After months of often impassioned public debate Germany’s Bundestag has voted to liberalise the nation’s law on research involving embryonic stem cells. Researchers say that the change will allow them to more effectively compete—and collaborate—internationally.
The revised law, approved on 11 April, will allow German scientists to import stem cell lines derived from embryos before 1 May 2007, although the process to derive stem cells will still be banned in Germany. Under the old law the import cut-off date was 1 January 2002, meaning that scientists had access to only about 40 outdated stem cell lines. Now they will be able to work with more than 400 lines.
Jürgen Hescheler, head of the Institute of Neurophysiology at the University of Cologne and president of the German Society for Stem Cell Research, said that he would have preferred no cut-off date. But he admitted that he was happy with the compromise: “You can’t always get everything you want. Now we can work with scientists in other countries who are using newer lines.”
Resistance to the revision of the law from pro-life groups was intense, particularly the Catholic church, whose top officials in recent months argued loudly against the change. All German political parties called the matter a vote of conscience and did not put pressure on party members.
The final vote cut across party lines, with 346 members voting in favour of the change, 228 against, and six abstaining. A proposal to allow imports of stem cell lines with no cut-off date restriction drew only 126 votes in favour, and a proposal for a complete ban of embryonic stem cell research had only 118 supporters. The defeat of those proposals allowed the compromise proposal with the 2007 cut-off date.
A key figure in the passage of the new law was the research minister, Annette Schavan, a conservative Catholic with a doctoral degree in theology, who surprised many—and angered Catholic church officials—when last autumn she announced her support for a one-off relaxation of imports. She argued that the change was needed to keep German science globally competitive, and she had strong backing from industry leaders.
Chancellor Angela Merkel had remained almost silent on the issue for the past few months but voted in favour of the change with 101 fellow members of the Christian Democratic Union and its sister party the Christian Social Union, while 113 party colleagues voted against.
Miodrag Stojkovic, now deputy director of the Prince Felipe Research Centre in Valencia, Spain, said that the revision of the law is “very important” for German scientists. Dr Stojkovic, a native of Serbia with German citizenship, left Germany in 2002 for the United Kingdom because of its more liberal laws on stem cell research, taking a position at Newcastle University.
He said that some German colleagues would prefer to be able to derive their own stem cell lines, as is possible in the UK, Spain, and some other nations. “The new law will be helpful in keeping young researchers in Germany, but it will not stop all of them from leaving,” he said.