Licenses to Harvest Stem Cells from Unborn Babies Granted by British Government

By Liz Townsend

The British government granted licenses March 1 to researchers who want to harvest stem cell lines from embryos originally created for in vitro fertilization treatment. The licenses are the first to be granted under a 2001 law that allows scientists to clone and kill human beings for destructive research.

Pro-lifers fought a long battle to invalidate the law, but their attempt ended when a committee of the House of Lords gave final approval February 27 for the government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to begin accepting applications for research licenses.

ProLife Alliance, the group that spearheaded the legal fight against the law, insisted that the government should not kill human beings for research purposes, but should instead focus on stem cell research that shows more promise for actually leading to effective treatment for diseases.

"We demand confirmation that the research aims identified by the licenses could not properly be carried out in either animal embryo models or with adult stem cells," the alliance said in a press release. "Developing treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's should be conducted using adult stem cells which, unlike embryonic stem cells, are already being used in clinical trials in humans in dozens of centers around the world."

"A huge amount of money will now be wasted in dead-end research and, by diverting scarce resources, put back cures for serious diseases possibly by decades," the alliance said. "Far from winning, Britain risks losing this particular biotech race."

The Centre for Genome Research in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Guy's Hospital in London were the first two facilities to receive authorization to create embryonic stem cell lines, according to The Scotsman. Neither center reportedly will clone new human beings for research, but will use currently existing embryos.

However, Professor Austin Smith, director of the Centre for Genome Research, told The Scotsman that although the centre will not be cloning new embryos at this time, he expects to do so in the future. "We need to find the best way to cultivate embryonic stem cells and, at that point, it would be important to see if we could do that with cloned embryos," Smith said, according to The Scotsman. "Another organisation could do this, or we could cooperate."

The House of Lords' Select Committee on Stem Cell Research had convened to determine whether research on embryonic stem cells was necessary, since there are other forms of stem cell research being conducted around the world. "After looking at all the issues very carefully, the committee was not persuaded that it would be right to prohibit all research on early embryos," the Right Rev. Richard Harris, Bishop of Oxford and chairman of the select committee, told the London Times.

The committee also called for the creation of a "bank" that would gather many embryonic stem cell lines for other researchers to use. "The establishment of a stem cell bank will further ensure that all researchers have access to the materials necessary for investigating radical new therapies for a wide range of diseases and serious injuries," Richard Gardner, chairman of the Royal Society working group on stem cell research, told the Times.

Pro-lifers condemned the committee report and called into question the motivation of committee members. "This report will have no credibility, as the committee's membership was stacked with supporters of human cloning, many with close links to bodies with a vested interest in embryo research," Anthony Ozimic, spokesman for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said in a statement. "Only two out of 11 members had voted against the government's cloning regulations in January 2001."