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11.20 am
Mrs. Ann Winterton (Congleton): I too apologise to the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker; I have to travel to Cheshire, and travel arrangements are extremely difficult at present, so if I am not able to remain in the Chamber until the end of the debate, I hope that you, the Minister for Public Health and other hon. Members will understand the reason and forgive me.
There cannot have been one Back Bencher who did not applaud our former Speaker, the right hon. Betty Boothroyd, when she reminded us in her resignation speech that the function of Parliament is to hold the Executive to account. Ministers, she said, should never overlook the primacy of Parliament.
I mention that because of the cynical manner in which the Executive have treated both Houses in their attempt to legalise what they choose to call therapeutic cloning. Far from taking the words of our former Speaker to heart, they deliberately introduced the Donaldson report to the public at a press conference on 16 August--about three weeks after Parliament had risen for the summer recess, thus denying Members of Parliament the opportunity to carry out their duty by questioning a Minister on a statement on the report in the House of Commons. The Government's subsequent actions were even worse. They chose the same occasion to publish their response.
The reason why soon became obvious, even to the most naive observer: publication of the Donaldson report and the Government response was followed by a carefully co-ordinated propaganda campaign, with one group after another--the Royal Society, the Medical Research Council, the British Medical Association, the BioIndustry Association and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics--announcing their support for human cloning. The Minister and Professor Donaldson constantly remind the press and the public that all those fine-sounding bodies support the chief medical officer's expert group on human cloning--a word that they always avoid, although that is what they demand; instead, they refer constantly to "nuclear cell replacement".
I draw the attention of the House to the threat made this week by the bio-tech industries--as reported in The Times on 15 November--that because of hostility to genetic engineering and other constraints on research, companies will move to countries such as Brazil and China. If the industry cannot persuade people by seductive promises--and it has made many--it will try to coerce them through threats to employment and investment.
It is well known that the public is very much opposed to human cloning; that fact explains much of the reasoning behind the publicity campaign. Every public
opinion survey has shown that opposition, to the point that a pro-cloning article in The Independent on 20 August--that newspaper could hardly be described as being pro-life--referred to the public being "vehemently opposed" to cloning.
Joan Ruddock: Does the hon. Lady agree that when the public think about human cloning, their perception is that it will produce a baby or a human being by some method that would give the common genetic complement to that new human being? I do not think that they perceive that we are talking about a small collection of cells that might be produced in a period as short as 14 days.
Mrs. Winterton: I do not agree with the hon. Lady. My hon. Friend the Member for Worthing, West (Mr. Bottomley) made the valid point that members of the public should be made aware of precisely what is at stake.
That point is echoed in a report issued by the Wellcome Trust, which highlighted the fact that public opinion on so-called therapeutic cloning is generally supportive until people realise what is involved. The report stated that many people did not understand the terminology used by doctors and scientists. It noted that
- the language chosen when describing scientific research has a major impact on participants' responses to the ideas . . . (but as their) awareness increased, so did their concern and apprehension. It was unclear whether many participants realised that an embryo created for research would be a genetic extension of a living individual. However, for those who did grasp this fact their concerns were further heightened . . . it was felt that there could be the potential to mislead participants, it being accepted that several aspects of the scientific research would not in fact be "therapeutic".
Members of the Government, including the Prime Minister, have sent scores of letters to voters, declaring that the Government will introduce legislation to reinforce our laws against reproductive cloning. As there has been no suggestion that reproductive cloning would be introduced, that claim is obviously a defence tactic--a smokescreen designed to obscure Government policy that supports the manufacture of clones for the production of cells and for other purposes.
Dr. Brand: I am sure that the hon. Lady does not want to mislead the public--or, indeed, Members of the House--but she has mentioned human cloning several times. Will she give us her definition of human cloning? I should like to know how different it is from my perception of that term.
Mrs. Winterton: The hon. Gentleman has picked on a most important point. If he will be patient, I shall deal with it later.
Before discussing the ethics of cloning, I shall refer to the manner in which today's debate was organised. As a result of the debate on the ten-minute Bill presented by the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris), on 2 November, the shadow Leader of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning), called for a fuller debate on stem cell cloning. In view of subsequent events, some of us feel that the reply given to my hon. Friend was not as informative as might have been expected. The Leader of the House said that the Government would
- bear it in mind and perhaps discuss it through the usual channels.--[Official Report, 2 November 2000; Vol. 355, c. 855.]
