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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support this amendment extremely strongly. It is important for the House to understand how difficult it is to generate an embryonic stem cell line. In my own laboratory, in one of the leading science universities in Europe at Imperial College, I have had a team of three post-doctoral scientists—so not PhD students—working for several years with a virtually unlimited budget to produce stem cell lines both from mice and from human embryonic tissue. It is extraordinarily difficult and it is only now that we have started to get lines which look vaguely like normal stem cell lines. In fact, after two and a half years of research, we were so desperate to get stem cells lines that we ended up buying in lines from Harvard University in the United States. When we examined those stem cell lines, we found that they too were defective and not valuable for human research. This is a priceless biological commodity and it is frustrating for us as scientists to see a slight inconsistency in the Government’s position. It is interesting to consider that, at the moment, growing consideration is being given to the idea of people having their organs donated without consent after an accident for renal transplantation, yet here we have lines which have been established with consent but not specific consent, so they cannot be used for this research. That seems a very difficult position for the Government to adopt, and therefore I must support this amendment.