From the rather scant information available (the story having garnered little media attention), it appears that this week’s parliamentary debate on the Government’s mitochondrial donation bill followed a pretty familiar script. That script was written around four hundred years ago—in 1633, to be precise—and featured an ageing Galileo standing defiantly before the Roman Inquisition as it charged him with the crime of heresy for suggesting that the Earth moves round the Sun, rather than the other way about. According to one popular staging of the play, the guilty verdict was met with the words Eppur si muove—‘and yet it moves’—a rebellious assertion of science’s truth in the teeth of religious totalitarianism. But that’s likely a bit of melodrama inserted by Enlightenment boosters.

To be fair to our parliamentarians, the debate on the Mitochondrial Donation Law Reform (Maeve’s Law) Bill 2021 was not completely devoid of nuance, the Government having allowed MPs to vote according to their consciences, and thus to argue according to their intellects as opposed to their party managers. Some who rose to express concerns that scientists should not ‘play God’ did find it in themselves to support the bill. Liberal MP Julian Leeser, for example, claimed to have consulted religious leaders before deciding to support the proposed legislation. Nevertheless, when such concerns were raised, they tended to be raised from a religious perspective. In this sense, and good tempered though it was, the debate was a fairly standard example of the science-v-religion genre.