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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My professional friend the noble Lord, Lord Winston, speaks with much more experience than I. I speak only with some second-hand knowledge. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, tries to promote in all these amendments his wish that—and he truly believes in it: I respect that—the only form of stem cell research we should allow is that based on adult stem cells, or, now, pluripotent stem cells derived from adult cells. I accept that both these lines seem enormously promising. What I do not accept is that any other form of stem cell research, including particularly embryonic stem cell, does not seem to have much future. The noble Lord may well be right, but just now he has to accept that the fundamental research is done on embryonic stem cells. I repeat: these are chromosomally normal cells present in early blastocysts that have the capacity to differentiate in all 257 types of human cells. None of the other cells has the same pluripotency. We have to wait to see whether induced pluripotent cells will have the same capacity. Whether they will and whether they behave the same way as embryonic stem cells will have to be compared with embryonic stem cells. Research on all types of stem cells at this stage is therefore important. We should not turn off any avenues of research in that respect. I refer to the noble Lord’s Amendment No. 46. In paragraph (b) he proposes that much of the interspecies embryo research could not be done solely in animal models. The whole purpose of interspecies embryo work is to be able to develop disease because many diseases are specific to humans; they do not occur in animals. The point of much of the research is to create disease-specific stem-cell lines that reflect the human specific gene mutations and abnormal functioning involved in the disease. I may be able to accept paragraph (c) but I will have to discuss it further. Paragraph (d) states that, "““the research method proposed is most likely to produce satisfactory results””." That is too high a standard for any research project. Not just in biological science but in any kind of science it would be unusual to have this degree of confidence in likely results in any research. That is the nature of research. While I am on my feet, I say to the noble Lord that while we can get very excited about induced pluripotent cells, we must remember that what we are saying is that, as my noble friend Lord Walton said, inserting viral vectors into the cells makes them differentiate and become pluripotent cells which carry these vectors with them. As I said earlier, even Yamanaka in his paper says that they had at least 20 insertions per cell. If you work out the mathematics, that means for a cell not to have an insertion would require 10 million cells. To get that is a tall task. Furthermore, perhaps I may say to the noble Lord that to be able to understand that these cells are truly pluripotent in the same way that embryonic stem cells are, he or any scientist would have to take them down to a blastocyst stage. That blastocyst is an embryo in every respect, and, if implanted, would be a clone of where the adult cell came from. Therefore, it too might need regulating.