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Nobel winner criticises Catholic Church over hybrid embryos

Britain's latest winner of the medicine Nobel prize has criticised the Catholic Church for misrepresenting and exaggerating the dangers posed by research on animal-human hybrid embryos.

Cardinal Keith O'Brien, president of the Bishops' Conference of Scotland, made headlines when he said that such research is "an unprecedented attack on the sanctity and dignity of human life" and could lead to the creation of hybrid babies ("If animal-embryos are allowed to be kept for 14 days - why not 14 weeks or 28 weeks?"). The experiments were of "Frankenstein proportions".

"I am astonished," says Prof Sir Martin Evans, stem cell pioneer and Director of the School of Biosciences, Cardiff University, who believes that research, such as this week's news of the creation of cow-human hybrid embryos in Newcastle, is crucial for efforts to work out the science of how embryos work, which will lay the foundation for many future treatments.

"To be honest, I think the whole thing is a non event. There have been human animal cell hybrids made for many years," he says "Cellular hybrids have a long history and noone has ever looked at these issues before - raising new issues of human dignity and things of this sort shows ignorance, quite honestly."

Full story at the Daily Telegraph.