Clause 3
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [Lords]
11:15 am
John Pugh (Shadow Minister, Treasury; Southport, Liberal Democrat)
The business end of this group of amendments relates to subsection (5), which is related in turn to subsection (6), which repeals a section of the Human Reproductive Cloning Act 2001—which, I believe, is repealed in full elsewhere in this piece of legislation. There are some anxieties about doing that, but there is a desirable goal to be achieved, namely, preventing the transmission of serious mitochondrial disease. I support attempts to achieve that. The problem is that there are many ways to do it.
Pre-screening is one way with which we are familiar. However, if we look at nuclear transfer, which appears to be the object of the regulations mentioned in the Bill, there are different ways in which that may be done. There is the simple case of transferring one person’s egg into another person’s cytoplasm. There is also the transferring of a fertilised embryo into the cytoplasm of a third person. That creates some concerns. Lord Walton announced in the House of Lords that researchers at Newcastle university had found successful ways of doing that, and he pointed it out as something else that was new and which could be authorised by the legislation and subsequent regulations.
It is an inescapable fact that some mitochondrial diseases are not a product of diseased mitochondria per se, but have an origin in the nucleus of the cell itself. That is an indisputable scientific fact, and I do not think there is any argument about it. It would follow from that, necessarily, that regulations are therefore capable of prescribing in this particular case manipulation of the nucleus of human cells or some form of connected engineering. The Minister can contradict me on that, but it seems to me a fairly transparent reading of the legislation as it stands before us. It does not seem to be the case—particularly as we have not repealed the Human Reproductive Cloning Act 2001—that there is a loophole whereby cloning can also be authorised.
There are genuine ethical concerns here. I am concerned that this is, in a sense, carte blanche. It is an opportunity for a number of things to happen, some of which we will be comfortable with, and some of which we will not. Lord Walton, in the House of Lords, said that he thought this probably was encompassed by the legislation. However, in a less than complimentary article in Nature, Dr. Chinnery, who conducted the research to which Lord Walton referred, said:
“I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it [in patients] now for a number of reasons ... There are a number of scientific, legal and ethical issues—we've got to engage in a debate to ensure that society feels this is the right thing for us to do.”
Who is going to engage in the debate? It seems to me that if we leave the clause as it stands, the debate is only going to be had in the HFEA and nowhere else.