In one corner, wearing black trunks and a red biretta: Cardinal Keith O’Brien, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, who alleged in an Easter sermon that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill - now before parliament - would allow “government-supported experiments of Frankenstein proportions”. In the other, wearing white trunks and a silver halo: Robert Winston, the scientists’ champion, who has accused Cardinal O’Brien of lying.

If this sounds like a caricature, that’s because it is - but it’s no more of a parody than the way in which serious ethical debate about the bill has descended into a vituperative slanging match.

This new bill represents the first revision of the original Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, which won widespread international admiration for its balanced regulation of new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation. Scientific developments since then need to be addressed by the law - and the one causing the most controversy is “human admixed embryos” (where human genetic material is inserted into a hollowed-out animal egg for research purposes).

This week, leading scientists and religious representatives will meet in London to hear each other out and try to overcome the black-and-white divide that has dominated debate. Not before time: the “God versus science” cliche has become a dangerous distraction.

As a (secular) bioethicist who also sits on ethics committees, I find it supremely unhelpful to be labelled either a luddite or a God-botherer when I pose ethical questions about scientific developments.

It’s not just the technology that’s changed since the 1980s; it’s also the economic environment in which science and medicine have to operate. We are living in an age when human organs, genes, eggs and other body parts are fast becoming commodities bought and sold on international markets: what I call “body shopping”. Our law lags behind: once tissue is taken from your body, it doesn’t legally belong to you. Instead, our common law views it as “no one’s thing”, or mere waste.

And that’s convenient for - to take one example - the private umbilical-cord blood banks (a burgeoning new sector) which charge expectant mothers a fee of up to £1,600 for banking blood taken during the last stage of labour. The Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists advise against taking cord blood, because it diverts delivery-room staff’s attention at a crucial moment. However, the activities of the cord blood banks aren’t covered by the new bill.

So here’s just one new, highly commercialised reproductive technology that needs scrutiny, but which has been lost from view in the brouhaha about human admixed embryos.

The new commercialised medical environment also means that researchers can now compete internationally for glittering financial prizes, particularly in the area of stem-cell research. Vast sums are being poured into private-public collaborations across the globe.

Because nobody talks about the financial realities behind modern medical research, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), can sometimes be placed in an awkward position. Research teams, under pressure from their universities and international rivals, will sometimes ask the authority to allow new procedures that haven’t been fully certified as safe.

And the HFEA sometimes says yes. During a 2006-7 consultation on whether women should be allowed to donate eggs for stem-cell research - a risky procedure - the authority allowed one research team to recruit women to give eggs halfway through the consultation.

Even some American commentators are beginning to remark pityingly that our HFEA is no longer the model that their country should emulate. And many Europeans, rightly or wrongly, already regard the UK as having few moral scruples when it comes to the biotech industry.

By taking an uncritical approach to the market developments that this new bill should be regulating, some secularists are playing straight into the hands of a greater potential enemy to scientific progress than God. I’m referring to the increasingly powerful forces of commercialisation.

Not that I have anything against, for example, the private sponsorship of medical research. However, commercial biotechnology companies can - and do - impede research by charging large sums for access to new developments.

Let’s take another example: the drug firms who enforce restrictive patents on genetic material necessary for scientific research and medical therapy. A monopoly patent by Genentech, for the cancer drug Herceptin and the HER2 gene on which it operates, has driven the price of the drug so high that its use in the NHS has had to be restricted.

Now that one in five human genes is patented, there are plenty of other companies ready to try the same tactic to make large sums out of other diagnostic tests. We need to take a more critical attitude.

Take the case for human admixed embryos, which are supposed to lead to breakthroughs in stem-cell research. The Conservative MP Mark Pritchard has warned that “there has been no recorded case of a single patient who has been cured of any disease using human embryonic stem cells - a small detail omitted by the large biotech corporations that stand to make millions from the government’s proposals”.

Clearly, nobody was listening. Earlier this month, a team in Newcastle announced that it had had preliminary success in growing an animal-human admixed embryo to the 32-cell stage. However, some scientists quietly pointed out that the Newcastle findings hadn’t gone through the usual peer-review process.

Good science can’t be rushed, and the commercialisation of biotechnology needs proper examination. The problem is that parliament is too busy arguing about God to pay much attention.

Donna Dickenson is emeritus professor of medical ethics and humanities at Birkbeck, London. Her book, Body Shopping, is published on April 24 by Oneworld

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