New science leaves cloning as dead as Dolly

What Yamanaka did was to take a mouse skin cell and introduce four small proteins which reprogram the cell’s nuclear DNA to make it pluripotent - effectively the same as an embryonic stem cell.

In a classic understatement, Nature comments: “The method is inviting. Whereas cloning with humans was limited by the number of available eggs and by a tricky technique that takes some six months to master, Yamanaka's method can use the most basic cells and can be accomplished with simple lab techniques.”

Cloning has always been promoted as the only way to get embryonic stem cells that exactly match a patient - an exact match because the cloned embryo is the patient’s identical twin. But if that goal of patient-specific pluripotent stem cells is now achieved by Yamanaka’s ethically uncomplicated method, what is left for cloning?

We trust that state MPs will ask tough questions of stem cell researchers who shrug and say that we should “continue to try for human cloning anyway”. This is too profound a social issue to be decided by value-neutral scientists who simply want to “try everything and see where it takes us”.

The fact remains that we must not - and clearly do not have to - resort to the unethical act of creating new embryos solely for research. We do not have to violate the deepest bond of human life - that between mother and offspring - by creating living human embryos that have no natural mother, and are denied any place in the human family. Human procreation must stay human.

The cloning era, which started with a sheep from Scotland, may have effectively ended with a mouse from Japan. Meantime the great things of stem cell science will continue to come through entirely ethical means - adult stem cell research, and now the new Yamanaka technique.

The new, ethical science has come too late for the Federal, Victorian and New South Wales Parliaments: unless they possess that rare quality of being able to admit a mistake and fix it.
For the remaining Parliaments there is only one question: what possible justification is left for legalising cloning?