Of mice and non-men

A lot has changed since 1999. That was the year public debate on genetically modified crops exploded, with coverage of the issue dominating the news cycle for weeks, right at the cusp of the new millennium. There were fears — some legitimate, some less so — about what such developments would mean for the integrity of the food chain, insects and birds in the wider eco system and the impact on humans of consuming genetically modified food. The outcry largely killed off the plans in Europe for a generation, with Bayer CropScience announcing on March 31 2004 that it was giving up attempts to commercialize its GM maize in the UK. 

Whether the scientific merits and safety of some GM foods were correctly interpreted or not, the public took a huge interest in the subject, and made their feelings loudly known to parliamentarians. The British people, usually pragmatic and cautiously optimistic towards scientific developments, slammed the brakes on. 

Which brings us to today; 21 years since the withdrawal of plans by Bayer CropScience, and a very different set of scientific breakthroughs face us, as reported by The Guardian this weekend: breakthroughs which have the capacity to fundamentally change the very way humanity reproduces. Development in the field of embryo and gamete research has progressed at shocking speed in recent years. Spurred on by mass investment into fertility tech pouring in to Silicon Valley, and by the explosion of private equity backed fertility clinics in the UK, fertility focused start-ups are competing with universities to be the first ones to create synthetic embryo models, develop artificial wombs and generate lab grown gametes from human skin cells, potentially from two or more “parents”, and in some cases with parents both of the same sex. 

Add in the growing trend for enhanced embryo screening by the wealthy, and we have the makings of a major new ethical and social dilemma, perhaps even a new eugenics; to say nothing of a huge money spinner for big fertility. The American writer and researcher Jennifer Bilek has long expressed caution about a reproductive sector which no longer focusses on IVF for women with blocked fallopian tubes, but which has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry, largely bent on repackaging and reselling back to us something people have managed to achieve without help for millions of years, while pocketing hefty profits in the meantime. And that’s before you get on to the likely “God-complex” driving some of the behaviour of the scientists behind these developments. 

In-vitro derived gametes are slowly coming to public attention, following an article in The Guardian published this week, which shared news of a board meeting at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority where the subject was discussed in serious terms: no longer “if”, but “when”. In-vitro gametes are eggs or sperm that are created in a laboratory from genetically reprogrammed skin or stem cells. You might ask why such technology is considered necessary; I certainly did. Peter Thompson, Chief Executive of the HFEA, was reported by The Guardian as saying “in-vitro gametes have the potential to vastly increase the availability of human sperm and eggs for research and, if proved safe, effective, and publicly acceptable, to provide new fertility treatment options for men with low sperm counts and women with low ovarian reserve”. Now, as a campaigner against the harvesting of eggs from young women, you might assume I’d be in favour of such a development. Imagine: “no female was harmed (or even involved) in the production of these eggs”. But what a choice for humanity: lab grown eggs derived from skin cells, or eggs harvested from the body of a woman aged as young as 18, all to meet the rapacious demands of wealthier people in their forties, fifties and upwards who want to become parents (whatever the cost), and an industry growing fat off the sales of human gametes. Not what most of us would call progress. It doesn’t seem to occur to the HFEA that perhaps we’d be better off gently telling people that a shortage of gametes is a price worth paying to avoid the splintering of motherhood and the ideological bewilderment that some donor conceived people experience; to say nothing of the fact that most people don’t want their own genetic offspring raised by strangers, and this situation, while undoubtedly sad for the childless-not-by-choice, is preferable to developing lab-grown gametes to meet demand. 

These are mother-erasing notions which some regular readers will be wearily familiar with

If this is the first you’re hearing of this, you may be surprised to learn that a number of British universities now have entire policy centres devoted to the future of human reproduction. For example, a team at Lancaster University are currently exploring concepts such as “the development of fetuses wholly outside the human body”, “new methods of creating eggs and sperm that will allow the creation of children with two genetic parents of the same sex or multiple genetic parents” and “genome editing, enabling a greater degree of control over the genetic makeup of future people”. The team will also ask: 

To what extent new reproductive technologies will disrupt, or even render obsolete, existing concepts and language (ideas such as ‘birth’, pregnancy’, ‘mother’, and ‘child’)?’

