Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [HL]

Or possibly sooner, as my noble friend Lord Winston suggests. Three million people in the United Kingdom alone suffer from this condition. The advantage of a therapy that is developed from embryonic stem cells is that it will be more widely available. There will be problems, as the noble Lord, Lord Walton, said, with regard to immune rejection, but we hope that we will be able to study that and dampen it down. It might even be possible to take a cell from a person who has a disease, which will alleviate the need to use immunosuppressive drugs. I hope that I have made a case for embryonic stem cell research, adult stem cell research and research involving reprogrammed adult cells and induced pluripotent cells. I hope also that I have explained why that research is so exciting but why we still need to learn a lot. That learning will come from studying human embryonic stem cells as the gold standard. Is there a need to use interspecies embryos to create stem cell lines? We have a problem in not being able to create stem cell lines that carry the genes of a disease that we want to study in order to develop therapies or drugs or to do drug trials. We have that problem because to create such lines we need human eggs, ideally fresh human eggs, and they are not readily available. We can do the research without using fresh human eggs by taking fresh animal eggs; for instance, from dead cows. The stem cell lines created will be 99.5 per cent human and, more importantly, will carry the genes of the relevant disease such as motor neurone disease, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, muscular dystrophy and so on, that we wish to study to discover why some cells that eventually become damaged brain cells or produce muscular dystrophy behave differently. Are they programmed to do so from very early on? If so, can we manipulate them so that that programming is removed? You do not get a disease unless you have a disease specific gene. Normally, most disease genes are multifactorial. When a gene is switched on, mostly to express protein, you get a disease. We can learn how to switch off that expression and how to test drugs earlier in these cells so that we do not have to test more powerful drugs on humans and end up with a disastrous result, as happened last year in Northwick Park when three young people were severely damaged. So I hope that I make a case for the need to carry out studies using so-called interspecies or admixed embryos. All the scientists who have worked hard to produce this science of induced pluripotent cells have said repeatedly that they do not believe that work on embryonic stem cells should stop. Every scientist today believes that work should continue on every different stem cell type—adult, cord blood, cord, embryonic, induced pluripotent, bone marrow—because we do not know at this stage which cell type will deliver the most cures, and what cures will be delivered by what stem cell types. I hope that I have made the case for allowing all forms of stem cell research to continue.