Mitochondrial Replacement (Public Safety)

Lady Hermon Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, but I would improve the motion in a number of ways. I would not try to characterise Lord Winston’s position as being fundamentally different from what it is. I would also say that we need to have these regulations so that the tests can be done and so that we can go ahead with clinical trials and find out what happens in humans. I hope that the Government will introduce the regulations promptly. It has been useful to have this airing of views, but it will be helpful when we have the regulations before us to have that debate. This House will then be able to vote on whether or not to adopt the regulations.

[Lady Hermon (North Down) (Ind)]

May I assume—I am sure I am right in doing so—that this technique has already been trialled on mice and that the hon. Gentleman will know whether those trials have been successful? It would help the House if he could enlighten us about the success or otherwise of using this technique on mice.

[Dr Huppert]

I do not have a list of the organisms it has been tested on, but it has been widely tested on a number of organisms—I assume that mice are one, but I could not be absolutely certain—and has been successful. Obviously, if it was not successful on any other organism, it would be perverse to want to go ahead with it. However, I do not have details on the experiments with me.

I understand and appreciate that some people have genuine religious or ethical objections about interfering with an embryo. They are entirely welcome to make that case, but they should not claim other reasons as a cover for that. People are welcome to their ethical opinions—that is fine—but to say that we should not do this because we should wait indefinitely for more and more tests, so that we can be more and more sure before we ever try it in a human is simply to condemn more children to more pain and more anguish. That is not the right way to go. We do need to do more tests; there is much more to do before this will become a regular thing on the NHS and people can be saved—there is no doubt about that. But for that to happen, it has to be tested in humans—it has to be tested in children. We will help at that point, and I hope we will have children who do not have the sort of hideous problems we see now. I urge the Government to get on with this. We have to reduce the number of children who have these hideous conditions. The Government have the chance to reduce it and they should act promptly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jane Ellison]

That was one area of detail covered in the draft regulations and the responses to the consultation on it, and I will write to my hon. Friend with a detailed response. A wider point is that we should surely not reduce the notion of parenthood to genes. Many Members who have spoken in the debate, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton, who moved the motion, have often spoken in other contexts about parenthood being more about loving, nurturing and so on. It cannot be reduced simply to the donation of genes—I worry that that, in itself, would be a slippery slope.

Mitochondrial donation is supported by both the chief medical officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, and many clinicians and IVF experts, including, I am pleased to say, Professor Lord Winston, who has been quoted a number of times in the debate. Among other comments, he has made it clear that he supports the draft regulations and would vote for them.

This is undoubtedly a really difficult area in which to gauge public opinion, because it is complex and technical and a lot of people know nothing about it. Some Members who have seen e-mails going around the House asking them to attend this debate have told me that they did not know what it was about. That means that the exercise of engaging the public needs to be carried out in a thoughtful and comprehensive way. That was exactly what the Government did—we tested the public acceptability of introducing these techniques through a comprehensive dialogue process commissioned by the HFEA and led by external experts. It included events such as workshops and focus groups, and it showed that when the process of mitochondrial donation was fully explained to them, the majority of people supported its use provided that it was carefully regulated. The Department of Health’s consultation was on the draft regulations, and those who commented on them broadly supported them. I urge people to be mindful of the way to go about testing public opinion on the matter. We have to ensure that it is done on the basis of facts.

[Lady Hermon]

rose—

[Jane Ellison]

I am really sorry, I just do not have the time to give way. I am not being discourteous.

Successive Governments have responded to advances in science that were controversial in their day. Time does not permit me to go into them in as much detail as I would have liked, but many Members will cast their mind back to the debates about IVF. I suspect that there are Members in the Chamber today who were extremely wary of IVF techniques but who have written to me in the past year asking me to help infertile couples in their constituency. We were told in the debates on IVF that the proposal for limited research on embryos, up to a maximum of 14 days’ development, was a slippery slope and that the 14-day rule would become 20 days, 50 days or even six months. Today, 25 years on, the Rubicon remains uncrossed and the important provision that research cannot take place on embryos more than 14 days old, which Parliament put in place, remains firmly in place. I hope that that gives Members some reassurance.

Mitochondrial donation will enable people to have their own, genetically related children, free of serious mitochondrial disease. The proposed donation techniques will allow unaltered nuclear DNA to be transferred only to an egg or embryo that has unaltered healthy mitochondria. I could not have put it more eloquently than my right hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr Willetts) did when he talked about the difference between nuclear and mitochondrial DNA.

On the issue of three parents, I mentioned—as have others—that we cannot reduce parenthood to a matter of 37 genes from a donor. It is about so much more than that, and our draft regulations refer to some of the safeguards in place.

There is no cure for mitochondrial disease, nor is there one on the horizon. The families of children born with severe mitochondrial disease face the prospect of having to watch their child suffer dreadfully, and in many cases die at an early age. Many Members have met constituents in recent months—as have I—who are facing that heartbreaking situation, and I pay tribute to the Lily Foundation for its work in helping us all to connect with those constituents.

This has been a thoughtful debate, and it is vital that Parliament discusses such matters openly and considers all the issues. For those who are not opposed in principle, we must consider all the evidence alongside the benefits that this treatment can bring, and make that consideration in a rational way. The Government will, of course, continue to consider the expert advice we have received and how that influences regulations before they are brought before Parliament for further debate. We believe that this is an important scientific advance that holds out great hope for families in this country and around the world.