The only real perspectives I have is:

1. As a Patient. I myself have a hereditary bone marrow disease which, without treatment would by now see me using a wheelchair in constant pain and well on my way to an early and rather gruesome death.

Thanks to some rather amazing medical research and the great luck to be born in a country where the health service pays around £100,000 per year for my treatment, the outlook is dramatically different and I am expected to live a full and healthy life. I have very direct experience of how the advancement of medical science can transform lives and so this is not entirely an academic question for me.

2. As a Parent. We have three young children and if they were suffering from a condition which could be helped via this kind of research I know how passionately I would want to see them benefit.

Also as a Parent I have to consider at what point in development and embryo really becomes a life? I don't pretend that this switches on at some point like a light bulb, so unless you go with the 'at conception' view then some time frame has to be chosen and for me an embryo of a few days is not a conscious life. At the same time 24 weeks seems very late to abort and I would certainly want to see everything in place to help avoid such late terminations wherever possible.

Politicians seem to thrive on packaging complex issues as simple choices, but certainly with this issue it is far from simple... and I don't pretend to know anything other than very superficial facts.

See Scott's profile


The Panel