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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

It would be surprising if Members of the Committee were not dazzled by the scientific acumen of noble Lords such as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, and my noble friends Lord Walton and Lord Patel. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, put the matter well; I have no difficulties with some of what my noble friend Lord Patel said earlier, and I believe that there is scope for common ground on the use of adult stem cells, a matter he alluded to. Nevertheless, issues have been raised in some of noble Lords’ remarks, and indeed in the remarks on mitochondria, which no doubt we will come to later when my noble friend Lord Walton of Detchant speaks to his Amendment No. 4 in the group. We are being asked to do different things. The amendment of my noble friend Lord Walton asks us to remove all regulation and to allow what he would like to do to proceed in a wholly unregulated way. On the other hand, my noble friend Lord Patel suggests a form of regulation. I suggest in my Amendment No. 2A that we should reserve to Parliament the right to decide on these complex and sometimes controversial issues. The amendments in the group deal not only with the questions already alluded to but with reproductive cloning, mitochondrial DNA, and immature human and animal gametes, expanding their use into interspecies embryos. That is a phenomenally wide group of issues to consider in one group of amendments. It is also a phenomenally complex group of issues for any lay person to deal with. We are having a rather back-to-front debate very late in our proceedings. Probably tomorrow or perhaps next week, we come to Amendments Nos. 66 and 67, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, which urge on us the creation of a national bioethics committee that is outside Parliament and capable of giving informed opinion to Members of both Houses before decisions such as this are taken. In many ways, I wish we could have had that debate at the head of our consideration of the Bill in Committee. My noble friend Lord Walton seeks in Amendment No. 4 to remove the need for regulation. The practical effect would be to allow licence holders to modify an egg or embryo for mitochondrial reasons without further regulatory requirement. If that were to permit reproductive cloning to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial disease without having to go through the affirmative procedure, we would have entered a brave new world without so much as a parliamentary grunt. Many of us who admire scientists and science nevertheless believe that Parliament has a right and a duty to insist that good science and good ethics march hand in hand. I doubt that I am alone in wearying of the political mantra, ““We will follow the science””. Parliament’s job is surely to inform itself; arrive at wise and just judgments; and to lead, not to follow. We should be deeply suspicious of any attempt to remove regulation and simply place that power in the hands of the Secretary of State, however esteemed they may be. To sleep-walk into provisions that might have irreversible effects, and to do so in the absence of a legislative, ethical and regulatory framework, would be a dereliction of our duty. So, too, would the failure to close a route to reproductive cloning. As we are seduced and subverted by the dazzle of these various proposals, I am reminded of CS Lewis’s prophetic polemic, The Abolition of Man, published in 1943, and of his futuristic work, That Hideous Strength, published in 1945. He foresaw what he described as technological brutalism, just as Huxley foresaw a world populated from vast hatcheries and peopled with entities with intelligences ranging from alpha to epsilon. Even before Lewis and Huxley, in 1896, HG Wells published The Island of Dr Moreau. Dr Moreau, who specialised in creating animal-human hybrids, says: "““I went on with this research just the way it led me … I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter””." He was not subject to regulation. Instructively, Lord Feverstone, the creator of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments in That Hideous Strength and a fictional Member of your Lordships’ House, says that his aim is: "““Quite simple and obvious things, at first—sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races … selective breeding””." Ultimately, he will create: "““A new type of man””." All this was futuristic, speculative writing, but it is fast becoming reality because of the extremely permissive flexibility of provisions in Bills such as this. It is clear that the desire of the scientific lobby, to which my noble friend Lord Patel referred earlier, and evidenced in arguments for deregulation, is that the Bill embrace all future technological developments without wasting time coming back to Parliament for approval. Even when specific restrictions are stated in the Bill, they are usually accompanied by provisions to permit further change, with a minimum of scrutiny or accountability. I hope that when the Minister replies, he will reiterate that the provision of the conscience clause in the 1990 Act will continue to apply, thus protecting those scientists who do not wish to be corralled into work that in other European jurisdictions would carry a prison sentence. It may be very unfashionable to say this, but there are tens of thousands of desperately unhappy children who are orphans and who would desperately love to be in a loving home. Adoption has gone out of favour, and I noticed in a reply to a Parliamentary Question which I tabled recently that, in the whole of last year, only 165 babies were available in this country for adoption. Of course couples who wish to prevent the transmission of disease to their children should, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, has said, be given every support possible if they want to adopt an orphaned child, instead of going to extraordinary lengths and using cell nuclear replacement procedures to create children who may turn out to have some other unexpected disorder resulting from the very artificial procedure used to create the embryo. Adoption would also be better than creating three genetic parents. At Second Reading my noble friend Lord Walton said that to be able to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial disease: "““One can take a donor ovum from which you have removed the nucleus and put the nucleus into that donor ovum, which has normal mitochondria in the cytoplasm, and then allow that to be fertilised by the partner’s sperm, thus allowing these women to have normal children””.—[Official Report, 19/11/07; col. 709.]" This means that you can carry out a technique to insert the nucleus of an egg from the woman with mitochondrial disease into the egg of an egg donor who has healthy mitochondria where the nucleus of that egg has been removed, and that would be followed by IVF. I ask the Minister, if we simply insert an adult somatic cell from the woman with unhealthy mitochondria into the enucleated egg instead of inserting the nucleus from her egg, would that not be reproductive cloning after activation instead of IVF? What precisely in the Bill would prevent this, as permitted eggs and embryos are allowed to have alterations in their mitochondrial and nuclear genes if it is for the treatment of mitochondrial disease, and do not have to have been created by fertilisation as new Section 3ZA(5) can override the prohibitions in new Section 3ZA(2) and (4) which would otherwise have prohibited implanting embryos created by altering DNA and embryos that had not been created by fertilisation? Paragraph 2(3) of Schedule 2 on page 54 also specifies that licences can be given where the nuclear and mitochondrial DNA of embryos to be implanted has been altered for the purpose of mitochondrial disease. These eggs and embryos are also specifically permitted to have material from two women according to new Section 35A on page 30. All this would seem again to permit reproductive cloning as one of several possible ways to prevent transmission of mitochondrial disease. With the Bill as it stands in new Section 3ZA(5), both this and the procedure suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Walton, would be subject only to affirmative resolution. However, if the noble Lord’s Amendment No. 4 is approved, then neither procedure would be required to go through Parliament for affirmation. This means that reproductive cloning would be legal as one method to prevent transmission of mitochondrial disease without ever having come back to Parliament. We must not allow this law of unintended consequences to happen.