A leading medical researcher recently abandoned thirty years of
contraceptive vaccine research because she found that the female body
refused to attack its own reproduction. Science once again affirms the
incorrigible strength of the female physical design.
Be it in rural China, the African bush, or the metropolitan West,
women’s bodies are daily barraged with a plethora of attacks on
their reproductive functions. Pills, patches, surgical inserts,
foaming tablets all essay to stop the woman’s system from its
most integral work, continuing its kind. These contraceptives,
however, invade the woman with a foreign material that aborts the
natural reproductive process. What Dr. Bonnie Dunbar hoped to develop
was a vaccine that would trick the female immune system into fighting
reproductive cells as if they were a virus. Dr. Dunbar’s vaccine
was an insidious attempt to make the body treat pregnancy as a
disease.
The motivation behind her contraceptive research was, not
surprisingly, population control. “I spent over 20 years
developing vaccines, contraceptive vaccines,” Dr. Dunbar
explained, “because in my young years I had a vision that maybe
we could help the world population problem and provide women with an
option for birth control that was not invasive in our hormones or our
systems or otherwise have the side effects we now see with a lot of
contraceptive methods.” Presumably, she hoped that the
vaccine’s immunity to pregnancy would last several years at
least and thereby prove a more effective population control in
developing nations than the pill or other short term contraceptive
methods.
Among the many successes of her long and brilliant career, Dr.
Dunbar served as a staff scientist for the Harbor Branch Foundation,
the Smithsonian Institution, and—no great surprise—The
Population Council, Rockefeller University. She has received many
awards for her decades of work on contraceptive vaccines and in 1994
was honored by NIH as the First Margaret Pittman Lecturer. She is a
founding member of The Africa Biomedical Center in Kenya, where she
now makes her home. Over the years, Dr. Dunbar was a WHO and US AID
advisor in many projects in developing countries including China,
India, South America, and Africa. (It is of interest that all these
regions are chief targets for U. N. population control programs.)
I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Dunbar recently at the 4th
International Public Conference on Vaccination. She came from Kenya to
present the results of her failed vaccine research and make a
startling appeal for a redirection of funding away from HIV/AIDS and
contraceptive vaccine research to primary African health needs
and—you saw it coming—population reduction.
When she began her quest, as a graduate student, to develop a
contraceptive vaccine, Dr. Dunbar noticed that many infertile women
had antibodies to their own zona pellucida, preventing the
sperm from binding, penetrating, and fertilizing the egg. (The
zona pellucida is the glycoprotein surrounding the female
ovum or egg.) This became the basis for Dr. Dunbar’s research
hypothesis.
“Over the years then,” she explained, “we thought
that if women who were infertile had these antibodies, but they were
otherwise perfectly healthy, that this might be an effective
contraception that would prevent fertilization and not be abortive,
would not interfere with the endocrine system.” She hoped to
imitate this natural infertility disorder, to make a vaccine that
would cause a healthy women develop an immune response to her own
eggs. “Our goal with our vaccine was to develop
autoimmunity,” Dr. Dunbar calmly announced.
So how Dr.
Dunbar proposed to generate autoimmunity was to inject her test
rabbits, not with their own zona pellucida glycoprotiens which were
too similar to other rabbit proteins to do anything, but with pig
proteins, which are just foreign enough to “trick the rabbit
into inducing antibodies against its own self proteins.” This
was effective; her injection caused an auto immune response in the
injected rabbits. There was, interestingly, a more than minor
difficulty that proved insurmountable.
“We found out when we immunized these animals, however, that
we completely destroyed the ovaries,” Dr. Dunbar admitted.
“Unfortunately, we weren’t just looking at preventing
fertilization now; we generated a complete autoimmune disease, which
is also known as premature ovarian failure.”
She tested the vaccine in several animal models, including
primates, and found in all cases that the vaccine caused permanent
autoimmune failure of the ovaries. Viewing slides of these blasted
ovaries, which had been completely destroyed by the female’s own body,
Dr. Dunbar came to a decision. Acting with an integrity often absent
among anti-fertility researchers, she resolutely opposed any further
development of this vaccine for humans. “I am
responsible,” Dr. Dunbar declared, “for killing this
vaccine for further human research, and I made some people in my
biotech company and some other people very unhappy.”
Now, this former contraceptive vaccine is being developed as a
possible non-surgical sterilizing agent for dogs and cats, and is also
used to cull the restricted African elephant population. We have no
objection.
