My Lords, at the outset, I have to declare two interests. First, I am the honorary life president of Muscular Dystrophy UK, which, along with the Wellcome Trust and other organisations, has been sponsoring and funding some of this research. Secondly, I have to say that I have an avuncular interest in the department in Newcastle upon Tyne, because Professor Douglas Turnbull, who now holds the chair of neurology in that university, holds the chair which I held 32 years ago.
I say just in passing to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, to whom I listened with the greatest possible interest, that he may not remember that I was the neurologist on the Southwood working party, which advised his department on BSE and produced a report which
ultimately led to the disappearance of BSE and its human form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, so he does not need to lecture me about the precautionary principle.
There is one sensitive matter which I feel that I must raise at this stage. I am a lifelong member of the Methodist Church, although I at present attend an Anglican church. I know full well that from the very first day that the whole issue of human fertilisation and embryology came before this House, it was bitterly opposed by the Roman Catholic Church. I do not suggest to either the noble Lord, Lord Deben, or my noble friend Lord Alton that their adherence to and strong faith in the Roman Catholic principles has in any way influenced their attitude to the regulations; but at every stage from the first regulations to allow human fertilisation and embryology to take place, they have been bitterly opposed.
I must confess that I did discuss the whole issue of the status of the human embryo with an old friend, the late Cardinal Hume, whose father was a professor of medicine in Newcastle, Sir William Hume, who taught me briefly when I was a medical student in the early 1940s. Cardinal Hume and I discussed the whole issue, and I told him that I simply could not accept what the Roman Catholic Church has now decreed. Many, many years ago, St Thomas Aquinas said that life did not begin until the foetus was capable of independent existence outside the womb. It was a Pope in the 19th century who decreed that life began at the moment that the sperm entered the egg.
I said to Cardinal Hume that I really could not believe that a small bundle of cells carry the same status in society as a mature adult, and that that was something with which I profoundly disagreed. We discussed it and regularly went on to have a powerful exchange of views and then to decide that we could not agree, but then moved on to discuss a matter of much more mutual concern: the fortunes of Newcastle United Football Club. When, in 1980, the city of Newcastle decided to create a number of new honorary freemen to celebrate its 900th anniversary, among them were me as dean of medicine, Cardinal Hume and Jackie Milburn, the former England and Newcastle centre forward. Cardinal Hume said that it was the greatest day of his life: all his life he had been waiting to meet Jackie Milburn.
6.15 pm
I move on from that to say that the whole issue of human fertilisation and embryology and each of the amendments to the Act and new Acts all came under attack from the Roman Catholic Church and its adherents throughout the process. They opposed the whole question of preimplantation diagnosis of serious diseases, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, in which I had a particular research interest. They opposed the development of stem cells based on human embryos—bearing in mind, of course, that many of the eggs that were later to be produced from those human embryos were donated voluntarily by the women from whom they were obtained, just as the eggs that are used in mitochondrial transfer have been voluntarily and willingly donated by the women when they were surplus in in vitro fertilisation programmes.
I need to remind the House that in 2008, when we discussed the new regulations and what became the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, one of the plain purposes of the Act was to permit regulation-making powers to amend the definition of a permitted egg and a permitted embryo for the purposes of preventing the transmission of serious mitochondrial disease. That was a decision by this House in 2008, and I was heavily involved in the debates at the time and discussed the whole process by which mitochondrial transfer, as carried out by pronuclear transfer in Newcastle, could be used to prevent the birth of children with those devastating diseases.
They are devastating diseases. I diagnosed many such patients in my time as a neurologist in Newcastle and elsewhere. Epilepsy, muscular paralysis, dementia, blindness and deafness can result from mitochondrial mutations. The problem always was that women carrying those mutations would pass them on to all their children of either sex. Of course, the results were variable, and still are. Some of those diseases are devastating and produce death in infancy. Some are much less serious, but none of them is treatable, except by supportive treatment. None of them can be cured by any form of treatment.
In 2008, I tabled an amendment stating that “a licence may provide”, with the intention at the time of seeing whether we could accept that the HFEA could at that stage issue a licence to legalise the process. It was made clear to me that it was premature, and that much more research was necessary. That research has been done over the succeeding seven years in Newcastle and elsewhere. The researchers have worked tirelessly and produced a substantial number of embryos by pronuclear transfer, embryos which gave every evidence of being totally normal—the only problem being that, until regulations such as these are passed, it is illegal to implant them into a uterus to allow children without mitochondrial disease to be born.
I believe that the time has come. I talked to so many of the women who carried the mutations. I talked to so many of their families. The agony and distress that they experienced, knowing that any children that they had would carry those devastating diseases, was pitiful and caused me very great concern. I have to say that I now firmly believe that the work has been done: all the research has been done, the consultations have been widespread. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, along with the expert committees, has issued a series of completely positive reports. All the organisations in the medical profession, starting with the BMA, the royal colleges, the Medical Research Council and the Association of Medical Research Charities, are universally in favour of accepting the regulations at this stage, because they believe that the consultation, along with the research, has probably been the widest, most comprehensive and most detailed that has happened in the case of any medical procedure in history. I believe that very strongly, and I cannot stand the thought of now extinguishing the hope of these women and families, who believe that this procedure will allow them and their offspring to have normal children without mitochondrial disease. For that reason it is crucial that these regulations should now be passed. It is not the end of the story, because once the regulations are passed in this House no procedure to implant these
embryos can be carried out except under a licence from the HFEA. Every individual case will be considered. That process will be there to provide the protection that many doctors and Members of this House appear to need. However, the time has come when we must move forward.