For many years now in Britain, a governmental body has strictly regulated all work involving embryos. Clark Boyd turns his attention to Britain's Human Fertility and Embryology Authority, which some scientists consider a model for how the U.S. should regulate this field of research.

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British writer Aldous Huxley painted a grim picture of mankind's genetic future in his 1932 novel Brave New World, read here by actor Michael York.

Reading from Brave New World: "The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale, corpse-colored rubber. Bent over their instruments, 300 fertilizers were plunged."

Huxley imagined a London where human embryos are created and manipulated by scientists.

Reading from Brave New World: "Under the microscopes, their long tails furiously lashing, the spermatozoa were burrowing into eggs. And fertilized, the eggs were expanding, dividing. And there in the crimson darkness, stewingly warm on their cushion of peritoneum, gorged with blood-surrogate and hormones, the fetuses grew and grew."

Huxley's dark vision aside, Britain has been a world leader in embryo science over the years. Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby, was born in Britain in 1978.

Suzi Leather: "That was clearly a revolution in science, but it was also a revolution in ethical thinking, in how we were going to publicly control this new scientific endeavor."

Suzi Leather chairs the organization that regulates work on embryos in Britain.

Leather: "The ability to create a human embryo outside the body, this had huge benefits for infertile couples. But the very ability to create an embryo outside the body enabled scientists to do research work on the early embryo. And then the question for society was, was it right that scientists should be able to do this?"

In the 1980s, the British government convened a special committee to formally address that question. That committee sat for two years.

It eventually decided two things. First, scientists could, ethically, use early embryos for research purposes. But second, that any such research work should be strictly regulated.

The British Parliament agreed. In 1990, it created the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority. That's the organization Suzi Leather chairs.

Leather: "They set up the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority to control what scientists and doctors could do, to ensure that what scientists are doing in the lab and clinics up and down the country was in keeping with what parliament had decided were proper uses of human embryos, and so the public could have confidence that embryos were only being put to good use."

British scientists, and a majority of the British public, applauded Parliament's decision. And then in the 1990s, embryonic stem cell research took off in Britain. Parliament decided that human embryonic stem cell work should fall under the control of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, or HFEA.

Stephen Minger runs the stem cell biology lab at Kings College, London. He left the University of Kentucky in 1996, to live and work in Britain.

Minger: "Stem cell research has been a real strength in this country, and I think the government saw that."

Three years ago, Minger's lab was one of the first awarded a license to generate embryonic stem cells. He hopes to use those cells to develop cures for Parkinson's Disease, diabetes, and heart problems. He says the British system is a bit bureaucratic, but that it works.

Minger: "It's created a very transparent, but tightly regulated process in this country, where if you want to work with human embryonic stem cells, you have to have a license from the HFEA to do that. I think it provides a real fertile environment for this kind of work."

The HFEA licenses ALL embryonic stem cell work, in both the public and private sectors.

In every case, the Authority says it asks tough questions: is the research necessary and desirable? Could animal embryos be used instead? Are there other ways to achieve the same ends?

Peter Mountford is the CEO of Stem Cell Sciences, Ltd., a private company with offices in Edinburgh, Scotland. Mountford says that the regulatory process puts the British public at ease with embryonic stem cell research.

Mountford: "I think the public is reassured by the regulatory environment, that the government ensures that science progresses properly, and with dignity and respect with what is required. In the US, we find it quite strange that companies can do what they want to do, and not really be answerable to anyone with respect to what they're doing."

But embryonic stem cell research has its critics in Britain.

Scolding: "There is no way of obtaining human embryonic stem cells without destroying the embryo, and the human embryo is a human life."

Neil Scolding is a neuroscientist at the University of Bristol.

Scolding: "It might be a very early life, and sometimes it's difficult to argue whether it's a person or not. What is always is, right from the beginning, is a human individual, and to destroy a human individual, regardless of the potential benefit, is something that medicine has always previously rejected, and I think it should still be rejected."

And that viewpoint, some argue, is given short shrift by the HFEA. For each license application, the Authority convenes a committee of lay people and scientists to assess that application. That committee spends months examining the scientific and ethical ramifications of the proposed work. It then decides whether to let the work go ahead.

But it's the make-up of such committees that bothers Michael Jarmulovicz. He's a spokesman for the Guild of Catholic Doctors in Britain.

Jarmulovicz: "Although on paper it may look that we have this regulatory body that looks at all the issues and makes sensible decisions, they have, in effect, chosen people who accept the science of embryo research. So, straightaway, all their decisions are going to be biased, because all the people sitting on that committee have no ethical problems with the research. What we've always been arguing right from the first day is that you need to have a balanced committee, now it may well be the committee goes against the minority view, but at least that view can be heard, can be debated, can be discussed, and a different decision could've been reached."

Despite such criticisms, the HFEA has become a model for other countries. Canada and France, for example, have set up systems based, at least in part, on the British one. Again, Stephen Minger of Kings College, London.

Minger: "I think the UK has done a number of things correctly. It's no small thing for us as scientists that we have sustained and unequivocal government support. I mean to have the Prime Minister get up and say we want Britain to be a leading center for stem cell research.American researchers would die for that."

Minger says the real issue for Britain is keeping up with other countries to the East that have quickly become competitive in the field. South Korea, Singapore and China have been investing hundreds of millions of dollars in stem cell research. He says if Britain doesn't start putting more money into its own effort, the stem cell cures of the future will come from Asia, not Great Britain.