Gene Editing — House of Lords, 2020-01-30
Topic: Health
Robert Maurice Lipson Winston (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I declare an interest as a founder president of Progress. I take some objection to its attempts to change the nomenclature, as it did at the time of embryo research when it called the embryo the pre-embryo. I do not think that is particularly helpful; it will not really make much difference to how we handle the actual biology and the science I am an unashamed gene editor. I have been involved with gene editing in embryos for nearly 30 years and have a company, Atazoa, which has looked at different methods of modifying embryos. We have done that both in mice and in pigs, and not only in embryos but in sperm, so I feel that I have something worth contributing to this debate I am grateful to so many people for mentioning preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, which was invented in my own laboratory. Alan Handyside and I published that first paper, and the first patients are now aged 30, so there is already a technique for preventing genetic disease that has been pretty reliable. It is not absolutely reliable—mistakes have occasionally been made—but the advantage of embryo biopsy is that one is not fundamentally changing the embryo and any risk taken is therefore simply a failure of that patient to get pregnant. As far as we know, there are no epigenetic consequences; we do not think that it causes long-term ill-health As the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has been mentioned, I should say that it admitted this week in answer to a Written Question that it has no follow-up on any of the issues currently important in embryology in IVF. So we do not know what happens to babies in the long term after egg freezing, and we have no follow-up on PGD or on a whole range of issues. Such issues are far more important than regulation of IVF, which is done quite inaccurately much of the time. Due to the finances, many private clinics are doing things that most of us in this House would regard as utterly disreputable, such as selling research treatments that have no basis. It is clear that there will always be that risk, just as there was with He Jiankui in Shenzhen University. We also have to say that any medical procedure can be misused; I do not think in vitro fertilisation, or even gene editing, are any worse. Of course, it is terrible for the child born irreparably damaged, who carries that gene editing through their lifetime and passes it on to the next generation—of course, it cannot be controlled in the future. The risk of gene editing in the embryo is of massive importance and it is therefore extremely valuable that we have this debate at least to put this online today A recent headline in the Times suggested that we can now eliminate genetic disease by gene editing. That is complete nonsense. We cannot eliminate hereditary disease because so many of these genetic defects will not be expressed in the genome of the parents being screened. In fact, many of these defects occur between the generations, at the time when the egg or the sperm is formed, during meiosis or at other times. The idea that we can eliminate hereditary disease is rather like the Tower of Babel: it is trying to be so ambitious that we lose sense of what our humanity is. That is really important and I will come back to it I have to say that we were criticised, in this House as well as elsewhere, when we produced the first pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and it was said that we were undertaking eugenics. If you go to YouTube, you can hear a recording of Anne Sofie von Otter singing "Wiegala", a lullaby that includes the words "Schlaf mein Kindelein"—sleep, my child. It was sung by its composer, Ilse Weber, as she entered the gas chamber at Auschwitz carrying her child. She wanted to comfort the child, who was frightened, and she died in that gas chamber. We know that this happened, because there were eyewitnesses, and we have the score of the poem she wrote. That is eugenics, because her only fault was that she was Jewish—a 41 year-old woman with two children. There was nothing else and the science was misused. Science is always capable of being misused: it is not just Nazis, anyone can do it. This was done in China and it can be done in this country, as it can in Europe. Let us not forget that Regulation is not really the answer here. I shall come back to that, if I may. We have to differentiate between eugenics and reasonable medical intervention. It seems to me that eugenics is where you involve a population. When you are dealing with an individual, you think of the best solution for that family; therefore, sometimes you decide to put back an embryo that has had some mitochondrial change—which, incidentally, is not gene editing, but simply changing the spindle, and therefore rather a different process. Gene editing has not been done in this country. We gave approval for that, but gene editing is banned and should remain banned, in my view, because the risks are appalling CRISPR is not an accurate technique. It is the best technique we have yet devised, and far better than the techniques we were using, introducing viruses into embryonic cells, but it carries the risks of off-target mutations, of epigenetic effects, of possibly producing cancer, of misdiagnoses and of producing, as the right reverend Prelate pointed out, completely unpredictable effects. I greatly valued and admired his speech, which was an important intervention in this debate One of the concerns we must understand has to do with our humanity. If we went through enhancement, we might end up with the basic principle of ethics being completely confounded. We believe in ethics because, whether we are religious, scientific or humanist, we believe in the notion of the sanctity of human life. If we make a superhuman, what value has human life? Playing God is something we should do; it is not wrong to do that. Imitating God, making use of our intelligence to provide the best solution to things, is what we are empowered to do and should be doing. However, to try to imitate God in the way they did, for example, at the Tower of Babel, if that parable or lesson is right, is utterly inappropriate, in my view We have to recognise that regulation will not work; it did not work in China and it would not work in this country. You could not prevent somebody doing this out of hand. We must recognise that we have to collaborate. International law will not work, but having more scientists working together and understanding the ethical issues will. I bet that if Dr He had worked in our laboratory, he would not have done that experiment in China. He worked somewhere in the United States. He was not an embryologist, which was not very helpful, because he did not understand the ethical issues raised. That understanding is something we have to grasp more and more.