Embryonic Stem Cells – the government is driving us up a dead end street

It is now nine years since the publication of the 1999 Donaldson Report, on which the government based its current policy on stem cells. Embryonic stem cells were apparently going to provide miracle cures for people with degenerative diseases like Parkinsons, Diabetes and Alzheimers. Immunologically compatible stem cells were going to be produced by therapeutic cloning, the same technology that produced Dolly the sheep.

Nine years is a long time in science. What has happened since? Human embryonic stem cells are yet to provide a single therapy for any human disease. Scientists are yet to produce a single stem cell line from a cloned human embryo. The technique is so inefficient that no one has yet grown a cloned human embryo beyond the blastocyst stage. In the meantime the cost and risk to women of producing eggs in the numbers necessary has led scientists to turn to placing human DNA into animal eggs by using the Dolly method – animal human cytoplamic hybrids or 'cybrids'. Licences for this unproven therapy have been granted even before Parliament has considered the matter.

Ironically the very week that animal-human hybrids were being debated in the House of Lords last November researchers in Japan and the USA independently published research showing how embryonic stem cells (induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS)could be produced by reprogramming adult skin cells (fibroblasts) by the injection of just four genes. This technique has been further refined since by scientists all over the world and this year researchers have also succeeded in harvesting embryonic stem cells from embryos without destroying those embryos. Ian Wilmut, the scientist who created Dolly the sheep, has as a result abandoned therapeutic cloning, and hence animal-human 'cybrids' altogether. The Medical Research Council (MRC) has demonstrated where its own convictions really are now by ploughing millions of pounds into developing iPS – but don't expect to hear this on the media or from government ministers.

Meanwhile we have seen adult stem cells provide therapies for over 70 diseases and huge advances using cord blood. Ironically millions of potential samples of cord blood have not been collected because the government has put all its eggs in the embryonic stem cell basket.

Why does the government continue to drive up the scientific blind alley of embryonic stem cell research? The reality is that the PM and his cabinet have been seduced by the scientific institutions and the British biotechnology industry through a cleverly orchestrated misinformation campaign.

In 2006 the public rejected animal human hybrids – but public opinion began to shift as a result of a campaign led by Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris and Times Science Correspondent Mark Henderson who together put together a powerful coalition of Science Institutions, individual scientists and Patient interest groups in January 2007. They argued that we must keep all routes to possible therapies open, and used shroud-waving tactics to bring people onside. Opposition was marginalised as purely religious – and government and the public believed the lie that thousands of people would die unless we went down the route of missing species.

The reality is that most scientists worldwide have now abandoned therapeutic cloning and animal-human hybrids to produce therapies and are turning to adult stem cells

When you hear government whip Geoff Hoon talking about his colleague who died from motor neurone disease who could have been saved by techniques derived from animal human hybrid embryos take it with a huge dose of salt. Hoon and Brown know little of the science here – they are simply Harris' and Henderson's marionettes parroting the embryonic stem cell hype that Blair imbibed with the Donaldson Report – but as government policy continues to be framed by journalists and Liberal Democrat bank-benchers the world has actually moved on. The governments plans are based on yeserday's science.

If the government manages to bully this legislation through it is highly likely that it will yield not a single therapy, will divert resources down a dead end street while the rest of the world makes progress using ethical routes that will actually deliver and that Mr Brown and his government will have a lot of explaining to do to the people with degenerative diseases and their families who had their hopes of miracle cures falsely raised. Embryonic stem cells, therapeutic cloning and animal human hybrids may well be consigned to a footnote in history regardless of what Parliament decides.