reagan administration banned federal funds for it in 1988.

The new case "could be extremely important," said Cowan, who is chief of pediatric bone marrow transplants at the University of California at San Francisco.

"It is the only one in the United States," he said. "But it is very early in the history of fetal transplantation, and there is much that is not known."

The Waldens had already lost two children to Hurler's syndrome, a rare genetic disease that causes retardation, severe crippling and death. Doctors hope the transplanted tissue will help the infant, who was born in November and who appears to be in good health, but they will not be able to tell until this summer.

Halting occasionally in their testimony, the couple said the government should end its ban on federal funds for transplants using the tissue of aborted fetuses, so long as precautions are taken to assure no one is pressured to provide the tissue.

In their own case, deciding to use the tissue was "a hard decision," said Walden, pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Houston. "I am not speaking from theory, I am speaking from experience."

by CNB