Thank God for tampering with nature

`Professor Gosden is the single person who most embodies the stupidity of our irrational fears about science'

IT'S CERTAINLY tough being a pioneering scientist. One day you're a hero, the next you're a villain. Professor Roger Gosden, who has masterminded the restoration of 30-year-old Margaret Lloyd-Hart's fertility, is celebrated today, even though research related to this heroic stuff was banned a few years ago amid unflattering comparisons between Gosden and Mengele and his receipt of much hate mail addressed to Dr Frankenstein.

Gosden himself is thoroughly fed up with what he calls Britain's "bioangst" and is decamping to Canada, where he will wrestle with the intricacies of the frozen storage and transportation of ovarian tissue, which is unsurprisingly hard to come by and therefore highly prized.

Professor Gosden believes that the use of ovarian tissue from aborted female foetuses is the sensible solution to this shortage and it is this belief which has made him the centre of heated controversy in the past.

His latest triumph, however, skirts this moral maze because the ovarian tissue implanted in Lloyd-Hart is her own, frozen after surgical removal due to an operation which sought to alleviate a "hormone-related medical complaint" and saved simply because she'd lost one ovary already and she didn't like the idea of just throwing her last one away.

Professor Gosden also saved and froze the ovaries of three-year-old Harriet Selka, whose operation against cancer would have rendered her infertile were she not able to have her ovaries reimplanted when she is older. Professor Gosden would like routine removal of ovarian tissue from women undergoing medical procedures which risk infertility as a side effect, and perfectly sensible this seems too.

But the possibilities, of course, don't stop there. The removal, storage and later replacement of ovarian tissue offers the prospect of maintaining female fertility for a lifetime, cutting out the natural process of the menopause in a far more decisive manner than the presently popular hormone replacement therapy, and allowing women to bear children later in life.

Professor Gosden, who is deeply religious and was an elder of the Church of Scotland when he was based in Edinburgh, doesn't have a problem with this, although his belief is that his techniques would not result in women choosing to have babies very late in life but would mainly assist women caught short by the menopause who want to have children in their forties and fifties.

He's an interesting man, one of those Victorian-style combinations of morality and pragmatism who assumes that everyone else is much like him. So while he is broadly against abortion, he sees no problem with using foetal material to promote fertility because it is otherwise wasted. Such matters as a child growing up to discover that their biological mother was an aborted foetus, he does not have much time for. For him life is the thing, its quality, its extension, its promotion. Living a life as the child of a person who never existed, must always be better than not living at all.

Likewise, in the case of elderly mothers, anyone's mother can die at any stage in one's life. Just because a woman can give no guarantee that she will live to see her child reach adulthood, does not mean that she should be denied the opportunity to create a new life.

All of this love of life and humanity is what makes it so odd that Gosden has been cast by so many people as a force of darkness. In a sense he is the single person who most embodies the stupidity of our irrational fears about science, and our assumption that there's always a host of people circling around, ready to take scientific advancements and turn them into crimes against moral decency. Of course, this is largely because these fears are at their most wild when they are turned to the matter of reproduction technology, even when the technology in question is directed at plants or animals, not humans.

So while the least controversial of Gosden's breakthroughs is that we are now equipped with the means of avoiding menopause perhaps indefinitely, even this is likely to provoke a note of hysteria among women and men. While no one, surely, will object to the idea of restoring the fertility of women who reach menopause at an early age, even women who wish to have the treatment without necessarily bearing children are likely to come in for criticism.

The most vocal harbinger of HRT doom has been Germaine Greer whose book The Change implored women to chuck away their pills and patches and embrace the end of reproduction instead. HRT had not agreed with Germaine, so she was certainly not going to agree with it.

In promotion of her ideas about growing old gracefully, Greer went through a brief period of shuffling around looking rough. Her point was that women want HRT in the way they want plastic surgery, to make them appear younger and more attractive in line with dreadful male demands on women.

So while fighting off the menopause can be seen as a sensible way to protect women against the ravages of an old age they were not biologically designed to experience, or as a ground-breaking way of promoting greater equality between the sexes - we have long complained that men can carry on having children throughout their lives, there will be many, Greer among them, who view this as sinister. It could be argued that all the choice of avoiding menopause will deal out to women is the opportunity for them to stay barefoot and pregnant for more of their lives, and become old and unvalued and ugly for less of it.

Greer no doubt thinks little of the humanitarian claims of the good doctor Gosden, and probably classes him along with the male doctors who have spent the last third of the century engaged in "an orgy of slashing and burning". Certainly she will see him as the product of a society which "fails to value older women" although another of today's triumphant men will find it hard to see where she's coming from.

The man in question, 63-year-old John Taylor, has just won a ruling in the European court of human rights which says that it is unlawful for the British Government to discriminate against men in the award of cold weather payments, which like pensions, accrue to women when they are 60 and men when they are 65.

While it is amazing that this discriminatory system still stands at all, the fact is that while it would be more sensible to adjust this anomaly to make both men and women able to claim at 60, fiscal demands are likely to lead eventually to a pegging for both sexes at 65.

All the more need for as much help as Professor Gosden can give us then. As human longevity increases, female reproduction choices narrow. In the past a woman was fertile for more than half of her life. Now she is fertile for barely a third of it. Largely we have science to thank for our longer, healthier lives. So the idea that Gosden-style tamperings are "unnatural" don't hold water. Now that science has created longer lifespans, it has turned to augmenting the options we have in that lifetime.

While the prospect of a 65-year-old woman giving birth just in time to qualify for cold-weather payments is charming in its absurdity, the truth is closer to Professor Gosden's own feeling. Which is that humans will not on the whole abuse the advances that reproductive technology can bring, and that those who shout about "unnatural science" have somehow failed to notice that being natural just doesn't come naturally to humans.