Leading article: The cost of progress

Last year's debate regarding the morality of animal-human hybrid embryos research was extensively aired during the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill through both houses of Parliament.

The legislation, as well as the development of hybrid embryos, was supported by both Gordon Brown and David Cameron. We were told by some of the most eminent medical scientists and scientific bodies, from the Wellcome Trust to the Royal Society, that this research must be allowed to proceed. So the Bill became law and the researchers readied their funding applications – but so far little else has happened.

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Today we report that two out of the three licence holders who are legally permitted to carry out the work on hybrid embryos have had their research proposals turned down, while the third has yet to apply.

Both the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Medical Research Council refuse to explain why they have rejected applications for grants from King's College London and Newcastle University. This is odd because the chief executives of both councils previously urged the Government to support this work.

At the time, it was explained that the creation of hybrid embryos would be pivotal in the development and eventual creation of embryonic stem cells that could be used in transplant medicine. Although the stem cells created from these hybrids would not in themselves be used to treat patients – because of the risk of introducing animal viruses into patients – the knowledge gained from their creation and laboratory culture was deemed essential for the understanding of how similar stem cells could be produced from a patient's own skin cells. This research, we were told, was vital.

For all the lobbying undertaken by the scientific community to prevent a ban, this may emerge as the effective result of the councils' decisions.

It is difficult be believe that there is no hybrid embryo researcher in Britain good enough to warrant a grant, so this episode prompts an obvious question of the tight-lipped funders: why have these scientists been turned down?