Purposive Interpretation and the March of Genetic Technology

Extract

Thirty years ago the Australian High Court described the law as “marching with medicine but in the rear and limping a little” (Mount Isa Mines v. Pusey (1970) 125 C.L.R. 383). Today this maybe an apt description of the lag between law and recent advances in genetic technology. In R. (Quintavalle) v. Secretary of State for Health [2003] UKHL 13, [2003] 2 W.L.R. 692 the applicants asked the court to declare whether embryos created by cell nuclear replacement (“CNR”) (a form of human cloning involving an enucleated human egg and a cell from a donor's body) were regulated under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, which was passed in an era when embryos were only ever created by fertilisation of an egg by a sperm.