Juliet Tizzard

Juliet Tizzard is the Policy Manager of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), a non-departmental Government body which, amongst other things, licenses and monitors all human embryo research being conducted in the UK.

Prior to joining HFEA Tizzard was director of the Progress Educational Trust where she started as the Administrator at PROGRESS in April 1998. PROGRESS was established to promote the benefits of reproductive and genetic science and 'believes that reproductive and genetic technologies have much to offer'.

At PROGRESS Tizzard was also Editor-in-chief of BioNews - its free weekly digest of news, sponsored by AstraZeneca and covering IVF, cloning, embryo research, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, gene therapy and prenatal genetic diagnosis. 

Prior to joining PROGRESS Tizzard appeared in the Channel 4 TV series Against Nature, which represented environmentalists as Nazis responsible for death and deprivation in the Third World, and germline gene therapy and human cloning will liberate humanity from nature.

Subsequent investigations revealed that certain of the programme makers and several key contributors to the series, including Tizzard, had been closely involved with a magazine called LM some of whose more controversial articles sought to excuse or deny acts of horrific violence.   One notorious LM article denied the Rwandan genocide, winning the condemnation of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center. The magazine was finally sued out of existence after an article falsely accused journalists working for news broadcaster ITN of fabricating evidence of war crimes in Bosnia. 

Tizzard is part of the LM network which argues 'for interfering with nature at every opportunity in order to improve the human condition' via infertility treatment and genetic engineering ('Nature's not good enough', Living Marxism, Issue 66, April 1994). LM's science editor John Gillott works for the Genetic Interest Group which works closely with PROGRESS. Both Gillott and Tizzard have been on the staff of the online clinical genetics resource Genepool.

Tizzard sees IVF as a way of not just helping couples who can't conceive naturally but as a way of escaping the tyrrany of nature. As she wrote in an article in the magazine  LM, 'What would be so wrong with a woman using science to avoid having a baby just because nature dictates it...?' Genetic technologies are viewed in a similar light.  

As well as contributing articles to LM, Tizzard has also contributed to the LM network's later fronts: Spiked, and the Institute of Ideas (I of I). She also wrote a chapter for the I of I publication, Designer Babies: Where Should We Draw The Line? (Institute of Ideas/Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).