Written evidence submitted by the Progress Educational Trust (MSI0039)

Human embryos cannot be experimented on in the laboratory for more than 14 days. This limit was proposed in the Government-commissioned Warnock Report of 1984, was incorporated into statute in 1990, and has since been emulated in many other countries around the world.

However, until 2016 the limit was entirely theoretical. No researcher had succeeded in keeping a human embryo alive in the laboratory for much longer than a week.

This changed in May 2016, when Cambridge researcher Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz published papers explaining that she had succeeded in keeping embryos alive in the laboratory for 13 days (at which point the embryos were destroyed in order to comply with the law).

Now that it is scientifically possible to keep embryos alive up to (and beyond?) the legal limit, there have been calls by researchers to extend the limit. Some researchers claim that science and medicine would benefit greatly, if we could learn more about the so-called 'black box' phase that covers the third and fourth weeks of human embryo development.

Such an extension of the limit would require primary legislation. The time is right for the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee to scrutinise the issue in an Inquiry.

January 2017