Charity Expresses Concern Over Human-Animal Embryos

Christian social policy charity CARE has raised serious misgivings in response to the report from the joint committee on the draft Human Tissues and Embryos Bill published this week.

The charity voiced particular concern over aspects of the report relating to the status of fathers and inter-species embryos.

Dan Boucher, CARE director of parliamentary affairs, welcomed the report's commitment to free votes on both the child's need for a father and on interspecies embryos and also the proposal to create a Joint Committee of both Houses on Bioethics but added that CARE still had "some major concerns".

The charity previously highlighted to the committee that post-1990 research had demonstrated the importance of fathers in the develpment of children.

"We are therefore very concerned that no comment was made about clause 51 (1) which would make it illegal for some children to have fathers," said Boucher. "This proposal demonstrates a complete disregard for the best parenting interests of the child and attaches greater primacy to the desires of adults than to the interests of children.

Boucher also warned against any amendments to the obligation that the 1990 Act puts on IVF clinics to have regard for the need of any child resulting from IVF for a father.

CARE has also expressed concern over proposals in the report relating to animal-human hybrids. Boucher continued, "The scientific case has not been made satisfactorily for the animal-human hybrid embryos that some researchers want to create. None of the scientific objections to hybrid experiments have been addressed properly by the committee, namely questions relating to the viability of such entities, their ability to tell us anything useful and risks of disease transmission.

Some scientists argue that licensing hybrid experiments would help overcome the problem of shortages in human eggs for the purposes of human embryonic stem cell research. Boucher argued that the case against such hybrids has become "more pronounced during the life of the committee" and that even where animal-human hybrids are 99.9 per cent human, they "still violate the species barrier and raise major ethical questions".

Boucher explained: "On the one hand there have been some crucial breakthroughs in adult stem cell research that raise huge questions for human embryonic stem cell research, whilst on the other we have seen a high profile embryonic stem cell research company folding because of recognition that the chances of success are 'vanishingly small'."

He went on to express doubt over the report's comments on pure hybrids, which are chromosonically 50 per cent human and 50 per cent animal.

"The greater measure of mixing involved gives rise to greater uncertainty, making them very much more controversial," he warned.

"The idea that one can move seamlessly from animal-human hybrids, created by cell nuclear transfer, to pure hybrids created by mixing human sperm and an animal egg is logically flawed. The fact that there has been no specific consultation about pure hybrids makes the committee's recommendations in this regard particularly unhelpful."