Gordon Brown has now announced a partial free vote on the Chimera, sorry, animal-human hybrid legislation. I'm no expert in this field, but here are a couple of links:
Peter Saunders blog at the Christian Medical Fellowship. Here's an extract from his post on embryonic research:
It is now nine years since the publication of the 1999 Donaldson Report, on which the government based its current policy on stem cells. Embryonic stem cells were apparently going to provide miracle cures for people with degenerative diseases like Parkinsons, Diabetes and Alzheimers. Immunologically compatible stem cells were going to be produced by therapeutic cloning, the same technology that produced Dolly the sheep.
Nine years is a long time in science. What has happened since? Human embryonic stem cells are yet to provide a single therapy for any human disease. Scientists are yet to produce a single stem cell line from a cloned human embryo.
Wikepedia has a section on 'stem cell controversy', which seems to have some good background.
Here's what The White House is prepared to fund. No discussion of hybrids, they draw the line at cloning and creating embryos specifically for research purposes.
There is a CofE policy paper here from a couple of years ago. 20 pages, so give yourself time to read it.
Helpful Q&A section at the Guardian, which outlines the main areas of research that the legislation is aimed at.
And Bishop Alan asks 5 critical questions.
Lots of other good links on this at Thinking Anglicans
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