The Catholic Church's opposition to research on human embryos presented Gordon Brown with the threat of resignation by three Catholic Cabinet ministers, who opposed key clauses of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill now before Parliament. The Prime Minister has now relented under pressure and allowed a free "conscience" vote. But easing the consciences of Cabinet ministers, good though that may be, was never the heart of the matter. The Church's ultimate objective has to be the winning of the argument itself. The recent Catholic tendency to resolve difficult ethical issues by resorting to authoritative rulings may be a source of strength in other respects. In this context it is a source of weakness.

Take the case described in our pages today by Mary Seller, a distinguished geneticist and an Anglican priest and theologian. If it became law, the embryology bill would allow - or continue to allow, given that such research is going on - an entity known as a "cybrid" to be produced by inserting a nucleus from an adult human skin cell into an animal ovum. This would undergo development for four to five days until the inner cell mass arises, from which stem cells will be harvested and later used for research into the treatment of serious diseases. It calls into question the naming of this entity a human embryo and the Church's condemnation of embryonic research on that basis. How has that skin cell become a human being, with human rights? Neither a human ovum nor sperm was involved in its creation.

Faced with an analogous uncertainty concerning the moral status of the early embryo itself, Pope John Paul II ruled in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae of 1995 that human life, so to speak, had to be given the benefit of the doubt. If it was wrong to destroy something that was human, it was equally wrong to destroy something that might be. But the uncertainty here is philosophical or even semantic rather than factual. That makes his conclusion less obvious than it seems. Scientists may well ask, when life-saving treatments might emerge from the research, why giving human life the benefit of the doubt doesn't switch the burden of proof in the other direction.

Similarly, embryologists have questioned the Church's argument that, as the late pope put it, an early embryo possesses "absolute unique singularity" from its first moment, and hence does not differ in essence from a fully formed foetus. This uniqueness seems to be logically contradicted by the fact that the early embryo can divide, into twins or more, up to 14 days after fertilisation. When does each twin's unique existence date from?

Evangelium Vitae was designed to close down such arguments, with the threat of sanctions against dissent. Indeed, it caused some theologians to transfer to safer work. But the cost of suppressing debate is that the Church is ill prepared to defend its ground in new situations, even more so when science poses challenges - like the cybrid - hitherto unforeseen. The answers will not come from canon lawyers but from theologians, philosophers and scientists engaged in open debate. Only if the answers are convincing in those terms will the Church - and Catholic politicians - be able to persuade public opinion and win the debate in Parliament.

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