October 31, 2008
NEWS OF THE WEEK: BIOETHICS: U.K. Approves New Embryo Law    By: Gretchen Vogel

New rules approved by British lawmakers increase the types of embryo research that are allowed.

     With the enthusiastic support of the scientific community, the British House of Commons has overwhelmingly approved a wide-ranging bill that expands the country's rules governing work with human embryos. The new standards, which have dismayed opponents of embryo research, spell out the kinds of research governed by the country's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). The 22 October vote in the Commons, which favored the bill 355 to 129, was considered its most significant hurdle, although the bill still needs final approval from the House of Lords.
     The bill updates the 1990 regulations establishing HFEA and a 2001 law governing nuclear transfer, as well as other regulations pertaining to reproductive technologies. It allows several kinds of research that were not covered previously, including interspecies nuclear transfer, in which scientists attempt to create an "admixed embryo" by fusing a human cell and an enucleated animal egg. Some scientists hope to use such embryos to derive embryonic stem (ES) cells. HFEA has already granted three licenses for such work, but opponents had challenged the licenses in court, charging that the agency had no legal authority to grant them. The new bill provides that authority.
The bill also says that HFEA can grant licenses for research to create transgenic embryos carrying human and animal genes or to create chimeric embryos by mixing human and animal eggs or sperm. Opponents have claimed that the bill authorizes the creation of "humanzees."
     But scientists "made a huge effort to allay fears that this was going to lead to real human hybrids," says stem cell expert Stephen Minger of King's College London. (The bill forbids allowing any human-animal embryos to develop for longer than 14 days or implanting one in a human or animal womb.) Their lobbying paid off. "Many people said, 'I am naturally queasy about this. I would have voted against it, but you guys have made such a strong case I can't see any reason not to vote for it,' " Minger says.
     Developmental geneticist Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute for Medical Research in London says experiments mixing human sperm and, for example, transgenic mouse eggs can yield important insights into the process of fertilization. Researchers hoping to test new methods of storing human sperm or new contraceptives that target fertilization will also benefit.
     Some politicians had argued that induced pluripotent stem cells, which are ES-like cells that are reprogrammed using a cocktail of specific genes instead of an oocyte, render interspecies nuclear transfer unnecessary. Minger and Lovell-Badge cite important reasons to pursue the technique, for instance, to compare the ES cells that result from both processes. Studying nuclear transfer--without having to rely on scarce human oocytes--also offers the best chance for teasing apart exactly what happens to turn back the clock of an adult cell and allow it to direct the process of development again, Minger says.

Science 31 October 2008:_Vol. 322. no. 5902, p. 663_DOI: 10.1126/science.322.5902.663a