In 1938, Aldous Huxley published a widely read book concerning the possible impact of the rapidly developing life sciences on human beings. Brave New World is a fanciful story about what human life could be like AF (After Ford) 600 - Ford being the symbol of mass production. The numbers and kinds of babies, and the people into which they develop were controlled by combining eugenic selection with a few embryological tricks and the activity of hormones and psychological conditioning. That world has now arrived. New possibilities of controlling human development have emerged. We now talk of controlling the initial hereditary endowment of people.
This theme was taken up by the Nobel Prize winner, Jim Watson, who discovered, with others, the structure of DNA 50 years ago: 'I am against society imposing rules on individuals for how they want to use their genetic knowledge. Just let people decide what they want to do'. He has gone on record as decrying a ban on stem cell research using embryos, but has also expressed worries about allowing reproductive cloning which seeks to create an adult in the same way as Dolly the sheep - by nuclear transplantation into an enucleated egg. He is quoted as saying 'any woman who cloned herself would be creating a great deal of trouble for her daughter'. At the same time, embryos have been produced to provide tissue for an older sibling with a genetic disease. The latter has been opposed by Pro-life groups and various court cases ensued before the recent decision to finally give it the go ahead.
The UK Parliament has struggled to tackle these and other similar issues and will no doubt continue to tread a legal and ethical minefield as the technologies are refined. Pro-life attempts to prevent research on cloned embryos sought to establish that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 did not provide for cloned embryos and therefore did not regulate their creation or use in research. If the House of Lords judgement had not overruled the claim, a new Act of Parliament would have been required to bring the creation of cloned embryos under statutory regulation as embryos created by the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm have been since 1990.
So, we can used cloned embryos for stem cell research in the pursuit of the treatment of serious disease. It is, however, illegal to produce cloned babies, although how long this will hold as case law builds up remains up in the air for now. Firm regulation is clearly needed in all these cases and individual cases need statutory approval. Our government will be anticipating what might happen next, for example, with regard to sex selection. As our knowledge of genes and disease develops, the controversy will no doubt increase.
Dr Ian Gibson is member of parliament for Norwich North.
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