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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I will reply to one point that the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, has just made. It cannot be said that scientists are always thinking that what can be done should be done or is permissible. I vividly remember, after the publication of the report on embryology and fertilisation, taking part in a television programme with Bob Edwards, who was partly responsible for the first IVF birth, where he said, ““What I would really like to do is to keep an embryo alive in the laboratory for more than 14 days but I am a law-abiding man.”” I nearly killed him for saying that because we were facing a very hostile audience at the time and I had envisaged saying that nobody would want to keep an embryo longer than 14 days. But he said he did want to and he could not. There may have been many other scientists who would have liked to conduct research on embryos older than 14 days, but as far as I know nobody has. That is a case where the law has laid down a regulatory barrier beyond which lawyers say nobody may go and everybody has kept to it.