Letter: Stemming studies

Leading scientists, including three Nobel prizewinners, have called on the Government’s fertility watchdog to back the creation of “human-animal” embryos.

In a letter published in The Times today, 45 experts, including the President of the Royal Society, urge the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) not to bar research that could help patients with currently incurable conditions such as motor neuron disease and Alzheimer’s.

The HFEA meets today to consider its policy towards fusing animal eggs with human DNA to create short-lived embryos for research. Three teams have applied for permission to create such embryos.

But the issue has been clouded by a White Paper, published last month, indicating that the Government plans to ban the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos. Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, said she expected the HFEA to take this into account.

When asked last week, however, Tony Blair said the Government was “not dead set” against the experiments — “in fact the opposite”. There were difficult issues surrounding creating the embryos, he said, adding: “I’m sure that research that’s really going to save lives and improve the quality of life will be able to go forward.”

This has left scientists confused over the Government’s true position. Today’s meeting of the HFEA, under its new chairwoman, Shirley Harrison, will not consider the three applications in detail but issue guidance over the principles involved.

The letter’s signatories include the Nobel prizewinners Sir Paul Nurse, Sir John Sulston and Sir Tim Hunt; Lord Rees of Ludlow, president of the Royal Society; Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientific adviser; and the fertility specialist and TV presenter Lord Winston. It states that the technique has “clear potential benefits to human health”.

The letter says: “Britain is rightly proud of its record in ethical and scientifically valid research on stem cells and therapeutic cloning. This reputation is now under threat because in its recent White Paper the Government has proposed, without giving any proper reason or citing any evidence, that much of this proposed research — that using animal eggs without their nuclei as the ‘activating casing’ for cloned human embryos — should be banned in 2008 when a Bill updating the 1990 Act passes through Parliament.”

The three teams applying for permission plan to compensate for the limited supply of human eggs for creating embryos by using animal eggs with almost all their active parts removed.

A human cell nucleus would replace the nucleus of the animal egg, to generate an embryo that was more than 99 per cent human. From this embryo, which under HFEA rules could not be allowed to develop beyond 14 days, scientists would extract embryonic stem cells.

The ultimate aim is to find ways of using stem cells, which can develop into any cell of the body, to replace diseased cells.

At issue is the question of whether such human-animal embryos would stray over the line of acceptability.

The Government appears to have been influenced by a public consultation that attracted 535 responses, many from those with religious or ethical objections to embryo research.

Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, supported the letter. He said: “Research involving embryos holds great promise for treating diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s but there is a shortage of human embryos for this work.”