Good! For once a small smattering of sanity has managed to break through all the FUD and anti-terror this and creationist that...

Doubtless we'll have to wait a while for the next one to come along though :(

Will the boffins use their new freedom to work on that?

NO

They will waste time and squander resources on keeping more of the population alive, in an over crowded world.

Where is the justice? Where are the squirrel tails!!!

I'm stumped, how can this outrage have happened?

What went wrong?

How did a government make the right call on a bioethics issue?

As for squirrel tails, surely you'd rather have retractable wings and gills? I know I would.

"Recent medical advances have meant that very premature babies born before this point have survived"

OK, most people would agree that there has to be some point in a pregnancy where termination would be a bad thing (and some people will always argue that it is a bad thing at any point of course).

What i don't understand is this pish; "well, if the woman gave birth prematurely at this stage, the baby might survive, given state of the art medical care" So what? If you left the baby alone in the womb it will most likely survive too. In the future it might be possible to grow a viable human in the lab from a fertilised egg, or maybe even just an egg, or a sperm. Will this mean that a woman having her period will be murder? Will teenage boys spraying their bellys with sticky white love piss be committing crimes against humanity?

I want a people-cow

Blizzard can now create real life Taurens.

<IANAL>

The Saviour Siblings part of the legislation is tantamount to slavery, as the moment that the "Saviour" is born they are obligated in servitude to the sick child, their own human rights of choice in donation, forsaken for the sick sibling.

How would you feel if you had been born out of a need for your tissue, spare parts supply.

I understand the emotional need as a parent, but at societal level this is morally wrong, and possibly unlawful under the Human Rights Act.

</IANAL>

My MP will hear of my displeasure!

IVF. Why are we contributing to over-population by allowing IVF when there are plenty of kids with no parents? Also, there are usually sound genetic reasons why a person can not breed.

Um, I'm no geneticist, but isn't all this "hoo-ha" just about putting some human DNA into a non-human egg cell which has had the nucleus (i.e. its own DNA) removed? How can this *ever* create a "hybrid"? Surely it's just human DNA, isn't it??

Is anyone else a bit concerned by the fact that the media has largely spun this issue as a battle between religion and science?

Certainly religious groups have opposed this measure on moral grounds, but the scientific benefits and validity of this research has also been questioned from within the scientific community itself.

but it's far to rude....

a woman who looks hot but doesnt whine or moan?:P

Having just had a chat with a friend who is the mother of two baby girls, we decided that Squirrel Tails would be useful for dusting.

However we would like to see the research done to allow every new born to come with an extra arm for the mother. That way they would have enough arms to deal with folding the buggy, holding the child and getting on the bus and paying the driver without need to learn to juggle large objects.

Mines the coat with the extra arm.

No really? The media simplifying a complex issue down to the mentality of a lynch mob? Shirley not.

The many boffins involved are also highly moral too, but with the ability to get past the "yuck" factor.

Paris is already a (sub-)human hybrid.

"I want a people cow"

I married one.

I personally don't have a problem with the use of animal egg shells (is that the right terminology) for human cells.

I think that the abortion limit is ok-ish, possilby slightly on the high side, but not much, if it is. Accepting that I really don't like the idea of abortion, but then again, you're not supposed to be a enthusiast of this sort of thing...

Saviour siblings however is really fucking worrying. How can you create a life specifically in order to harvest it's organs/bone marrow/etc, when there is no way that it can consent? Umbilical chord blood, not really a problem, but bone marrow transplants, for example, are far more dangerous for the donor and not especially sucessfull. Do you wait until the intended donor is 18 and able to consent, albeit under a massive ammount of pressure, or can the parents make the decision earlier in life? Very worrying...

The argument is that some of the non-human DNA may still be in there, it's not 100% guaranteed clean with the process as it stands..

"Saviour siblings however is really fucking worrying. How can you create a life specifically in order to harvest it's organs/bone marrow/etc, when there is no way that it can consent? Umbilical chord blood, not really a problem, but bone marrow transplants, for example, are far more dangerous for the donor and not especially sucessfull. Do you wait until the intended donor is 18 and able to consent, albeit under a massive ammount of pressure, or can the parents make the decision earlier in life? Very worrying..."

Try reading My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. Fiction, but a very interesting and thought provoking story of a saviour sibling.

When this new fangled science involving 'growth hormone' was developed back in the 60s it was to be a wonder cure, and apparently no thought was given to the risk of cross species disease spread. Then several decades later along comes CJD and slowly killed many people in horrible ways. What have we learned from this? Nothing - we've (well, ok, the arseholes in London) have just given the ok to dabble further in bio-medical areas that they think they are all-knowing in, but in reality are just playing around with. Pure stupidity.

