Mitochondrial Replacement (Public Safety)

Steve Brine Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) on introducing this debate. It is absolutely essential that Parliament has the opportunity to talk through these important details at greater length.

As my hon. Friend knows, I am usually very conservative on ethical matters such as this. I do not usually advocate anything that might be seen as playing God. I have severe reservations about euthanasia. I have always opposed and will always oppose anything that would modify human characteristics and be seen as creating some form of designer baby. However, there are times when one has to be pragmatic. I have met families of the victims of these terrible, deforming, disfiguring and life-shortening diseases. It is right that we should use our human knowledge for the good of fellow mankind. It is great that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr Willetts) has said, British science is leading the way.

Science is about finding cures and solutions, and this is just a different way of preventing horrible things from happening to our children. It is fundamentally a human intervention and it should be judged purely on the basis of whether we are doing more good than bad. I believe that we are when one in 6,500 of our constituents each year contract, without any choice, these horrible inherited diseases. The longer we say, “We need more checks, more safety, more testing”, the longer we are delaying a cure.

We need to get on with it. It has been widely consulted on. I have received virtually no letters on this matter and we need to take a balanced judgment on when the risks of mitochondrial donation become proportionate to the severity of the diseases that are affecting our constituents now. As colleagues have said, it will be licensed by the HFEA based on the safety and efficacy of the evidence, and those licences can be withdrawn at any time.

“Mitochondrial donation only allows for unaltered nuclear DNA to be transferred to an egg or embryo that has unaltered healthy mitochondria. These techniques only replace, rather than alter, a small number of unhealthy genes in the ‘battery pack’ of the cells with healthy ones. Mitochondrial donation does not alter personal characteristics and traits of the person.”

That is an important consideration, because:

“Mitochondrial donation will enable mothers to choose to have children who are genetically related to them, with a natural combination of nuclear genes from both parents while being free from a potentially devastating disease.

Nuclear DNA is not altered and so mitochondrial donation will not affect the child’s appearance, personality or any other features that make a person unique—it will simply allow the mitochondria to function normally and the child to be free of mitochondrial DNA disease. The healthy mitochondria will also be passed on to any children of women born using the technique”—

so we are doing good for generations to come as well.

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

I agree with what my hon. Friend is saying, and I do not agree with the motion of my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), although I have great respect for her, as a fellow Christian in this House. The work at Newcastle university is being funded by the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign and by the families and the people whom it supports and works with. Does my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) agree that the fact that they are putting money behind this, speaks volumes about the motives behind the work and about not letting the bad be the enemy of the good?

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I think it is a great triumph that a British university is doing this important work. To those who say, “No other country allows this sort of thing,” I say, “Well, great; we are pioneering here, as British science has done in so many different areas.”

We need to be honest. We can raise a question about the ethics of it, but we should not hide behind safety considerations when certain people really oppose it for ethical reasons. Let us have that honest debate. I am prepared to give my support to these regulations and to us getting on with this science, with the assurances that there will be strict licensing conditions based on strong scientific evidence and that this in no way can lead to anything that can be remotely construed as designer babies, which I find completely and utterly abhorrent.

We should get on with it. Mankind has used its knowledge and skill to invent some pretty devastating and ghastly ways of disfiguring, maiming, neutering and killing human kind. We should celebrate this remarkable advance in using our scientific knowledge—our human skills—for good, and potentially for the good of generations to come in the families afflicted with these terrible illnesses.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Brine]

I am listening carefully to what the hon. Gentleman says, and the way in which this debate is being conducted shows the House of Commons at its best. He is one of the co-sponsors of this debate and he is speaking out of a great deal of fear about what might happen. Is his wish, in supporting the motion, to kick this into the longest of long grass or to see it stopped dead in its tracks? Will he be clear about that?

[Robert Flello]

I can be even clearer than that, because it is neither of those things. I want further research done on the safety implications and I want the consultation to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) referred a while ago actually to be taken forward. Let us consider the polling the Government did. Their response to the consultation on mitochondrial transfer, published the day before the summer recess, tells us that

“700 expressed general support for the regulations and 1,152 opposed the introduction of the regulations with the remainder not expressing a view either way.”

Yet the same day the BBC quoted the Department of Health as saying:

“A public review into the three person IVF technique has been broadly supportive”.

That in turn enabled Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, to say:

“As the Government’s latest consultation has again shown, there is broad public support for making mitochondrial replacement therapy available to patients”.

That raises the question: in which world does 1,152 against and 700 in favour equate to “broadly supportive”? Does the Minister support her Department’s briefing that the consultation responses were “broadly supportive”? What further action does she intend to take to correct the highly misleading statement? Someone may think that the public were misinformed or that only a small group of people were responding and the responses were thus disrupted, but what is the point of having that consultation if no notice is going to be taken of it?

At the end of the day, there is concern about this matter. I have a concern—perhaps I am the only Member in this House who does—but if, as I fear, this legislation goes ahead in the autumn, I do not want to have to come back to this House to say to future generations, “Look what we did.” Once we go down this route and children start being born, there will be no turning back—[Interruption.] Yes, it is the power sell of the cell. There is not enough research on what the mitochondrial part does. Is it just a battery pack, or is it more? We just do not know. I do not want to have to stand up in this House and explain to generations of future children why we let them down.