Stem Cell Research

Speech to Scientists for Labour Meeting, 21/11/00

by David Sainsbury

I am very grateful to Willie Russell and the Scientists for Labour group for organising today’s meeting. Coming on the back of the adjournment debate in the Commons last week and the excellent Royal Society briefing, I think a considered and intelligent debate is now underway about this important scientific and ethical decision.

In considering this difficult area of stem cell research I think it is useful to consider the process of decision-making which the Government went through in reaching this decision. This is for two reasons:

1. It puts the decision in context with other decisions;
2. It shows how carefully we have treated this decision.

The starting point is the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 which set up the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Its principal tasks are to license and monitor those clinics that carry out in vitro fertilisation, donor insemination and human embryo research. It was the first statutory body of its type in the world and its creation reflected public and professional unease about the potential future of human embryo research and infertility treatments and a widespread desire for statutory regulation of this ethically sensitive area.

The Act also sets out the parameters within which the HFEA may issue research licenses. In particular schedule 2 of the 1990 Act states that the HFEA cannot authorise a research project "unless it appears to the Authority to be necessary or desirable for one of the following purposes:

1. promoting advances in the treatment of infertility;
2. increasing knowledge about the causes of miscarriage;
3. increasing knowledge about the causes of congenital disease;
4. developing more effective techniques of contraception;
5. developing methods for detecting the presence of gene or chromosome abnormalities in embryos before implantation

or for such other purposes as my be specified in regulations.

As a result of the cloning of Dolly the Sheep in February and a subsequent report by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, the HGAC and then HFEA decided to hold a public consultation exercise into the implications of cloning developments.

The public consultation had to take account of the development of the technique of cell nuclear replacement and the therapeutic advances which now seemed possible and which were never envisaged when the 1990 Act was drafted.

Scientists had also concluded that there was a considerable potential for the use of tissues derived from stem cells in the treatment of a wide range of disorders by replacing cells that have become damaged or diseased. Examples might include the use of insulin-secreting cells for diabetes and nerve cells in strokes or Parkinson’s disease. One means of deriving stem cells which are genetically compatible with the person being treated could be from cells created by the cell nuclear replacement technique.

As a result of the public consultation the HGAC and the HFEA concluded that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 had proved ineffective in dealing with new developments relating to human cloning. It recommended that the safegaurds in the Act be recognised as wholly inadequate to forbid human reproductive cloning in the U.K. However it suggested that the Government might wish to consider the possibility of introducing legislation that would explicitly ban human reproductive cloning regardless of the technique used, so that the full ban would not depend on the decision of a statutory body (i.e., HFEA) but would itself be enshrined in statute.

The HGAC and HFEA also recommended that the Secretary of State for Health should consider specifying in regulations two further purposes for which the HFEA might issue licenses for research.

First, the development of therapeutic treatments for diseased or damaged tissues or organs;

Secondly, the development of methods of therapy for mitochondrial disease.

One potential future applications of cell nuclear replacement would be the avoidance of mitochondrial diseases.

The Government agreed with the report recommending these two changes but we wanted to be certain about two scientific issues involved:

1. that there were real potential medical benefits;
2. that there were not other ways of achieving these benefits.

We therefore asked the Chief Medical Officer to convene an expert group to consider these two points and in June this year they confirmed the approach of the original report. They also rightly said that they did not think the proposals raised new ethical issues. The report deserves quoting at length. "A significant body of opinion holds that, as a moral principle, the use of any embryo for research purposes is unethical and unacceptable on the grounds that an embryo should be accorded full human status from the moment of its creation. At the other end of the spectrum, some argue that the embryo requires and deserves no particular moral attention whatsoever. Others accept the special status of an embryo as a potential human being, yet argue that the respect due to the embryo increases as it develops, and that this respect, in the early stages in particular, may properly be weighed against the powerful benefits arising from the proposed research. The current restrictions and controls on embryo research reflect this latter view, providing the human embryo with a degree of protection in the law but allowing the benefits of the proposed research to be weighed against respect due to the embryo. If, as Parliament has judged, it is ethically acceptable to use embryos for the five currently permitted purposes then those in the ethical middle ground would argue that using them to obtain stem cells to study the development of tissue for potential therapeutic purposes…does not seem to raise fundamentally ethical issues."

On the basis of the Donaldson report the Government agreed to the two proposals and decided to draft changes to the regulations and put them to a free vote in both house of Parliament.

I think that is the right course of action, and I hope that shows you the context in which this difficult decision was taken and the care with which we have taken it. I shall be voting for the change and I am feel sure the majority of my Labour colleagues will be joining me.