These are mother-erasing notions which some regular readers will be wearily familiar with. While some of these policy centres consider developments in reproductive technology from an ethical perspective, I have been struck by the language used by many of them which doesn’t ever seem to focus on the rights, needs or wellbeing of the child, or the likely psychological challenges for a child who grows up truly motherless, having been created from genetically edited human skin cells. And that’s before we even begin to question how safe this technology is. Dolly the sheep, anyone?

Awareness of these trends has been growing among the women’s movement in recent years, particularly following the 2023 publication by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) of their consultation exploring the potential overhaul of British fertility law. Reading the HFEA recommendations, we see mention of the terms “in-vitro derived gametes” and discussion of “embryo models”, then December 2024 saw a push by the HFEA in the press for an extension of the research time limit on human embryos from 14 to 28 days. 

Feeling alarmed, women and children’s rights campaigners wrote to the Secretaries of State for Health and Social Care, and Science, Innovation and Technology in July 2024, seeking to raise awareness of these developments and asking that they be considered at the highest reaches of Government. Because taken together, the effects may not just be dystopian, but potentially devastating. 

There are huge risks with such technology; most of which won’t require explanation to the average reader. Indeed, the HFEA board (their discussion was reported almost verbatim to The Guardian) themselves set out a range of potential consequences: parents many decades older than their children and multiple parents of one child, or “multiplex parenting”. According to The Guardian:

In multiplex parenting, two couples produce two embryos and cells from these embryos would be used to derive eggs and sperm in the lab to create a final embryo. Rebecca Taylor, HFEA’s scientific policy manager, said: “In the final embryo, the four parents would actually genetically be the child’s grandparents. The parents would be an embryo, if that makes sense.” 

You can almost hear the tearful conversations with the psychiatrist now. 

The HFEA board also discussed “solo parenting”, where eggs and sperm could be cultured from the skin cells of just one individual. The board at least recognised this should not be permitted, given the increased likelihood of severe genetic diseases manifesting themselves in the child. If all of this sounds dystopian to the point of impossibility, and something perhaps to be scoffed at, consider that the HFEA believe this technology may well be viable in humans within a decade. The Times followed with its own coverage, and another angle to the story later this week, as Chinese scientists have for the first time created mouse pups formed from two males, without inherited DNA from a female. Although as an anti-surrogacy campaigner, I was struck by the supreme irony that the male-derived mouse pup still required a surrogate mother to actually go through pregnancy. 

Once this technology, now in its infancy, develops, it will not be long before the demand for human babies, able to be created without a female genetic parent, begins. In fact, I have previously seen an owner of a surrogacy agency in the US speculating on the very prospect. 

If this seems far-fetched, consider, we live in an age where you can buy women’s eggs from egg banks, have clinics create embryos for you, and have them frozen, shipped abroad and implanted into low-income surrogate mothers halfway around the world — a practice which has, sadly, become normalised to the point of obliviousness. There is apparently a limited ethical brake in operation in many western countries today, and I can well imagine the sob stories in the press in a few decades from now: “I haven’t met a life partner, why shouldn’t I be allowed to have a baby with myself?” and the court cases which will inevitably follow. 

With the British Government now bent on economic growth, whatever the cost, are they likely to halt the developments in a sector which is now worth hundreds of millions to the British economy every year? 

The world at large must wake up to the threats and challenges posed by these developments, and politicians, many of whom have never given any thought to this agenda and its consequences, must at last do so, and not just outsource their thinking and opinions to the HFEA. We could do with the same level of public attention being shown to the future of reproductive technologies as we saw with GM foods. This issue can no longer be left solely to bioethicists and religious groups to monitor and mull over: we all have a duty to acquaint ourselves with this brave new world, and to speak out if we disagree: before it is too late.