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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, correct me if I am wrong, but I think it was about five years ago that this House voted overwhelmingly in favour of continuing embryonic stem cell research. The vote was also carried in another place by about a two-thirds majority. It is true, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, says, that embryonic stem cell research has not produced much clinical benefit. It has produced scientific benefit, unquestionably, and I do not think he disputes that. Although we think of science progressing very rapidly, in fact science does not progress very rapidly—it takes a while. It took about two years for the HFEA to grant any research licences, because it was so cautious. So in practice, in this country, the research has been relatively short-lived. It would be utterly wrong for this House, after such deliberation—which was so welcome to so many people, and so widely praised, not only in this country, but all over the world—suddenly to turn around and nip this work in the bud, just at the time when we are beginning to develop the tools to see what we can do with embryonic stem cell research. I do not want to go through the arguments of five years ago, but the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has produced a bit of a blunderbuss attack. There are undoubted problems with adult stem cells that are widely accepted in the scientific community. Firstly, they come from an ageing person. Therefore, they are likely to be different in the way they propagate, and also in whether they are capable of continuing to live after transplantation. Secondly, as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, they may be subject to producing cancers. I do not want to exaggerate this, but the transplanting of any stem cell, either embryonic or adult, could theoretically produce a cancer. It is essential for scientists to look at this—one reason for doing embryology research is to see whether these cancers can be prevented. There is also the question of transplantation. What is rather forgotten in this debate is that stem cells are very slow to divide in culture. Therefore, if you are an adult with a medical condition, and stem cells are taken from you, because they will be immune compatible, grown and then transplanted back into you, your degenerative process may be so advanced that your stem cells cannot catch up and you die before the stem cell transplantation can help you. That is why we need pools of stem cells and one reason why embryologically derived stem cells may be so valuable in future. There are other issues. There has been confusion here about nuclear transplantation and the risk of immune incompatibility. I do not think that this is relevant to this debate. Any further manipulation of these cells reduces their viability, whether they are embryonic or adult stem cells—that remains a significant problem. One thing that we have to consider carefully is that transplanting adult stem cells is different from transplanting embryological stem cells. If I am an adult patient and I receive my own stem cells that have been grown, those stem cells will be programmed with potentially the same genetic defects that I already have, and which caused my disease in the first place. The brilliant advantage of an embryonic transplant is that you would be using a fresh pool of genes which would not be prone to that defect; that is one of the promises of such transplants. Of course scientists, like anyone else, are fallible; there is no question about that. But 95 per cent of the biological community, with all honesty, firmly believes that embryonic stem cells are an important area of research. I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has difficulties with in vitro fertilisation, but at a time when so many human embryos are literally discarded after in vitro fertilisation because they cannot be transferred back to the patient, not to use those embryos seems to me to be an ethical problem for us. In my view it must be ethically far superior to use that material which would be discarded to produce stem cells, rather than simply discarding it. As I said in Committee, and we have gone a bit further now, we have written the scientific paper and are about to present it to a journal. Recently in my laboratory we found that embryos that are not clinically viable and which we as clinicians would not consider suitable for transplantation to the human uterus seem potentially capable of producing embryonic stem cells. If the amendment prevented that research, we would kill the huge potential benefit to patients. That seems wrong.