And whats this about saviour siblings? That is just obscene. I thought we were a civilised society. My mistake.

"Also, there are usually sound genetic reasons why a person can not breed."

I'm not sure if you intended to, but you do sound like a bit of a Nazi!

Cells of people, cows, squirrels, penguins, plants and fungi contain mitochondria. Mitochondria contain their own DNA, and reproduce independently of the host cell. Mitochondria make adenosine triphosphate (ATP) which is used to power most processes inside cells. AFAIK, Mitochondria are the only source of ATP (IANAboilogist).

I think the plan is to create embryos with human chromosomes (where most of the DNA lives) and cow mitochondria. I have yet to read anything that tells me the advantages of such embryos.

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts1998/ukpga_19980042_en_3#sch1-pt1

"No one shall be held in slavery or servitude."

Enshrined from the European Convention of Human Rights:-

http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html Article 4.

Which comes from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4

http://www.hri.org/docs/UDHR48.html

"Article 4

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms."

Farming people for body parts is not something a decent society should be allowing, for that is slavery. The Sibling angle, to a degree just personalises the issue.

Way to go Commons, lets just hope the Lords see sense.

I've never heard of any links between CJD and growth hormones. Could you elborate?

Dead vulture, because it doesn't react well to drugs in livestock, just like AC.

Soylent Green

Just to clear things up a bit, regarding there being some leftover bits of DNA - there are no "ifs" about it, no "chances" of some DNA remaining. The mitochondrial DNA from the host (animal) egg cell will still be present. Human DNA + animal DNA is a pretty good example of "hybrid"

@AC

There's a difference between "saying" someone shouldn't breed and someone not being capable of breeding - the latter does occur in nature, the former only among humans.

if we can't have pointy ears as well.

Otherwise, nice collection of knee-jerk reactions from the IANA brigade.

"Farming people for body parts is not something a decent society should be allowing, for that is slavery."

No, forcing someone to work for no wage and and buying and selling them and their children as property is slavery. Selecting an embryo that you know will save your child, which will then grow up into a free human able to live its life according to its own will, same as all the rest of us, is saving a child's life. That's it.

"How would you feel if you had been born out of a need for your tissue, spare parts supply."

Better than if I'd been born as a result of rape, or intoxication, or because my family needed another 0.8 kids (adjusting for the rate of infant deaths) to work in the fields and support them in old age. In fact, even "my parents have been married for three years and arbitrarily decided it was time" isn't a particulary good reason to begin life.

No, scratch that, I wouldn't feel better. How I was born makes absolutely no difference to how I live now, as an adult. It has no effect whatsoever. Let's say you or I had, in fact, been born for 'spare parts'. If God waved a magic wand and changed the past so we were born for 'normal' reasons (see above), and left everything else the same, would our lives in the present be better or worse? Worse, obviously. We'd have lived our lives in a completely identical fashion, the only difference would be that we'd be minus one sibling.

No-one wonder people post this tripe as ACs. Think this stuff through.

www.godhatesfurries.com

should hang their heads in shame. this whole area could lead to treatments of serious diseases and they use a religious belief to try and stop that - disgraceful.

I think we are going to see a real spiderman soon :D

I want to be mixed with a pig cause they have half-an-hour orgasms..

I'm pretty sure that BSE can be attributed to the over-use of organophosphates in insecticides, not growth hormones.

In 1990 the public were told that allowing experimentation on IVF-generated embryos would lead to cures for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, etc. In 2001 we were told we had to legalise human cloning before these cures would be possible: now we're being told we can't do it without hybrids. The fact is that eighteen years of legalised human embryo research in the UK have not produced any significant medical advances. This legislation will not change that.

Hybrid embryos will contain DNA from animal mitochondria (and possibly from human mitochondria as well, depending on technique). Some mutations in human mitochondrial DNA can cause serious metabolic diseases. However, the sequence changes introduced by these mutations are much smaller than the differences between human and animal mitochondrial DNA. So the idea of deliberately trying to create embryos with mutated mitochondrial DNA is unhelpful and will lead to the study of artefacts.

Will nobody consider the catgirls?

and all I wanted was a real sheeple...

"There's a difference between "saying" someone shouldn't breed and someone not being capable of breeding - the latter does occur in nature, the former only among humans."

True, but Dan's post in full:

"IVF. Why are we contributing to over-population by allowing IVF when there are plenty of kids with no parents? Also, there are usually sound genetic reasons why a person can not breed."

