A pioneering fertility researcher who is also one of the most famous faces of television science in Britain says he is planning to take his research across the Atlantic to escape the stranglehold of UK red tape. The British press is full of the story (Independent, BBC, Telegraph). The American press has yet to notice it.

The Times says fertility expert Robert Winston’s move “raised fresh concern that the brain drain to the US is being revived by an excessive bureaucracy attached to British science”. Mind you, last year the UK was gloating over all the US scientists who were going to flee oppressive regulations to its shores (Guardian) and there is some debate about whether brain drain is necessarily a bad thing (Ars Technica).

Speaking to journalists at the BA Festival of Science in York yesterday, Lord Winston complained that the Home Office, which oversees animal research in the UK, had taken 13 months to grant him a license to produce transgenic pigs as part of his research into developing organs for xenotransplantation – the transplantation of tissue between species. Then the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs prevented his spin-out company Atazoa from moving the genetically modified pigs to a farm to breed, thus halting work which, according to Winston, “causes absolutely no suffering to the animal and simply allows them a bit of pleasure while they naturally mate” (Guardian). Presumably it provides some scientific insights as well. Winston has previously taken issue with other heads of the UK’s regulatory hydra – notably with his running battle with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (Guardian from 2007, BBC from 2004).

Winston is now applying for US funding to pursue his research in Missouri with collaborators there. In the meantime, those on the organ transplant waiting list are, he says, “literally waiting for someone to have a motorcycle accident and die” (Times again).

Posted on behalf of Mary Muers