To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Earl Howe on 6 February 2014 (WA 76) and the Written Statement by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health, Jane Ellison, on 17 December 2014 (HC Deb, cols 96–7WS), whether an enucleated embryo being unable to survive without nuclear DNA necessarily implies that both steps of the different processes described in Regulations 4 and 7 must be completed in their entirety in order to generate the permitted egg or embryo referred to in Regulations 3(a) and 6(a) respectively of the Draft Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Mitochondrial Donation) Regulations 2015; and if not, whether they will describe how individual eggs or embryos that have been enucleated might be used directly in infertility treatment as egg P or embryo P.
Answered on
22 January 2015
Enucleated eggs and embryos are, in themselves, non-viable and, therefore, cannot be used for the treatment of infertility. The different processes used to generate a permitted egg or embryo, referred to in Regulations 4 and 7, will be completed in their entirety.