Embryo cloning claptrap - is there no limit to public gullibility?

It is one of the unhappier jobs of a doctor to tell a patient she is a victim of false hope. But somebody has to do it, and guide her back to reality and any genuine hope for treatment.

We have read of the Brisbane woman who flew to India to receive injections of “embryonic stem cells” into her spinal injury.

To any medically trained person, this story carries the highest suspicion of fraud. Nowhere in the world has an embryonic stem cell ever been injected into a human, for the very serious reason that they cause tumours when injected into animals. Yet some obscure Indian doctor, whose work is not only inherently absurd - claiming to treat Alzheimer’s, which is the very litmus test of stem cell absurdity - and which breaks the cardinal rule of medical research - that experimental treatment must be judged by medical peers before being used on humans - is treated with seriousness by our media.

If only the media could show judgment in what they get excited about. Yes, the first published trial last year using adult stem cells in human spinal injury does show early benefit and gives ground for cautious excitement, but that is with adult stem cells, which are safely used, according to the journal Nature Biotechnology, in some 80 human conditions. Embryonic stem cells remain both dangerous and unusable in humans.

As it stands, the injured woman has shown only the well-known benefits that come to desperate patients given an expensive placebo, at a stage in the injury when some spontaneous improvement might yet be expected.

As a lecturer in the palliation of advanced disease, I understand how desperate some patients can be for “miracle cures”. They will grasp at anything.

And MPs considering the question of embryo research and cloning have to deal with the same desperate hope from patients.

The cloning lobby knows that its most effective approach is to send patient advocates to MPs to say: “If you don’t vote for cloning, you are keeping my little Johnny in a wheelchair longer.” Yet exactly the opposite is true: any MP who diverts money into the dead-end science of cloning and away from the “galloping horse” of adult stem cell science (as Griffith University Professor Peter Silburn put it to the Senate committee) is quite likely to be delaying the one genuine hope such a child has.

The Federal debate showed how vulnerable some of our MPs are to the emotional blackmail of “don’t stand in the way of a cure”.

One after another, they stood with hand on heart and told the Parliament that people had a right to hope, and that they “could not block the hope of a cure”. Their credulity was touching and pitiful - any disease suffered by any relative became reason enough for them to vote for embryo cloning. Like superstitious peasants they believed the witchdoctors who held out hope of miracle cures. And now, in the midst of the debate, we have this Indian embryonic illusion being given a dream run in the media.

By contrast, listen to the serious scientific judgment of leading Australian stem cell researcher, Professor Alan Mackay-Sim, who told the Senate inquiry (see CA68) (PDF 715KB): “The purpose for using therapeutic cloning can be achieved with adult stem cells.”

Cloning for stem cells is unnecessary. We are getting the great benefits of stem cell research, both for treatment and research, with ethical adult stem cell science.

Just recently we read of a momentous human trial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association using adult stem cells successfully in diabetics - achieving “prolonged insulin independence”. Also recently, corneal blindness cured in a Melbourne man using adult stem cells. That is stunning science, actually helping patients, versus the empty rhetoric of embryonic non-treatments and cloning.

But here is the serious point - that even if there were unique benefits to be had from embryo cloning, we would still have to reject it on ethical grounds alone.

Cloning creates a living human embryo - just like an IVF embryo - which could, like Dolly the sheep, be born as a baby. That central fact was acknowledged by the Lockhart Review and by the Senate Committee. Because it is wrong and inhuman to create embryos with the sole intention of destroying them in research, the Federal leaders of all the major parties rejected cloning last year.

Nevertheless, by one vote in the Senate and a gullible handful in the House, cloning was permitted. State MPs now considering the proposed “national uniform legislation” on cloning must justify this “create in order to destroy” approach to new human embryos. They need to defend legislation which is so degraded and dehumanising as to allow for an aborted baby girl (PDF 231KB) to be used as the “mother” of a cloned embryo.

And there are further inhumanities planned, which can only happen if the first steps in cloning are now permitted by the present generation of politicians. Australian ethicists writing in major journals have already proposed bringing cloned embryos to birth, and far worse, growing cloned embryos to the advanced fetal stage to harvest their organs for transplant (PDF53KB). Cloned fetus farming. Welcome to the brave new hell of cloning.

As the noted Australian jurist Frank Brennan put it recently:

But there is a second Rubicon. That is where we now stand. Beyond this is a city where the scientist is justified in creating human life only so that he might experiment on it and destroy it without the need for any respect of the dignity of that human life.

Will state and territory Parliaments cross that Rubicon, overturning the unanimous ethical judgement of the Parliament only four years ago, and agree to the intentional creation of living human embryos solely for research?

Or will they say “no” to this unnecessary evil, this hype and false hope, and turn instead to stem cell science that is both ethical and magnificently effective?