Lord Winston speaks out against 'blinkered' regulations

Lord Robert Winston has accused “blinkered” regulations of holding up his research aimed at creating transgenic organs for transplantation.

Lord Winston, a past president of the BA, has spoken of “blinkered” regulations of holding up his research

Speaking at the BA (British Association for the Advancement of Science) Festival of Science last month, he also called for more public consultation about ways of increasing the supply of organs for transplantation.

“One of the biggest problems in Britain is the regulatory framework,” he said. “It’s been very difficult to get this work going.”

Winston’s work is based around trying to genetically modify pigs so that their organs can be transplanted into humans. He works with minipigs which, at an adult weight of 100kg, produce organs of the right size to transplant into humans. “We can inject the gene construct using an appropriate virus directly into the testes, or we can remove the stem cells from the testes, modify them and replace them,” he said.

Either way, the method has the advantage that the pigs can then mate naturally to produce transgenic offspring. However, the Home Office took 13 months to issue a licence to allow the pigs to be injected and the scientists were refused permission to mate the animals.

The consequence was that the team couldn’t demonstrate that we had actually got the appropriate gene target in the right place and that it was expressing in the offspring. Defra (the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) refused permission because of an EU directive which does not allow the animals to be returned to their farm for mating.

He said the UK and EU delays had forced him to take the project to the US. If other researchers followed, he added, a potential loss of intellectual property for the UK could result.
“One of the issues for British science that we need to consider is that, with work like this, which is of potentially high value to human medicine, it does seem rather blinkered not to allow work which causes absolutely no suffering to the animal, and simply allows them a bit of natural pleasure while they mate.”