Question
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Garden of Frognal on 5 November (WA 168), when the journal article detailing progress with somatic cell nuclear transfer was first submitted for publication; to which open-access journals it has already been submitted; and to what extent they consider that data presented at the workshop convened by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and the Medical Research Council in June 2010 has been publicly reported given that the chief communications officer for CIRM has stated that its scientific workshops are by invitation only, and invited participants were assured that unpublished information need not be made public.[HL3272]
Answer
The report of the MRC and California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) workshop on human somatic cell nuclear transfer was published on the websites of both organisations in November and December 2010. The aim of the workshop was examine human somatic cell nuclear transfer and its role in stem cell research and to summarise the state of the global research effort in this area.
The publication of the report on the CIRM website was accompanied by a letter from Dr Alan Trounson describing the workshop where researchers in the field were invited to discuss the progress and how these discussions would inform CIRM funding decisions.
The publication of the MRC-CIRM workshop report was followed by a discussion paper Finding the niche for human somatic cell nucleartransfer: Grieshammer et al 2011, Nature Biotech: 29, August 2011. The paper was authored by CIRM staff and was submitted to Nature Biotechnology in March 2011, it has not subsequently been submitted to any open access journal.
The 2010 workshop was open to invited researchers to allow their ongoing research, including preliminary findings and intellectual property, to be freely discussed. A draft of the MRC-CIRM report was made available to workshop participants prior to publication and they were given the opportunity to comment on how their research was presented.