Behind the shop that serves as a bar and kiosk on the ground floor of the private Foch hospital in Suresnes (Hauts-de-Seine), the welcoming reception of the Medically Assisted Procreation Service (AMP) promises the best of medicine for these women and couples facing fertility problems. But Professor Marine Poulain, head of the reproductive biology unit, presented a different face this July morning. Returning from Amsterdam, where the annual congress of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) was held at the beginning of July, she noted that the number of women and couples who had recently had to wait for the AMP to be established was 1.5 million. “very few sketches of French research teams”One reason is that the law is more restrictive in France than in Belgium or the United Kingdom, for example, when it comes to research on human embryos.
Another reason for this disadvantage is, less officially, the result of secret pressure exerted against French research teams. Close to certain Catholic circles, the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation, named after the co-discoverer of Down syndrome, is increasing the number of legal proceedings against them. Since 2008, the date of its first appeal, it has asked the courts to annul 61 research authorisations granted by the Agency for Biomedicine (ABM) to scientific teams, mainly from Inserm and the CNRS. It does not matter if the courts prove it wrong nine times out of ten, the result is the same: devastating. “We work on research projects with a sword of Damocles constantly hanging over our heads”says Marine Poulain.
In the latest setback for the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation, the Versailles Administrative Court of Appeal definitively validated on July 2 the authorization granted at the end of 2017 to a Lille team for research on human embryonic stem cells for therapeutic purposes for type 1 diabetes. Almost seven years of a procedure initiated before An administrative tribunal, followed by an appeal and even an appeal to the Council of State, would have been necessary before returning to the Versailles court. The question decided by these judges concerned… the problem of the lack of an address on a form. We are closer to procedural harassment than to the proclaimed objectives of the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation: “to seek, cure, defend, and serve the sick and their families.”
“It’s a disaster”
You have 89.33% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
