Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, with reference to the letter from the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health to Lord Alton of Liverpool of 30 October 2014, if he will place in the Library a full copy of the correspondence between members of the expert panel convened by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and the Zhang research group referred to in that letter.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has advised that neither its members or executive have been in correspondence with the authors of the abstract referred to. However, a member of the Expert Panel convened by the HFEA had an email exchange with one of the authors regarding this abstract, which confirmed that the research group did not publish any further detail or follow up to this study. It would not be appropriate for a copy of this private correspondence to be placed in the Library.