ABLEnews Designing Children In the Wonderland of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Alice ate a magic mushroom and grew taller. In the Wonderland of our nation's capital, government scientists are experimenting on healthy children to increase their height. The children are healthy, that is, unless like the scientists at the National Institutes of Health, you find "being too short a problem for which medicine is the solution." One who most definitely does not is Jeremey Rifkin, of the Foundation on Economic Trends. The Washington watchdog has announced its intention to sue NIH if it persists in injecting human growth hormone (HGH) with unknown side effects into short children throughout their teens. How short is "short"? Experimental subjects must be between 9 and 15 years of age and a least 2.5 standard deviations below the average height for their age when they enter the study. At age 12 and a half, for example, this means all girls under 4 feet, 6 inches and all boys below 4 feet 4. Half the subjects are injected with HGH. The other half receive a harmless placebo. Did I say "harmless"? Not to many parents recruited by the experimenters (nor, as we shall see, to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine). Only one in five families whose children are found eligible for the study enroll them. Many decline because they do not want to run the risk of their child being dumped without their knowledge or consent, in fact, against their wishes, into the nontreated control group. According to Dr. Susan Rose, who designed the NIH experiment's protocol, one in four families refusing to participate in the study find pediatricians willing to prescribe HGH, whose only approved uses in the United States involve the treatment of genetic disorders and disease. With a year's treatment for each of the 20,000 children with hormone deficiency from pituitary damage or unknown cause costing up to $20,000, the annual sales of HGH's manufacturers, Genetech, Inc. and Eli Lilly and Co., exceed $200 million. This would be a paltry downpayment, however, should HGH prove effective in boosting the final height of healthy children with adequate HGH levels in their bloodstreams who are nevertheless short. The government experiment's outcome is far from certain. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine accuses NIH of violating regulations of the United States Department of Health and Human Services designed to protect human subjects by requiring that experiments subjecting children to risky procedures offer them the prospect of direct, personal benefit. Previous experiments with African Pygmies found they did not grow taller when given extra HGH. Most experiments on healthy children have lasted less than two years, with preliminary results indicating HGH supplements merely shorten the time children take to reach their adult height. The treatments may even be harmful. Still 36 children presently participate in the four-year-old experiment, with 80 targeted to do so. The study is designed to continue for a decade when all participating children will have had the growth plates of their bones close, a sign of skeletal maturity. As David Brown, of the Washington Post, reports: The HGH experiment debate had focused in one place some of modern medicine's thorniest issues: What constitutes a "disease" and a "successful" treatment; which experiments involving children are permissible; how much attention should scientists pay to consumer and commercial pressures for research... These questions are likely to come up again in other contexts as medicine and biology gain the ability to manipulate physical, and possibly mental, traits that are not obviously linked to disease. "This is the big fear that we've always had about genetic engineering-- that it would be used for social purposes and not medical purposes," warns Rifkin, who has sounded the alarm on recombinant DNA technology for more than a decade. "What about fat people? What about people with different skin pigmentation? [Like the African Pygmies?] What about young girls whose breasts won't grow to the size that society desires? [Who may subject themselves to dangerous silicone breast implants?] This experiment moves us on a very, very dangerous journey that starts with 'enhancement' and ends up with eugenics." Short children "underrate themselves, and people around them expect less of them, because they look younger than their age. They grow up working below their capacity," Rose charges. Arthur Levine, scientific director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which runs the NIH experiment, adds, "In our society, height is generally seen as a positive characteristic, and extremely short stature is seen as negative characteristic. If a child becomes so disabled by anxiety and worry about his short stature it becomes tantamount to a disease." For Rifkin, and for CURE, the real disease--bigotry lies elsewhere. "There is nothing wrong with these children. What is wrong is society, the biases, the discrimination. But don't address the diseases of society by changing the physiology of the individual." Let's make our hearts so big that we love every child no matter how small his or her size! ...For further information, contact CURE, 812 Stephen Street, Berkeley Springs, West Virginia 254511 (304-258-LIFE/5433). 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