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7 September 2006
The Scottish Council on Human Bioethics has expressed concern over comments made by Professor Alison Murdoch, of Newcastle University, at a University of Edinburgh Symposia on the 5th of September 2006 (http://www.crb.ed.ac.uk/symposium/programme.html). At this event she questioned whether the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) should continue to regulate experiments involving human embryos.
Work in this area includes human cloning procedures, licenses for which have only been granted twice in the UK. Dr Calum MacKellar, the Director of Research of the SCHB, stated: "While the HFEA is not perfect, to have no such publicly accountable regulator would reduce even further the voice of the general public in a very controversial area of science that has profound repercussions for society."
Professor Murdoch, who herself has received one of the licenses to clone human embryos, claimed that the HFEA, which recently granted a license to Professor Murdoch�s North-East England Stem Cell Institute to give discounted rates for IVF treatment to women in exchange for eggs for research, merely duplicates the role of local ethics committees. However the SCHB noted that the HFEA has an important role in representing the opinions of the public, which local ethics committees do not.
The SCHB also expressed concern about the attitude that researchers seem to be taking towards the ethical dimension of their work. Dr MacKellar said: "Alison Murdoch has said she thinks there should not be a national body charged with regulating the activities of researchers in this area. She seems not to see the need for publicly accountable ethical scrutiny of this kind of research. This is very worrying as it suggests a lack of concern for the deep ethical questions involved. It actually serves to emphasise the need for researchers to be ethically scrutinised by an independent body."
Professor Alison Murdoch claimed that embryos not yet implanted should no longer be protected, and that "legislation should be directed towards the protection of the post-implantation embryo." However, Dr Calum MacKellar responded: "There is no reason to give an implanted embryo a greater moral status. An embryo at the pre-implantation stage during IVF is similar to one created in a natural conception. The only difference is its location, and surely the moral status of an embryo should be determined by its nature, not by its location. It may be useful to researchers to do so, but it does not make sense ethically."