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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I fully respect the reasons for this amendment moved by the noble Baroness. I refer to the notion of trying to do animal research before human research. The poor scientist is in rather a difficult position. Often he is told by the animal rights people that animal research bears no relationship to human research and therefore we should concentrate on human research. Now we are being told that we must use animal research first. The fact is that research has to be tailored to the circumstances in which you are working. On mammalian embryology, the reason why I have to say that this amendment is not reasonable, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Neill, is that there are many situations that are specific to the species with which you are concerned. In this case, for example, specific aspects of human embryos are different from those of all other animals. For example, let us consider the culture media. In some species, the use of glucose is not particularly deleterious, but for others the use of glucose in the medium turns out to be completely poisonous and will destroy the embryo within two days of fertilisation. Certain embryos require particular growth factors while others do not. That is why the species that you are dealing with is so important. In the human, we have a particular issue when we are looking at individual genes that we might want to identify in the embryo and, more important, the string on which the genes are arrayed: the chromosomes. Human chromosomes are unique to humans. If we wanted to image a chromosome in the embryo, we would have to go to the human embryo because no other animal species would give us that information. There is also a difference, as I mentioned before, in the proportion of cells: the inner cell mass that will become the true embryo and the outer cell mass that will become the placenta. Perhaps the nearest model to the human is the primate, and a higher monkey at that—a menstruating monkey. That represents even more of a problem, because even monkeys do not fully represent the human and the notion of doing this kind of work in monkeys would, practically speaking, prevent the research from going on. It would be hideously expensive, terribly complex, and in some ways I doubt the ethics of subjecting sapient primates to research that can be done, quite justifiably, on discarded human embryos.