Pro-cloning lobbyist helping to regulate cloning!

Hard on the heels of renewed controversy about how LMers are colonising the infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment, comes news that Juliet Tizzard has become the Policy Manager of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the government body which, amongst other things, licenses and monitors all human embryo research conducted in the UK.  

Prior to joining HFEA, Tizzard was director of the lobby group, Progress Educational Trust, which 'believes that reproductive and genetic technologies have much to offer' and argues against their regulation. As Tizzard put it, 'our organisation exists to make sure that access to new technologies is not restricted by parliament or by doctors'. PROGRESS, which is even equivocal about human reproductive cloning, enjoys a close relationship with AstraZeneca.

Prior to joining PROGRESS, Tizzard appeared in the Channel 4 TV series Against Nature, which represented environmentalists as Nazis responsible for death and deprivation in the Third World, and argued germline gene therapy and human cloning would liberate humanity from nature.

Subsequent investigations revealed that certain of the programme makers and several key contributors to the series, including Tizzard, had been closely involved with LM. As well as contributing articles to LM, Tizzard has also contributed to the LM network's later fronts: Spiked, and the Institute of Ideas .

Tizzard appears to regard 'spin' as a valid way of overcoming public concerns: 'Three cheers for PPL Therapeutics! Not for their success in cloning pigs (although this is worth at least three cheers), but for their success with the media coverage of those five little piggies. Press coverage in the United Kingdom of the cloned pigs was almost universally positive... Perhaps PPL Therapeutics is just good at media spin. But maybe media spin isn't such a bad thing in science... perhaps instead of spin doctors, what we need is spin scientists!'   

The news that an ideologically-driven pro-cloning lobbyist is working for a Government body 'regulating' cloning came shortly before the news that HFEA has granted a licence to the Roslin Institute, which collaborated with PPL Therapeutics to clone Dolly the Sheep, to create stem cells from human embryos via cloning. 

Tizzard is not the first Furediite to gain entry to the HFEA. HFEA's former Director of Communications was Ann Furedi, wife of the ideological 'Godfather' of the LM network and star of Against Nature, the sociologist Frank Furedi.