Scottish cardinal attacks government embryo legislation
Mar 22, 2008
The leader of Scotland's Catholic Church is using his Easter Sunday sermon to attack a British government bill to allow research using mixed human-animal embryos.
(The Associated Press, March 21, 2008) LONDON: Cardinal Keith O'Brien will argue the bill is a "monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life," according to a text of the sermon released by the church.
"One might say that in our country we are about to have a public government endorsement of experiments of Frankenstein proportion — without many people really being aware of what is going on," O'Brien wrote.
Scientists, however, said Friday that the cardinal does not understand what is going on.
"The Catholic Church is misrepresenting science because it doesn't understand the basic facts," said Dr. Stephen Minger, whose laboratory at King's College London has been granted a conditional license for one year to use mixed human-animal embryos for research.
The bill will spell out such licenses to be awarded in future.
The research the church opposes is aimed at helping develop cures for debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis, said Robin Lovell-Badge, head of genetics at the National Institute For Medical Research.
The research would be strictly regulated and the hybrid embryos would be destroyed after 14 days to ensure they are not implanted into the womb of a woman or animal, he said.
"How can a little ball of cells violate human dignity or scare anyone, especially when its purpose is to do good?" Lovell-Badge said.
The process involves injecting an empty cow or rabbit egg with human DNA. A burst of electricity is then used to trick the egg into dividing regularly, so that it becomes a very early embryo, from which stem cells can be extracted.
Because the animal cell's nucleus would be removed from eggs before human DNA was added, scientists said the resulting egg would not be an entity.
The Catholic Church and other social conservatives often oppose embryonic stem cell research, setting off emotional debates in countries such as the United States about the morality of using human embryos to look for cures to diseases. Such groups often oppose the research because days-old human embryos are destroyed to extract the cells.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Wednesday that the bill was important and vital for dealing with life threatening diseases. His Labour Party has a 67-seat majority in the House of Commons, so the bill is likely to pass.
But O'Brien is demanding that when Parliament votes on the bill later this year that Brown give lawmakers a free vote instead of compelling them to support the party line.
"The Catholic Bishops are using scaremongering tactics in an attempt to block important medical research aimed at understanding and developing treatments for incurable diseases," said Chris Shaw, a neurology professor at King's College London.
Scottish cardinal attacks government embryo legislation