- The Guardian,
- Saturday December 16 2000
The debate in the House of Commons yesterday on whether to allow stem cell research to go ahead on human embryos was always going to be deeply emotional. Fiona McTaggart, MP for Slough, offered a particularly poignant example of the dilemmas. She is both infertile and has multiple sclerosis; the fertilised embryos she has donated can only be used, under current legislation, for research into fertility, yet it is the multiple sclerosis which now poses the biggest threat to her life.
Ms McTaggart's argument was that such a restriction on the use of embryos - put in place after Mary Warnock's landmark report on how to regulate the growing science of embryology - made little sense when there are now huge potential benefits in developing new tissue from the fast-growing stem cells found in embryos for common and vicious diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Her position is compelling; there is no point of principle between allowing one kind of research on embryos rather than another, as the chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, noted in his report on the issue last summer. This is underpinned by the considerable confidence which has been generated by the effective and strict regulation of all embryo research by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in the last decade.
But there are other aspects to this debate which are less clear cut. The government has been very nervous to broach this topic and with good reason. The HFEA first brought out its report calling for extension of the research allowed on embryos two years ago. Given the public sensitivities around BSE and genetic modification, the government kicked it into the long grass and handed the issue to Professor Donaldson and another committee. Now it has finally reached parliament, but the government has provided only four days between publication of the new regulations and a vote; and it is squeezed in before Christmas when many minds are elsewhere.
The government's nervousness is two-fold. First, it is concerned that the issue could be used by the pro-life lobby to challenge the sensible pragmatism of Warnock. Second, and far more important, this change in the regulations is inextricably linked to the emotive cloning debate. Stem cell research on fertilised embryos prepares the way for therapeutic cloning. And that, say the critics, is to slip down the slippery slope towards cloning human beings; it could mean developing techniques which, while banned in the UK, could be used abroad by the less scrupulous.
In reality, the scope for therapeutic cloning is always likely to be limited because of the lack of donor eggs and the high failure rate of cloning (Dolly the sheep required 277 attempts). Besides, the slippery slope argument is a poor one: the HFEA has shown that a line can be drawn and held. Some of these anxieties could also be set to rest by more energetic attempts to achieve a global ban on human cloning.
The benefits stem cell research offers may not be as clear-cut as health minister Yvette Cooper would have had us believe yesterday; it is still early days in the search for cures. But it does offer the only remaining hope for relieving the suffering of many. In the meantime, the government deserves a rap on the knuckles for rushing such a vital issue through parliament at such a time. Given the extraordinary pace of scientific development, there is a real danger of public debate not keeping up. The result could be a backlash against "Frankenstein science" which benefits neither scientific research nor its accountability.
