Lord Alton of Liverpool – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Alton of Liverpool on 2016-02-04.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Prior of Brampton on 27 January (HL5039), whether the recently approved application by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to perform genome editing in human embryos by means of CRISPR-Cas9 will be performed on embryos specifically created for research or only on those considered to be surplus to infertility treatments; whether that research application included any application for the creation of embryos; and if not, why the person responsible requested that reference to surplus embryos should be removed from the research project title.

Lord Prior of Brampton

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has advised that this research project will make use of donated embryos that were originally created for treatment purposes. An application was not made to create embryos for the purposes of this research project.

The removal of ‘surplus’ from the title does not reflect a change in the way embryos will be donated to the research.