---

Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support the amendment. The major reason for my support is that embryo research has huge potential for the treatment of diseases. I know that there are many other reasons for doing this work, but for me the idea that we could crack diseases such as Parkinson’s, diabetes, stroke and some cancers is just so attractive that we must do anything possible to encourage this research. Looking to the future, I believe that the possibilities are exciting. This Bill is mainly concerned with research and not treatment, except infertility treatment, which, of course, is of great benefit to the individual but not usually to society as a whole. As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, much regulation relating to cell-based therapies already applies to the UK. I have discovered that there are many European Union directives: the European Union directive on human tissue and cells, the European Union directive on clinical trials, and many more. The UK Human Tissue Act 2001 and even the OECD regulations apply to cell-based therapies in the UK. A long time has to elapse and many hurdles have to be jumped before a cell-based therapy can be taken from the laboratory into clinical practice. That is one side of the coin. The other is that licences granted by the HFEA are only a very early step in research towards treatment. They extend only to cover the creation, storage and use of embryos for research and the treatment of infertility—nothing else. However, if a cell line was developed under licence that was found to be useful for treating, say, diabetes, replacing the pancreatic eyelet cells with functional ones that produce insulin—just imagine that—and it is feasible, researchers under current law would have to go back to square one and create another cell line to comply with the directives that I mentioned. You could not carry on with a cell line that you had already created. Valuable time—as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, two years or more—would probably be lost before clinical trials on humans were permitted. We are suggesting in this amendment that we provide a missing link in the legislation to allow treatment to be developed and, if it proves successful, to move forward into the final stages of approval, ending in clinical application. As the noble Lord said, surely the use of embryos for therapies was part of the reason why, in 2001, both Houses voted to allow therapeutic cloning research to take place. We must include in this Bill permission for research towards treatments using embryo cell technology. There is a lot of support among the general public for embryo research if it will lead ultimately to cures for terrible and common diseases with which every family is familiar. It would be tragic if this new legislation did not recognise this and did not allow the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to grant licences or research into treatment on the same cell lines developed for research purposes.