I think one of the things was it was an advantage to be a female because we were talking about what you're going to do with IVF embryos, even if they're left over, and what man could stand there in all honesty and say, I'm going to say we can use these to make embryonic stem cells. I never took a moral standpoint. I just said, these are going in the rubbish and I am perfectly fine with using something for something potentially useful, something that's being discarded. The argument was, well, it's not your rubbish bin, is it? So I said, that's perfectly true, but what I always wanted was people to argue on facts and not on misconceptions and there's nothing wrong with having a point of view that may be against doing this type of research.

In fact, there was a Catholic university who actually we had low chances of doing IVF because they only wanted to have two embryos max. Well, it reduces the chances, but we had tens of thousands of leftover embryos in the Netherlands because of the IVF program and in total to make five human embryonic stem cell lines, we used a hundred, so a fraction.

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.