Close the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority?

Lord Robert Winston is arguably Britain's most distinguished and certainly most outspoken participant in the IVF debates. Today, he proposed something that will be seen as absolutely outrageous in the rest of the developed world, which admires Britain's HFEA. The HFEA is responsible for all sorts of regulations, research and policymaking in reproductive technology, ranging from the storage of embryos to the selection of sex to the cloning of embryos for stem cell research. Winston says shut them down.

And he has recruited some unlikely allies. The big problem in the critics' eyes is that HFEA believes its own publicity, thinking it cannot really improve much. Because of this, say Winston and others (including Josephine Quintavalle, spokesperson for Comment on Reproductive Ethics), they miss the need for big reforms. What's needed? A great big bioethics committee for HFEA. Hard to see why the HFEA would benefit from that, given that ethics committees of that sort very, very rarely work as intended. But perhaps the British critics of HFEA are as sharp as those who brought that 'brilliant' institution to life.