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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I think that what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Winston, and by my noble friend Lord Patel leaves me with little to add, except these points. I think that the Minister raised this, and the Government proposed the term ““admixed embryo””, in a brave attempt to produce a more acceptable term than ““interspecies embryo””, which frightened many of the public into believing that if this Bill became an Act, it could ultimately result in the development and formation of monsters, or animal-human hybrids. That was never the intention, because these ““admixed embryos”” are viable, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, made clear, only for three or four days at most and could never under any circumstances develop into actual animals or human beings. The Bill makes it clear that such structures could never be implanted into the egg of a female human being or indeed into an animal. Having said that, let me stress the crucial point made by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, about the importance of stem cell research. Many people are saying that stem cell research has not as yet resulted in any improvement in human disease. There is in fact some evidence to suggest that stem cells have been able to ameliorate certain cardiac conditions and considerable evidence is now emerging—I speak as a patron of the Spinal Injuries Association—that crucially important work is going on that shows a very real prospect that stem cells may help to move towards repairing spinal cord damage in the paraplegic person. As yet, that is not a reality, but it is coming much closer. One other point is very important. Stem cells derived from adult tissue such as bone marrow, stem cells derived from the umbilical cord and stem cells derived from other tissues may in fact be invaluable for the treatment of disease. The problem is that the cells, when injected into another individual, produce an immune response. If that treatment is to work, they require the suppression of the immune response of the individual in just the same way as suppression of the immune response is required in renal transplantation, heart transplantation and others. The great virtue of what has been called the interspecies embryo, to which my noble friend Lord Patel referred, or as the Government now wish to call it, the admixed embryo, is that if you take a skin cell from a human being suffering from one of these devastating diseases and, if it were available, take a donor female ovum—which is very rare and difficult to obtain—and take out the nucleus of the donor ovum and transplant into it the nucleus from the skin cell of the individual with the disease, you can then create from that structure a series of stem cells that are immunologically compatible with the host from whom that skin cell has been removed. That is a major development of great importance. The reason for using the admixed embryo is to take the animal egg, remove the nucleus, put in the skin cell from the human subject—the same technique that was used by Ian Wilmut in creating Dolly the sheep—and to create from that a generation of stem cells that are 99.95 per cent human. The animal component is simply the capsule in which that nucleus has been implanted. That is a very minor component, so it is properly called a human admixed embryo. That technique has enormous prospect for the amelioration of human health and, if the Bill goes ahead—as I very much hope that it will—it will be of great importance to the future of many people with inherited diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s and other conditions that could be greatly helped by the derivation of those cells. Ian Wilmut said that he was not going to go on with this technique of cloning because of another technique that is being developed; but that other technique, which is being carried out in the United States, requires the use of an oncogene, which is a cancer-producing gene. I know that that is now being modified, but the problem is that stem cells derived in that way, which Ian Wilmut says is worthy of further exploration, are liable to produce malignant growths. That is one of the problems. The so-called interspecies embryo, or, as the Government now prefer to call it, the admixed embryo, is capable of producing generations of stem cells that are compatible with the individual and which do not produce an immune response, which is of enormous value in the treatment of disease.