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Medical Research

My Lords, I want to take issue with a number of things that have been said this afternoon by noble Lords, the first of whom is the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg. Although the life expectancy of some of us might be extended by 30 minutes, whenever I stand up in this Chamber, mine is shortened by at least 30 minutes, even if I am speaking for only five. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Hayman on introducing this very important and timely debate and on her chairmanship of Cancer Research UK during the difficult transitional period which she mastered wonderfully. I absolutely agree with her about its relevance to basic blue skies research. But I fear that at that point I rather take issue with her and I wish to part company, to some extent. At the moment, one problem in research—to which I drew attention in the debate two weeks ago and which we have heard a little about already—is regulation. It is inhibiting blue skies research. I told a story two weeks ago about the difficulty in getting a simple project to do stem cell biology through the HFEA, and it being peer reviewed—although on what basis I do not understand. Incidentally, I understand from the HFEA that it was sent out to two peer reviewers. Only one bothered to reply, which was completely inadequate scientifically. We rebutted all the points. That reviewer replied, but did not answer any of our points. That is a disgraceful example of how projects should not be reviewed. I do not understand why, when you are not applying for public funds or trying to publish, it needs to be peer reviewed. One would think that the HFEA should have the expertise in house to deal with a fairly simple project of that kind. With due respect, it is interesting that the HFEA keeps saying that it provides the conditions for public confidence. One could argue that having a regulatory authority may raise rather than allay public fears, which is an issue on which I do not think that we have ever done any research. We produce the mantra but we do not have any evidence from social science research one way or the other. It is about time that we did, particularly as the noble Baroness talks about the public understanding of science. It should be the public engagement with science. The public understand the science very well. By and large, they trust what is going on in stem cell biology. There is not much doubt about that, but the issue is whether we have found the right mechanisms for listening to their views. One problem is that on taking a consultation based on a website, which the regulatory authority does, you inevitably get skewed opinions. You get people who are representing their opinions from extreme ends—people like myself. I have an interest as someone involved with stem cell biology as a medical researcher and with a spin-out company at Imperial College. On the other side, you will have the people from the right to life movement who have strong views. But the broad public opinion, which is probably largely supportive, will also be largely silent. That is an issue, too, that the noble Baroness rightly raised with regard to animal research. It is sad that it takes so long to get a licence. As I pointed out two weeks ago, it took me 13 months to get a licence to inject six pigs with a completely painless gene construct which caused no damage to the pig. I want to come back to a key issue. This House, together with another place, overwhelmingly voted strongly in favour of a very important development in biology; that of stem cell research. The HFEA says—we have heard it said in this Chamber today—that we lead in stem cell biology. That is a little bit of an overstatement. This morning I downloaded all the English publications on human embryonic stem cell research from www.pubmed.co.uk, the medical index. There are now 14 licences on the HFEA website, although it seems to be nine months out of date, so there may be more. I am surprised that it is not updated more regularly. But most of the research projects have not yielded a single publication. Two units have managed 13 publications between them. The others have managed, altogether, just five. The number of publications from this country in stem cell biology, although this is an area in which we should be expert, is less than from Israel or Singapore, both of which have half the population of London. That is not a very impressive record. There is no question that clinicians are inhibited in this country from doing research by the regulatory frameworks. The HFEA is just one example. It happens throughout regulation with regard to ethics approval. On the train yesterday I read the April issue of Human Reproduction, the leading and most high-impact journal in my field. That British journal contains some 35 publications, only three of which come from the United Kingdom; the rest are from other countries. That is rather astonishing. In part it may be because of commercial activity in the field, which is a problem, but I think it is also that we are finding it more and more difficult to attract clinicians to clinical research of any kind in this country. I fear that the regulatory framework may have something to answer for. In his speech I hope that my noble friend on the Front Bench will try to suggest ways in which we might speed up the regulatory framework. I think it is wrong for me to have seen published in Nature only a month ago research that I wanted to do over a year ago, but was not able because I have not been given permission to do it in this country. In the meantime, colleagues have conducted exactly the same experiment in the United States.