Professor Colin McGuckin, professor of regenerative medicine at Newcastle University and the UK’s leading scientist working on stem cells derived from babies' umbilical cord blood, has announced that he is leaving Newcastle University for the University of Lyon, France, with a research team of ten, because his work is not being supported in the UK. Professor McGuckin is an international expert in the fields of stem cell biology (cord blood and adult), tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
This is a great loss to British science, especially at a time when the Government is rushing through unethical legislation on embryonic stem cell research and animal human hybrids. Professor McGuckin commented on the Government priorities, how money was being poured into embryonic stem-cell research above work with adult stem cells, despite the more immediate clinical benefits offered by his work.
Professor McGuckin said that France had kept a "much more reasoned balance" between supporting adult and embryonic stem-cell research, unlike the UK, which had focused on embryonic research to the detriment of adult stem-cell research. He added, "You would barely know that adult stem cells exist at Newcastle." He went on to say that "Cord blood has already cured around 10,000 people, but despite this much of the UK stem cell funding goes towards other types of stem cells including embryonic stem cells, which are not expected to cure people in the next 50 years. Value for public money demands that this is addressed and patients get what they need."
It is not the first time Newcastle has experienced a loss of top stem-cell researchers to the Continent. Professor McGuckin joined Newcastle after his predecessor Miodrag Stojkovic took his pioneering work on stem cells to Spain in 2006.
Newcastle University has already been in the news this year as Professor Alison Murdoch there claims her created the country's first human-animal hybrid embryo - despite the fact that the legality of the creation of such embryos was only being debated in Parliament and is still not law. The validity of Alison Murdoch's licence to create the animal human hybrid is being challenged in law by the Christian Legal Centre.
Professor McGuckin is planning to open the world’s biggest institute devoted to cord blood and adult stem-cell research at Lyon.
Stem cell ethics groups said his departure would create a "huge hole" in Newcastle's research portfolio and another leading scientist, Anthony Hollander, a professor of tissue engineering at the University of Bristol, agreed funding was unbalanced.