It developed that I was actually involved [in the legislation], and I'll tell you how. That was because my director had a very serious car accident. He had a whiplash and was completely out of the running. And at that point, he said, Christine you have to do it, you have to go in the government's think tank and think about the law. I thought, whoa, I didn't know that I could do that. I spoke Dutch, but not that well. But there was nobody else at that point, so I did it, and it was very interesting to help formulate the first law that governed embryo research. It was called the Embryo Law in the Netherlands. There was a very charming and very smart Minister of Health at this time. Her name was Els Borst and she was very driven for a number of quite, you could say left wing, articles of legislation. One of them was to get human embryos available for research, the other was euthanasia, and those are two areas where the Dutch government and the Netherlands are seen as being extremely liberal, but basically the embryonic stem cell law, or the Embryo Law as we call it, was following the UK guidelines.

[The Embryo Law was] after the UK guidelines, but it takes about ten years to make a law. It was at the point that the law was written and it was going to go to the lower house, and at this point, what had happened while this whole process was going on, in 1998 Jamie Thomson had indeed derived the first human embryonic stem cells with Ben Rubinoff, Alan Trounson, and Martin Pera hard on his heels, just too late, but hard on his heels.

Dr. Christine Mummery is a professor of developmental biology at Leiden University and head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology at the Leiden University Medical Center. Her work specializes in stem cell biology, cardiovascular development, and developmental biology.

In 1974, she received her Bachelor of Science degree in physics, electronics, and mathematics from the University of Nottingham, UK and in 1978 received her PhD in biophysics from the University of London, UK for her research at King’s College London. She received a post-doctoral fellowship at the Royal Society, UK from 1978 to 1980, and in 1981 continued her fellowship at the Hubrecht Institute working with carcinoma cells. In 1985, she was appointed to a tenured staff scientist working on developmental biology and differentiation.

In 2011, Dr. Mummery founded the iPSC&OoC Hotel facility in the Leiden University Medical Center. From 2009 to 20019, she was the head of the department of Anatomy and Embryology at Leiden University and guest professor at the University of Twente from 2015 to 2023. She was president of the ISSCR from 2020 to 2021 and is the founding editor of its journal, Stem Cell Reports.

Dr. Mummery has received several awards for her work in developmental biology, including the 2014 Hugo van de Poelgeest Prize for Animal Alternatives, the 2014 Hans Biomendaal Medal for innovative interdisciplinary research, being an elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2015 and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010, the 2021 Fondation Lefoulon Delalande-Institut de France prize for cardiovascular physiology, and the ISSCR Public Service Award in 2023.