UK Parliament / Open data

Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [Lords]

I thank my hon. Friend for his valuable intervention. I am not for one moment suggesting that the Government intend to follow the example of Stalin in the 1920s. I am not suggesting that they will select a team of experts and dispatch it to inseminate chimpanzee females with human sperm to obtain, if possible, a hybrid of the two species. I do not believe that it is the Government's intention to do that. However, let me point out several important comparisons with the Soviet experiments. Ivanov's experiments were legal. I suppose that should hardly surprise us—he was working under one of the most brutal totalitarian regimes the world has ever known, at the personal behest of one of history's bloodiest dictators. He was allowed to experiment with humans and chimpanzees. Soviet scientists had precious few personal freedoms in the 1920s—they could not buy their own homes or shop for the food that they wanted—but they enjoyed the legal freedom to carry out experiments involving placing human gametes in animals. Such was life in Stalinist Russia, but of course no enlightened 21st century western democracy would ever countenance allowing such things in law. Of course it would not, because its Government would ensure that they learned a key lesson from history and what happened in the 1920s, and would legislate to ensure that it could not and would not happen again. I am using the example of those 1920s experiments to say that that is what we should do today. We should legislate today to ensure that such experiments will never be legal. The Department of Health insists that inseminating chimpanzees with human sperm could never produce hybrid offspring, and therefore no scientist would ever try. But the Ivanov episode shows that there is just enough hypothetical possibility in such a proposal to entice a certain kind of scientist. The chromosomal differences between some animals that can mate—such as goats and sheep—is greater than between humans and chimpanzees. There has been reference to a press article in which scientists speculated whether inseminating chimps with human sperm could produce offspring, and predicted that were it legal, some of their less squeamish colleagues were bound to try it. So we actually have members of the scientific community saying that if this is allowed to go through today, some of their colleagues will try it. The scientists are saying that themselves—
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
481 c358-9 
Session
2007-08
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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