Seems to be "saying" that if you can't reproduce, we shouldn't fix this with IVF and that "genetic reasons" justify this.

Sounds like eugenics to me.

This seems to have been poorly reported. Best as I can make out they don't want to take organs from the sibling, but to use the blood and cells from the placenta and umbilical cord to help the elder child. This is otherwise waste tissue and not likely to be subject to the human rights act.

"I'm not sure if you intended to, but you do sound like a bit of a Nazi!"

No, I'm sure its the arm bands that make him look like a Nazi.

And the little 'tash.

And the side parting & quiff.

And the jack boots.

Invading Poland didn't help either.

Dan - BSE has nothing to do with organophosphates, they can cause brain damage and have in some humans, usually due to their use in sheep dip, but this is not transmitted and certainly not by eating

Dominic - he's refering to the use of growth hormone from infected animals, though there is little/no evidence suggesting that this led to the emergence of vCJD. However the use of human growth human taken from cadavers that had CJD has been shown to have caused CJD in people who used it. This happened at very low levels however and you were more likely to get HIV that CJD from human growth hormone.

AC who Dominic responded to - human growth hormone has been presented as a "wonder drug" though this was largely due to misinterpretation of one paper, as I've said the deaths its use cause were in no way cross-species and as there have only been 26 reported I'm not sure that qualifies as many. The deaths had nothing to do with the growth hormone itself just with not purifying it well enough. Would you stop the use of any drug that's ever killed anyone regardless of how many lives it might save? If so I can't imagine there's anything in your medicine cabinet.

The only reason this has been given the green-light is to make sure that the life-sciences industry in the UK is able to cash in. As always, the driver behind this political decision is purely economic - that's why it doesn't matter if this technique is useful or not, so long as some pharmaceutical company is willing to spend millions on it right here in he UK.

Lets pretend for a minute then that I didn't mention genetics and over-population:

What about the kids with no parents or family that would love parents but aren't going to get them because we are enabling otherwise childless people to have children?

That's my main issue with IVF.

The genetics argument is also valid as per horses, donkeys and mules.

If a kid is born for a bit of blood (especially from the placenta) then I don't see a problem with it as they have no impact on the child and/or would be done anyway.

If it's for more invassive procedures then I would say that it should only be done if the child is consenting (not necessarily 18 but at least old enough to have some idea what will happen and why) and the kid's opinion should be independently verified by an expert as geniune willingness to help rather than parental 'bullying'. How practical all this is is another matter!

I suppose this also raises the question if a kid up for adoption, would it be OK to adopt them and then put them through a bone marrow extraction procedure or similar?

I don't see a problem with IVF however, as it's not life saving and doesn't improve the quality of life (like a hearing aid for example) then I say let the parents foot the bill themselves or adopt one of the many hundreds of children needing a good home. The cases where the NHS has foot the bill for this are beyond belief given you can't get certain cancer or Altzeimer's treatments on the NHS!

"The second vote will decide whether to cut the upper limit for abortions from 24 weeks. Recent medical advances have meant that very premature babies born before this point have survived."

From yesterday's Grauniad, quote by David Field, professor of neonatology at Leicester University, president of the British Association of Perinatal Medicine: "At 24 and 25 weeks there is no doubt that survival is improved. At 22 and 23 weeks we found no evidence whatsoever. Survival at 23 weeks in the first six years (of my report 1994 to 1999) was 18.48% of those who admitted to a neotnatal unit. In the second period (2000 to 2005) it is 18.52%, which is a .04% difference over 12 years. It was almost as identical as you can get it. There is no change."

Just because your Catholics and similarly religious types are saying survival rates pre-24 weeks have improved, doesn't mean they aren't lying through their teeth and assuming (correctly) that the vast majority of people won't actually check the truth of their statements.

Best Bits Censored (BBC) let slip during its coverage that 200,000 abortions are performed in the UK annually - industrial-scale production of embryonic stem cells. The result of making love on an industrial scale.

One cannot kill the thing one loves, so how is it that it has become so easy to kill and so hard to love?

HGH has nothing to do with nvCJD, the human form of BSE, which is what most people think of when mentioning CJD. CJD has been known about since the early 1970s, before the advent of HGH.

As for the "Recent medical advances have meant that very premature babies born before this point have survived", well, sorry, there hasn't been a significant change at 23 weeks or later in the last fifteen years or so: in a recent thorough study, survivability at 23 weeks between 1994 and 1999 was 18.46%; between 2000 and 2005 it was 18.52%. This is not what one might call a step-change, and certainly not enough to restrict the right to elect a termination further. Survivability has incresaed somewhat past 24 weeks. This a classic low-ball tactic to chip away at the availability of terminations, since there are also amendments to reduce the limit to 13, 16 and 18 weeks. Many people don't even realise they are pregnant at 13 weeks, especially if they have a history of dysmennorreah (sp?), or are under certain medications.