The hon. Gentleman also declared that a statutory instrument would be tabled within three weeks and there would be a vote on the subject before the end of the year--a statement he confirmed on Tuesday, when he spoke to a journalist from The Tablet. It will be interesting to find out whether the hon. Gentleman's second assertion is correct--that he does indeed have inside knowledge, despite the Minister's comments at the beginning of her speech. It will be interesting to hear whether--perhaps in the light of the contributions to this debate--the Government come to the conclusion that they should not push this measure through the House with undue haste. My hon. Friend the Member for Worthing, West made a valid point when he said that the public should be made aware of and understand the issues being decided on their behalf in this House.
Dr. Harris: I can reassure the hon. Lady that although I have tried to get information from the Minister's office, it has been like trying to get blood from a stone. At no point has the Minister's office confirmed to me any of the dates. At the meeting to which she referred, a rumour about a debate this Friday was provided by the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) whose connections with Government thinking are, understandably, more in tune than mine. Finally, I do not remember speaking to anyone from The Tablet, although I indicated that I would be happy to do so. But I have no authority, except to report the rumours that I have heard--perhaps the hon. Lady has heard them, too--about when the Government will make the regulations.
Mrs. Winterton: The hon. Gentleman's comments are interesting and the House will take note of them. Perhaps many will feel a little sceptical, as I do, about what he had to say.
Many Members of all parties would have taken the trouble to attend today's debate but, due to the lack of notice, found it impossible to cancel constituency and other engagements. With further modernisation, and the parliamentary week being made ever shorter, this problem
will grow worse in the future, as constituency engagements will become more important and the affairs of this House perhaps less important. On the other hand, it is obvious that with greater advance notice, members of the all-party science and technology group have been able to muster their supporters. I believe that the Government must have been aware of this.Given the size of the defeat of the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon, it is important to pause, reflect and consider these matters more thoroughly. A vote before Christmas would be precipitate and would not reflect the Leader of the House's statement to the House that these matters should be thoroughly aired.
I shall refer briefly to the techniques of cloning. Perhaps that will answer the question posed earlier by the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Dr. Brand). A human clone--which we all know has not yet been achieved--would be an exact genetic copy of another human being; likewise, a clone of any animal species would be an exact genetic copy, and can be produced by two techniques.
The nucleus from an oocyte--an unfertilised female egg--is removed and replaced by the nucleus of a cell taken from a donor animal, which, in fact, will be the genetic twin of the new clone. This was the technique used to produce Dolly the sheep. It is, however, extremely hazardous, and out of more than 400 trials--some of which produced malformed sheep--only one, Dolly, succeeded. In the event, Dolly was found by chromosomal analysis to be six years old at birth, the age of the donor sheep.
Cloning can also be achieved by splitting an embryo's cells at a very early stage of development, thus creating one or a number of clones. There is no difference between the techniques for reproductive cloning and so-called therapeutic cloning. The difference lies solely in the purpose for which the clone is created--whether it is to implant into a woman, so that the embryo can develop in the normal way as a baby, or if it is intended to use the clone in the production of stem cells or biochemical products.
In both cases, the clone would be genetically completely human. Even the Warnock committee stressed that
- the embryo of the human species ought to have special status.
It is important to repeat that stem cells can be obtained from adult tissue, the umbilical cord of a new-born baby and from embryos. There are no ethical problems in using adult stem cells or those from the umbilical cord. Unlike ordinary cells, stem cells have the capacity constantly to renew themselves and to form or to differentiate into the different cell types needed by the body. That is why stem cells may be used to replace tissue in cases of severe burns or in cases where the tissue has been destroyed by cancer or through diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.
A human embryo has been described as
- a stem cell par excellence.
As a mother and a grandmother, I must confess that I become quite emotional when I think of the beginning of life for children; each on the first day after conception no bigger than a full stop, yet miraculously sustaining, controlling and directing their own development in the production of every different type of cell and tissue to bring them to what they are today. The fact that we have scientists who think of these, who are definitely human, simply as a source to be exploited in obtaining cells and tissue, I find frightening.
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