World’s first cloned embryo misses the stem cell boat

Australian Christian Lobby

January 2008 Newsletter

Scientists in California announced today they had cloned the world’s first human embryo.

This unethical achievement will almost certainly not help sufferers of Parkinson’s and other diseases, as a breakthrough in November, previously reported in e-news, has rendered cloning human embryos redundant.

Indeed, this caused some of the world’s most prominent advocates for cloning, such as Dolly the sheep cloner professor Ian Wilmut, to walk away from human embryo cloning.

The ethical field of adult stem cells, already streets ahead of embryo stem cells, became the only game in stem cell research when Japanese and American scientists developed a way of turning skin cells in to what are known as pluripotent stem cells – cells that have all the possibilities for curing disease attributed to the hoped-for embryo stem cells.
But this was after the Federal Parliament, and most State Parliaments passed laws in 2006 and 2007 allowing the cloning and destroying of human embryos for stem cell research.

Until today, no cloned human embryos had been produced.

However, the California cloners’ work is outstripped by last November’s ethical stem cell breakthrough.
South Australia, the ACT and Western Australia are the last Australian jurisdictions to consider human cloning laws. Any argument in favour of cloning evaporated last November and this is not changed by today’s announcement.

In an article in this week’s The Australian, emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne, Jack Martin, argued that Australia’s cloning laws should be repealed.