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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

My Lords, I do not want to get into the pros and cons of adult versus embryonic stem cells—there are cases for both—but I do want to return to the actual words in the amendment. My noble friend Lady Hollis has already mentioned the difficulty of requiring published, peer-reviewed scientific data when one starts research for the first time. If the amendment had said something to the effect that the research must be peer-reviewed, that would be reasonable, but it must be published, which makes it more difficult, perhaps impossible, to do research for the first time. Proposed new sub-paragraph (6)(b)(i) in Amendment No. 21 says, "““the research proposed … is likely to achieve its specified purposes””," but that misunderstands the nature of research. When research is done for the first time, you cannot possible know the answer. Indeed, it would be ethically immoral to do the research if you knew the answer before you started. You hope that it will achieve its purpose, but unfortunately research often fails—that is the nature of it. We can never be sure when we start it, so who is to judge the likelihood of the research achieving its specified purpose? That is not achievable, so the amendment is not valid in its present form.