Mitochondrial Replacement (Public Safety)

Frank Dobson Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Mitochondrial disease is horrible. It has dreadful effects on children and shortens their lives and there is no cure. The scientists at Newcastle university have been trying to improve the inadequate treatment services that are presently available and one of the reasons why they got involved in this research is that they do not see very much progress there. The replacement technique does not provide a cure; it prevents the condition from arising in the first place, and generally speaking we all believe prevention is better than cure.

There is no other option for these families and children. What is proposed would not be permitted under the law passed in 1990 and there has been consultation since 2003 about changes to the law, which led to the law being revised in 2008. That permitted progress to be made on this issue by regulation when the House decides that that should happen.

Some people have fixed views and are totally against any embryo research and any changes to human fertility, and some other people want a total free-for-all. By and large, most of us do not want either of those things. The practical measures that were put in place through the HFEA have worked very well. They provide protection against the unprincipled and dangerous use of genetic science, and everything is subject to strict regulation. People are rightly concerned about the idea of designer babies and super-babies and the creation of a master race, but mitochondrial DNA replacement does not do that. All it does is eliminate one horrible life-threatening defect. It does not change personalities, and the baby we hope will be born will have a usual father and a usual mother—one mother and one father—and the idea that they will have three parents is ridiculous.

Will it work? We do not know. There is a risk that it will not work. That is in the nature of science. In the earth-shattering paper produced by Crick and Watson in 1953, they were tentative and were not very sure about DNA, but they pressed on.

Will it be safe? We cannot say for certain that it will be safe. There is always risk, but the risk will be taken only with the informed consent of the parents, and if people had always avoided risk in this sphere and if in 1968 at Oldham general hospital Robert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe and Jean Purdy had not taken risks with the agreement of Mr and Mrs Brown, the first test-tube baby in the world would not have been born and the whole world would be worse off as a result. If the scientists are willing to take the risks and keep them to a minimum and the parents are willing to take the risks and take the advice, we should put the HFEA in a position to regulate and permit this technique so that it can be used when it and it alone, is convinced that it is safe. That is why I oppose tonight’s motion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) for securing this important debate. Some in this House are in favour of the treatment and oppose the motion, whereas others, like me, support the motion and oppose the procedure. The important thing is to have the debate and to put down a marker, and I hope that the Government do not try to rush these things through, as I believe they originally intended.

[Frank Dobson]

Consultation on this started in 2003. If this is a rush, how would my hon. Friend describe something that was slow?

[Robert Flello]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that. I have been in this House since 2005 and this is the first debate I have had here on this matter, even though the consultation may have started in 2003. I will return to the issue of the consultation shortly, if I am able to do so in the four minutes and 10 seconds remaining to me.

There is no doubt that this disease affects many children—I believe the figure is one in 6,500—and has some horrendous and devastating consequences. However, the chief medical officer seems to believe that perhaps 10 lives a year might be changed as a result of this treatment. That is absolutely important for the 10 people involved and their families, but my understanding of the science is that it is very hard for the researchers to know who those 10 people might be and how to decide which children might benefit and which might not.

I agree with a number of speakers who say that two issues are involved. I have grave concerns about this from not only a moral, ethical point of view, but a public safety point of view. Whatever someone’s position on mitochondrial transfer, I am sure we must all agree that we cannot authorise new research techniques that are unsafe or might be unsafe. In this context “unsafe” does not only mean that procedures may not work; it means that they may result in disabilities and illnesses. To put it crudely, there is every possibility that we could be legislating to allow techniques that could cause damaged embryos, resulting in further damaged children. That is not spin; it is a reasonable assumption based on the available data. Newcastle university’s own paper concluded that, compared with control experiments, 50% fewer eggs fertilised through pronuclear transfer reached the blastocyst stage—in other words, pronuclear transfer is twice as likely to cause the embryos to fail. No further work was conducted on why so many of these embryos developed abnormally, despite consistent calls from concerned scientists.

Based on the available data, therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility that these techniques could cause the people born as a result to have illnesses or disabilities. The Government have a responsibility, as we all do, to avoid such eventualities, and we cannot take that lightly. We might not know the result for many generations. We might not know whether some damaged has been caused until three, four or five generations later. We simply cannot know that. Indeed, in a conversation I had with an hon. Friend in this House not a few hours ago there was talk of how science is about probabilities and risk; it is not fact but about what may or may not happen.