So by the time I came to my last campaign at the Royal Society, it was on stem cells, again... well, stem cells surfaced, I finished on November 30th 2000. Before I left, we had managed to get a Bill through Parliament allowing the use of stem cells. Now this again... this happened only in Britain. Only in Britain are we allowed to... there are a few other countries. In Germany, it's totally forbidden, in the States it's not allowed because Bush will only allow certain cell lines to be used for stem cells, it's all very limited. There are one or two other countries contemplating it. It may be one of the smaller countries, it may have been in Holland that they allow it now. Now this again goes back... it's the same sort of pattern that's happened with global warming. When I was on Council in 1989/90 the issue came up of experimentation with embryos, and I've forgotten how it all surfaced, but people wanted to find out whether you could... you could do research on animals of course, but this would now be on human embryos, and so... we managed to – we produced a paper – it had been debated – this... is all to do with IVF and people like that, and what do you do with cells which have been fertilised and they don't implant, surplus cells they're called, and from which you could produce an embryo, blasocysts and things of that sort, in the early stages of development for implantation into the uterus.

It turned out people were woefully ignorant of this. A member of the House of Lords, a lady member, thought a test tube, we call them test tube babies, she really thought that you actually implanted the ovum, you fertilised it, and you grew it in a test tube, you grew a whole embryo in a test tube, so they hadn't realised they get implanted into the womb, and the ignorance was appalling. But... they set up a commission called the Warnock Commission which was to allow work on this sort of thing, and Anne McLaren who is a very distinguished embryologist... we discussed all this and the French were discussing this and... but they never got anywhere, and so we decided to produce a paper. I was on Council and she suggested we should argue in Parliament with the Warnock Commission, through the Warnock Committee, that experimentation on human embryos should be permitted up to 14 days. But we were looking for a time table... obviously you can't do it on foetuses which are really pretty big, and I realised from listening to the public that most people don't know the difference [between] an embryo and a foetus. They think the embryo is a little homunculus. Ann MacLaren suggested that we choose 14 days, because that's the day in which a primitive streak, the origin of the nervous system, begins to appear, so before that, it was quite interesting discussions, because, you know, Aquinas had said that the soul only enters the body at 40 days. I've forgotten the name of the Pope in 1859. The Pope, of course... there was a new biology, he thought, life begins not at 40 days, but at conception. Of course, he was right, and this changed the teaching of the Catholic Church. So there were all sorts of side issues one had to learn about.