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"The House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology report on reproductive technologies shows a libertarian agenda which is ethically naive and out of touch with society,” says Dr Donald Bruce, Director of the Church of Scotland’s Society, Religion and Technology Project. “Some of their suggestions are bizarre. The fact that serious objections to the report have been raised by half the committee, both on content and procedure, points to a very ill-conceived report.”
A BBC interview by the select committee chair Ian Gibson MP set up a series of misleading Aunt Sallies, notably about the HFEA. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority is probably the most highly respected regulatory body in the world in the field of embryo research and IVF. Even if they disagree with some of the laws it administers, HFEA is seen as a model by many other countries which envy the UK legislative structure in this area. The report would reduce HFEA to a role of quality assurance for IVF clinics and leave its ethical role to Parliamentary and government advisory committees. This would be a dangerous precedent which flies in the face of established good practice for sensitive areas of science in society.
Ian Gibson also said embryology regulation should be made more flexible, which is ironic. When it was set up in 1990 one of the central concepts of the HFE Act was to be flexible enough to follow what was envisaged to be a rapidly changing area of science, and because Parliament could not bring in primary legislation every year to keep pace. An example was when Parliament in 2001 extended the scope of the regulations permitting areas of embryo research within the Act to include stem cells. The vote was badly organized in failing to allow ethical distinctions between different types of embryo stem cell research, but the Act itself had flexibility.
What the report seems to mean by flexibility is to allow any new technologies to be "used until harm is proved" This seems to be the central tenet of the report, and could be socially disastrous. It implies that on highly sensitive issues like sex selection or cloning, risk is the only substantive issue at stake. Moral considerations are secondary or a regulatory nuisance. It was with this attitude that GM foods were introduced in the UK, and which eventually prompted a huge public backlash. In 1993, a parliamentary select committee recommended relaxing regulations on the emerging GM food technology to enhance competitiveness. By ignoring public concerns (that we and others had warned about) the Government unnecessarily lost what was once an important area of UK science. Ironically, analysts evaluating what went wrong over GM, have repeatedly held up the UK embryology legislation as the example of how UK can do things properly in relation to taking moral issues seriously and being sensitive to the public.
The committee's suggestion that there is "no compelling evidence" to prohibit sex-selection for "family balancing" should be allowed is bizarre in relation to public opinion. It is the exact opposite of the result of a major public consultation done by the HFEA. Most people do not want sex selection for non-medical reasons to be allowed. Yet half a dozen MPs seem more concerned for science over society's interests than science in society's interests.
The press release for the report claims that "taboo subjects such as cloning and chimeras must be tackled head on in a rational debate". This is again highly ironic. It implies that the Chief Medical Officer's (Donaldson) Committee (2000), both houses of Parliament (2001) and the Lords' Select Committee (2002) have not tackled these same issues in rational debate. The report concludes that it has not had a principled ethical case against reproductive cloning, despite our own and others' contributions on that point over many years. It seems to be less a question of debate but that some committee members disagreed with the law, and wish to overturn it in favour of their own reasoning, which is disturbing.
The Committee's attitude to rational debate may perhaps be gauged from its regret that parthenogenesis (artificially stimulating an egg to be fertilised without a sperm) was not considered by the Government's official committee, but its pleasure that nonetheless the HFEA have already issued two licenses for it. The outcome is already presumed by the committee, regardless of whatever rational debate might conclude.
A libertarian view of new technology pervades the report and leads to many ethically naïve statements, for example that chimeras (animal-human hybrids) and parthenogenetic embryos pose fewer ethical problems than human embryos, without any rational debate as to why it disagreed with submitted views to the contrary. Its endorsement of "safe and effective" germline genetic engineering of humans is extraordinary when no one knows how it could be made it safe and effective, and when it did not even mention the profound ethical issue of making enforced genetic changes on future generations.
An undercurrent of scientific optimism also pervades the report as to the eventual success of currently insoluble problems that seems to be more ideological than strictly scientific. A more sanguine view might have been expected. Science often takes odd directions in which confidently expected things fail or throw up serious side effects, and unexpected things work. Scientific progress is not magic, nor at the behest of what any particular ideology would like to see happen. The committee should beware becoming more like the medieval church than Galileo. Both sides of the embryo research debate please note.
More positively, a revised HFE Act is probably needed, but one which keeps HFEA and much the same constraints as now exist. It should add some new ones to take account of unacceptable areas of science. For example, in responding to the Donaldson Report, in 2000 the government promised primary legislation to make it illegal to perform mixed species cloning, but has not yet done so. HFEA failed in not going out to the country and promoting effective public debate on stem cell research as it had done on foetal ovarian tissue and did again on sex selection. Such a procedure on new areas of science should be mandatory, not merely at HFEA's or the government's discretion.
HFEA's recent policy change to put embryo research applications on its website was welcome, except that the lay summaries on cloned embryo research were quite insufficient to convey what was being proposed, and in one case was misleading and did not reveal the extent of what was proposed. This aspect of open access to research proposals still requires significant improvement. HFEA's powers to decide new areas like parthenogenesis and cloned embryos are extremely wide and rather unspecified. HFEA needs to be made more transparent in how it comes to its decisions on ethical issues, and to have better procedures to deal with new areas.
HFEA's combined ethical and regulatory role is, however, far better than the muddle and hypocrisy of the US situation where the private sector is largely unregulated and but federal research is highly regulated. But if, as the report implies, its hugely important ethical role would be replaced by a libertarian technocratic elite would be a sad day for democracy.
The views expressed are those of the Society, Religion and Technology Project (SRT) of the Church of Scotland and have not been considered by its General Assembly. SRT is part of an expert working group within the church to study these and other emerging issues in human embryology and stem cells, which will in the following months prepare a report for the General Assembly's consideration.
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