Sir

I believe that the crisis facing embryo research in the United States is a great deal more serious than your news item “US biologists wary of move to view embryos as human beings” (Nature 420, 3–4; 200210.1038/420003a) portrayed it. The Bush administration's clear intent is to establish a legal precedent for declaring embryos to be people from the moment of conception. If this effort succeeds, all research on embryos in the United States could cease.

Assurances that the changes are intended only to protect pregnant women are obvious falsehoods. If that were the case, the new remit would emphasize “pregnant women”, not “pregnant women, embryos, and fetuses”. These assurances have been made by the deputy assistant secretary of the Health and Human Services (HHS) department, Arthur Lawrence, reported in The Washington Post (30 October 2002, page A1), as well as by HHS spokesman Bill Hall, as reported in your News story. Any doubts about the political motivation of these changes should be settled by the Bush administration's stated intention, also reported in The Washington Post's article, to place on the new HHS committee Mildred Jefferson — a founder and past president of the National Right to Life Committee.

Adherents of the US 'right to life' movement have made backdoor attempts at legislation before. A proposal to declare conception as the beginning of legal personhood by constitutional amendment has been floating around for many years. Even the amendment's supporters concede that it has no chance of ratification, however, so attempts proliferate to obtain by executive fiat that which is unobtainable by straightforward appeal to US citizens. Given the results of the 5 November elections, we can expect more such attempts in the near future.

The biomedical community and patients' advocacy groups should harbour no illusions about what is at stake. The goal of certain elements in US politics is to have balls of undifferentiated cells legally defined as people. From that beginning, the argument that a ball of cells cannot give informed consent, and therefore cannot be a test subject, is a short and inescapable step away.