---

Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I must say that it is a privilege to have listened to the debate today in this House. I cannot think of anywhere else where any of us would have heard people with such erudition as the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Winston. I do not want to upset the noble Lord again—I know that I did in Committee—but I find myself instinctively more in sympathy with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester. I am not a Roman Catholic. I understand that he is not either. I am probably only a fellow traveller on his train, rather than an active driver. But we treat humans and animals differently and I think we would all agree that we should treat humans and animals differently. Once we get into the business of creating entities which are halfway, or somewhere along that spectrum, between animal and human, we have a deep ethical dilemma. Arguments for the different treatment of humans and animals begin to be undermined and I find that a worrying feature. I am also worried about the attitude of the scientific community which, while it is always willing to accept that there should be limits placed on it on ethical grounds, always seems to assume that the limits should be somewhere just beyond what is scientifically possible and what it wants to do and those limits keep moving. The matters we are discussing are more of ethics than of technology. Because it is scientifically possible to do something does not mean it should be done. Because it might bring great benefit to particular people does not mean that it should be done. If we accept arguments of that kind, we are essentially accepting the argument that the end justifies the means. I am not sure that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is absolutely right. It is very difficult to decide where we should go from where we are, but I would much rather go in the direction which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, wants to go in than that which we are told the scientific community wants to go in. There is an ethical element to this which is understood broadly by most people in or out of the scientific community and which relates to the unease of creating things which are neither human nor animal and then justifying in some way that we should continue to treat animals and humans differently.