The Bishop of Elphin, Kevin Doran, has said the Church is totally opposed to bio-medical research that reduces embryos purely to research material to be experimented on and destroyed. He was speaking after researchers in the USA used embryos in such a manner to develop gene-editing techniques to remove mutations linked to heart disease.

Bishop Doran, who is chair of the Catholic Bishops’ Consultative Group on Bioethics and Life Questions, said – as part of the research – human embryos were “being deliberately generated under laboratory conditions with a higher than average risk of congenital heart disease”. They were being “deprived of any other purpose than to be used for research and then disposed of”, he said. He cited a recent charter for healthcare workers released by the Vatican that it was “gravely immoral to sacrifice a human life for therapeutic ends”. That charter stated: “To create embryos with the intention of destroying them, even with the intention of helping the sick, is completely incompatible with human dignity, because it makes the existence of a human being at the embryonic stage nothing more than a means to be used and destroyed.”