These amendments must fail.

>I think the plan is to create embryos with human chromosomes (where most of >the DNA lives) and cow mitochondria. I have yet to read anything that tells me >the advantages of such embryos.

The only advantage is that they exist. If a good supply of genuine human eggs was available, then no-one would be contemplating complicated and expensive procedures like this, which won't produce 100% accurate results (but which will hopefully prove close enough to be worthwhile).

Yeah, it sucks that we have orphans. However, the only consistent solution to that is to forbid anyone from having babies until all orphans in the care system have been allocated. (This is of course completely impossible - not just infeasible, impossible. Enforcing such a system would mean jailing parents for having illegal babies, which would create yet more orphans, meaning that the solution to the problem would make the problem even worse.)

There's no rational reason to demand that the responsibility for accepting orphans should be inflicted solely on those unfortunate enough to be infertile. It would be pure discrimination.

I can understand your logic; but which would you, as an individual, rather have:

a) Treatment for Alzheimers so you can remember that you don't have any children.

b) Treatment for infertility so that there'll be someone around to care that you have Alzheimers.

The NHS is always making budget allocation decisions that will affect peoples lives, the world will never be perfect.

Thanks, I meant to make that point as well

If an embryo is selected to be genetically compatible with the older sibling, surely this also means that the younger sibling could benefit from the tissues/organs/stem cells of the older sibling if the younger became ill? It's a reciprocal benefit, not "slavery".

I'd never heard of that idea before.

Learn something new every day, just don't believe them all :)

"The fact is that eighteen years of legalised human embryo research in the UK have not produced any significant medical advances. This legislation will not change that."

In case you weren't aware, medical advances do not happen to some sort of time-table. You cannot say "if this research is allowed we will have a cure for X in Y years".

However if research is not allowed it's pretty damn certain that any chances of a cure being discovered are a hell of a lot lower!

I wasn't suggesting that adoption of orphans should be the sole responsibility of the infertile. I know several people that took to fostering and then adopting even though they have their own biological offspring. They are indeed better people than most. But I still disagree with IVF. Perhaps if Neil Docherty's suggestion of making the parents pay for the treatment themselves would encourage more adoption and less IVF.

After listening to you Brits a couple of years back, whinging on as if someone had stepped on your balls with golf spikes as you complained about the evil manipulation of genes that was done to GM foods, it pegs the old irony meter to hear some of you defending the same type of genetic tomfoolery with human DNA.

Don't get me wrong, I have no horse in this race - I don't care. But a sarcastic and cynical bastard such as myself can't help but enjoy the irony of it all.

Dammit Shin, I'm a scientist, not a magician!

I, for one, welcome our new minotaur overlords!

You're suggesting for two people who want to have children, the medically fertile person should have the *option* to adopt, but for the medically infertile person it should be *compulsory*. That is discrimination.

Re: 16:18:

"I can understand your logic; but which would you, as an individual, rather have:

a) Treatment for Alzheimers so you can remember that you don't have any children.

b) Treatment for infertility so that there'll be someone around to care that you have Alzheimers."

A. A. Wait, let me think. A. Alzheimers is the only thing I fear more than death itself. If I've got Alzheimers then it won't matter whether I've got children to care for me or not, because it won't matter to me whether it's my children or a bunch of nurses who are putting up with my shell asking where my dead wife is and trying to beat them up. The only difference is that my children might be wondering whether their father is actually still alive in that shell, whereas the nurses will have the blessing of clinical detachment.

Alzheimers is fucking terrifying. If that was a rhetorical question to which you expected the answer B, you either don't know what Alzheimers is or you are insane.

Shame on you for joking about squirrel tails and whining about left over bits of animal DNA. There are real issues here, like if we can make glow in the dark pigs, can I have a glow-in-the-dark baby? Also where's my talking dog? Until these and the issue of a glow-in-the-dark-talking dog (or a glow-in-the-dark-baby that can speak dog fluently) are properly satisfied (i.e. I own one) all this tomfoolery must stop.

Linux thing because my baby must have penguin feet and flippers too. You might laugh, but I bet it wins gold at the olympics.

Anything coming out of it will be rejected by the host.

There is a mad scientist in china who uses stem cells for Motor

Neuron Diease. It is successful until the body kills of all the foreign

cells and the the patiant is back to where they started sans

$000's.

