Should We Bother To Listen To The Public?

I kid you not... that was one of the questions asked at the end of the HFEA consultation meeting this evening. Ok, I simplified it a bit for the purposes of making a catchy post heading, but not much.

The majority of the audience seemed to be very much opposed to the idea of allowing the creation of human-animal hybrids and chimeras. Josephine Quintavalle spoke well, and she was actually backed up by John Cornwell, something I hadn't expected from a writer for The Tablet. The token clergyman, Anglican, did his best to sit on the fence. If he doesn't get down soon he'll get splinters where the sun don't shine. The two Science types kept banging on about how the human-animal hybrids were absolutely essential for working out the basic processes involved in cell development and differentiation, that this would be essential for working out therapies, and that the hybrid embryos would never be allowed to go to term, so the public was worrying unnecessarily.

My inward response* to this was that cell processes, at a basic level, are pretty much the same whichever mammal you use, so why not use mammals and leave human embryos out of it (if all you want to do is study the processes), that therapies involving adult and placental stem cells would be far less controversial ethically, and so more research should be done on them, and finally, that it's all very well to say that the hybrids would never be allowed to go to term, but we used to believe that cloned animals would never be allowed to go to term... and yet, somehow, we ended up with Dolly the sheep.

*I did try to make these responses out loud, but wasn't picked to get given a microphone.

The ethical considerations were not really dealt with. I came in late, to find that several people were contesting that embryos were not human beings, and therefore were not worthy of being treated with dignity. Comments were made to the effect that those who were ill with progressive diseases like Parkinson's, or people with relatives suffering from such diseases would have a very different idea about treatments which needed to be developed using embryo research. The chap from The Tablet actually warned about ends-justifying-means, and said that this led to the slippery slope. A particularly vociferous scientist challenged him to state where the slippery slope actually led... and I was pleased to hear him respond "the death camps." It is so true: the doctors in Nazi Germany justified their research on "sub-humans" because they hoped to get cures for diseases and such like.

And before you have a pop at me in the combox for equating such scientific endeavours with the Nazi death camps, and telling me that I'd feel differently if someone close to me had a debilitating and progressive disease, I would just like to point out that my mother is German, my grandfather has Alzheimer's Disease, and my grandmother had Parkinson's Disease. I have also worked in a laboratory with fellow scientists who believed that embryos were just sources of cellular tissue, and I know how easy it is for scientists to push the envelope that little bit further just to see "what would happen if..."

Although the ethical issues were not dealt with as fully as they might have been, I got the distinct impression that the majority of people present were unhappy with the idea of hybrids and chimeras. However, I was also confirmed in my opinion that the HFEA considered the meeting to be little more than a PR exercise: the question about whether the public should be consulted on matters of scientific research implied that the public were the great unwashed, and could not possibly understand matters of such scientific complexity, so the decisions should be left to the scientists. I shall watch carefully to see the final outcome of the consultation. I fully expect the opinion of the HFEA to be firmly in favour of allowing the creation of human-animal hybrids.

But then, I'm cynical like that.

If you want to try and prove me wrong, the online consultation is still running, so please take some time to fill in the form HERE.