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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 1: 1: Clause 3, page 3, line 21, leave out ““Regulations”” and insert ““A licence”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, within the past few weeks there has been a major development in the field of human neuromuscular disease in that the Medical Research Council has established a major research centre for the study of such diseases jointly between University College London and Newcastle University. An inaugural symposium was held last Friday at which I was privileged to be present and to hear an outstanding lecture by one of the world’s experts on mitochondrial disease, Professor Salvatore DiMauro from New York. I am not going to be repetitive as I heard what the noble Baroness said about arguments previously set out at Second Reading and in Committee. Mitochondrial disorders are a cruel class of inherited disease that are life-threatening conditions and are coupled with great unpredictability about how future children will be affected. They can include blindness, fatal liver failure, stroke-like episodes, mental retardation with intractable epilepsy, profound muscular weakness, diabetes and deafness. There are 29 mitochondrial genes, but in them there are 200 mutations, all of them harmful, as Professor DiMauro said last week. The subject of this amendment is a process whereby it is theoretically possible to remove from a woman with the mitochondrial abnormalities in the cytoplasm of her ovum the nucleus containing 99.95 per cent of her DNA and transplant into a cell from which the nucleus has been removed a donor ovum with normal cytoplasm and normal mitochondria. Recently, Professor Douglass Turnbull from Newcastle University has taken matters further. Through a simple process of in vitro fertilisation an ovum from a woman with mitochondrial disease has been fertilised by her partner or husband’s sperm, and as soon as the first cell is formed it contains two pronuclei, one from the woman and one from the partner or husband containing 100 per cent of the partner’s DNA and 99.95 per cent of her DNA. That process has been successfully carried out under licence from the HFEA. The licence, however, does not allow that fertilised ovum to be transplanted into the uterus of the female from whom the original ovum was derived. Professor Turnbull has completed excellent research in animals since he received a licence in 2005. The embryos created by this IVF technique have proved to be perfectly normal and viable. The purpose of this amendment, crucial to the future of huge numbers of individuals with this group of mitochondrial diseases, is not to require that the issue has to be further reconsidered by introducing regulations to be debated by both Houses of Parliament, but to enable the HFEA, after careful consideration of all the ethical and scientific consequences, to award a licence for treatment by the implantation of fertilised ova, with the consequence that the women in question will be able to have normal children with no risk of mitochondrial disease. I beg to move.