March 24, 2008	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 15, 1429

LONDON, March 23: The Catholic Church seems all set to engage the Brown government in a bruising fight over a bill which in the opinion of its leading lights would allow the Frankenstein fiction to turn into a reality.

According to its supporters, however, the controversial Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is designed to bring the 1990 regulatory framework for fertility treatment in line with the new advances in science and also allow the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos for research.

A proposed amendment to the bill, which would have prohibited the creation of inter-species embryos known as human admixed embryos was defeated by 268 votes to 96 in the House of Lords in January.

Labour peers were instructed to follow the party whip by voting against the proposed amendment.

The church is asking the ruling Labour party to allow MPs to vote according to their conscience when the bill returns to the House of Commons later in the year.

The Archbishop of Cardiff the Most Reverend Peter Smith and Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who is the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, want a free vote on the bill and have also asked the MPs as well as Catholic ministers serving in the Cabinet to stand down rather than support the bill.

The church has written to the prime minister asking for Labour MPs to be released from the three-line whip that would force them to vote for the legislation ministers who did not support a whipped vote would be expected to resign.

The government representatives defending the bill said this is about using pre-embryonic cells to do research that has the potential to ease the suffering of millions of people in this country.

Downing Street said a decision on a free vote would be taken “in due course”.

The Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders plan to allow their MPs to have a free

Researchers say the work is needed to advance the understanding of complex diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Motor Neurone Disease.

But critics say it involves the needless destruction of human life, and is fraught with moral difficulties.

The experiments involve transferring nuclei containing DNA from human cells, such as skin cells, into animal eggs that have had almost all of their genetic information removed.

The resulting cytoplasmic embryos are more than 99 per cent human, with a small animal component, making up around 0.1 per cent.

The embryo would be grown in the lab for a few days, and then harvested for stem cells immature cells that can become many types of tissue. It is already illegal to implant human-animal embryos in the womb or bring them to term.

The body that grants licenses for embryo research, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, has agreed in principle to the creation of human-animal hybrids.

However, it also stressed that each application must be considered closely on its own merits.