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Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill

With today's biological drugs, that has extended to 20 years. However, I do not agree that there have been no results from stem cell research. I think it is a remarkable field of research, which is advancing more quickly than the legislation to deal with it. That is the point, and that is why we are here now—because the legislation is not keeping up with the pace of development in this field. I was privileged to be a member of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee when it published a seminal report entitled ““Human Reproductive Technologies and the Law”” in March 2005. I have to tell right hon. and hon. Members that if the then Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson), and I had not decided to guillotine the Committee—something that I had not previously thought possible, but guillotine the Committee we did—that report would never have seen the light of day. That drastic action was necessary because 130 amendments had been tabled; this was shortly before the general election of 2005. I am very pleased that I did that, because that report, produced by Committee members of all political parties, was the seminal report on which all the subsequent Government consultations were based. Select Committees can do some very useful things. We produced other reports—for example, on the Government's proposals for the regulation of hybrid and chimera embryos and, more recently, on the science of abortion—and in my opinion, those three reports provide the bedrock for this debate. I do not see abortion mentioned in any of the clauses, and I am disappointed that we are going to spend as many as three hours discussing that issue. I am not denying that abortion is an important subject, but there are already many technical difficulties in the Bill that hon. Members need to get a grip on. In my humble opinion, we need all the time available to discuss all the issues mentioned so far, and others that have not been mentioned, without getting bogged down in the difficult debate about abortion. Personally, I believe that abortion should be the subject of a quite separate debate; indeed, we have already had many debates on it. Members seem greatly preoccupied with adult stem cells and cells that have been rewound to their embryonic state. This research is indeed important, but let us not forget that when we use adult stem cells, they may have built into them an inherent mutation. That is the danger of adult stem cell research. It may well be that we will find techniques for detecting those mutations in adult stem cells, but I would not like to use therapy from adult stem cells and produce a mutation, or produce a fault in an individual by using them. Let me also tell the House about the work done in Japan by Professor Yamanaka's group, and at the university of Wisconsin in the United States, to reprogramme a skin fibroblast. Four genes are necessary for that reprogramming, and one is an oncogene—a gene that produces cancer. It is not therefore surprising that when Professor Shinya Yamanaka's group in Japan injected stem cells into a four-cell mouse blastocyst and embedded it in a womb, the full-term mouse that developed contained tumours in almost every part of its body. I would not therefore like right hon. and hon. Members to feel that we can completely abandon stem cell research using human embryos or cytoplasmic hybrid embryos, and rely entirely on either rewinding adult cells, or even using adult stem cells. All three lines of research must continue, because faults are inherent in each of them. At the moment we do not know which one will tell us how diseases will develop or produce the best therapeutic results. In conclusion, let me make a plea to the House. For a long time, in listening to debates in the House on both animals and humans, I have thought that a parliamentary bioethics committee was needed—not a national bioethics committee. If Members want to observe the difference between the two, I urge them to read the articles in ““Science in Parliament””, which will appear on their desks next week, and an article in The Observer that Baroness Warnock has already written. Those ought to be part of the debate. I agree that we should be led by a discussion of ethics, and there is not enough time on the Floor of the House to discuss all the issues and the ethics involved at the same time.