My *really*-bad-movie take on all of this:

Mad-scientist sneaks stuff out of lab, secretly grows human-hybrids in basement. They *appear* human so he raises them as children, enrolls them in school, etc. Outwardly, they're normal.

They grow up and leave home. Some of them are even kind of hot-looking.

No one knows they're part cow.

You meet one of them, you fall in love and you have your first child, but oopsie - WTF, why does your first kid have a cow's tail??!

Some cosmetic surgery to remove the cow's tail so your kid doesn't get made fun of in school...

Wait and see what else skips a generation in your grandkids...

Dating services will eventually adapt to all this by having the option, when seeking prospective mates, to specify whether or not you're actually "fully human" accompanied by certified medical testing of your DNA to prove it.

Actually, I'm not really all that worried about this... Hell it might even *improve* the human race, who knows ;)

"Alzheimers is fucking terrifying"

What the public sees, at least up to a *point*, is that it's harder on the family than on the person who is actually afflicted with Alzheimers. It changes (gets bad) when the person deteriorates to the point that it's too hard to control him/her and they have to keep the person sedated against their wishes (force-feeding them meds to make them calm down), that's pretty disturbing. So yeah it's ugly.

One would hope that someday or some-century, people won't have to endure that kind of horror anymore.

For all our medical advances, we still have a very long ways to go.

> pointy ears as well.

I want Spock ears :) Oh wait, we'd have to find some Vulcans first... dammit I forgot they're fictitious...

"How would you feel if you had been born out of a need for your tissue, spare parts supply."

I wouldn't, because I'd be genetically altered to not feel anything as I was being harvested. Pretty convenient, and we already harvest stuff from nearly every living thing except humans these days anyway. At least the humans wouldn't be inhumanely treated. Oh ho!

Screw this debate, mine's the one with the squirrel tail!

I think some people have let their imaginations run wild with this whole saviour sibling thing.

Firstly the sibling is not born, will not grow, up, will not go to school will not eat. It reamins a bunch of stem cells and such. The term Sibling is used because it will contain the same parents as the child who requires the medical attention rather than human DNA spliced into a cows DNA removed egg.

there will not be any people walking this earth in servitude just in case a sibling becomes sick. The child is already sick and so then the parents donate sperm and eggs to turn into the 'sibling' before Gestation (is that right?) the stem cells will then be used to help cure the sick sibling

Some people really do have blurred vision when it comes to science and morals

Discrimination or not, I disagree with IVF. When people can't reproduce - through no fault of their own, I'll admit - it's usually because they are genetically flawed. Again: horses, donkeys and mules.

Nazi? No. Cold bastard? Most Definitely yes!

"Firstly the sibling is not born, will not grow, up, will not go to school will not eat."

Urm... no. The sibling is selected at the ball-of-cells stage to be one compatible with the existing child. It then grows in its mother's womb, and is born, and at birth the cord/placenta blood and cells are used to help its older sibling. The child then grows up and goes to school and eats some food. There is always a possibility that if the older sibling needs further blood transfusions or bone marrow transplants, or even a kidney, that there could be pressure on the saviour sibling to be the donor. According to the BBC in 2006:

"A number of "saviour siblings" have been born, including two-year-old Jamie Whitaker.

He is a near-perfect genetic match for his older brother Charlie - now five - who has a rare condition called Diamond-Blackfan anaemia, which could only be treated with a stem cell transplant from a matched donor."

I thought the Church of England weren't bothered? Can you clarify?

I've wondered before if there has been an increase in genetic disability since IVF was introduced - generally nature does its best to wipe out genetic disadvantages, often through infertility. Don't know as I'd go as far as to deny anyone IVF though, but I have wondered about it.

> In case you weren't aware, medical advances do not happen to some sort of time-table. You cannot say "if this research is allowed we will have a cure for X in Y years".

I think you've missed the point of my post. We are continually told that cures WILL be imminent, if we can only legalise such-and-such a procedure. Consider this quote from Sen. John Edwards in the run-up to the 2004 US election, concerning embryonic stem cells:

"If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

A case of vote for us, cure paralysis? As you say, medical research does not work in this way and it is dishonest for politicians and the media to imply that it does. Life science produces a great white hope about once a decade: monoclonal antibody treatments in the '80s, gene therapy in the '90s, and now embryonic stem cells.

Personally when biomodding myself I am going for a shorthair, prehensile tail for irresponsible party monkey mischief and an extra thumb on each hand. Squirrel tails while asthetically pleasing are, let's face it, just fluffy counterbalance! (though admittedly debonair resplendent with a high wow factor if red)

My tail will be holding my martini.