Page 934 - Week 03 - Thursday, 3 April 2008
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The breakthrough, in November 2007, simply bears that out. It was a quantum leap. It was something which probably had not been completely scientifically proven until recently, although it made eminent sense to lay people like me. It is quite clear that science has taken it further and in an ethical way. All the moral issues around using human embryos and all of the problems with other types of experimentation go out the window in terms of any justifiable need. It can be done in an ethical way. When you look at it logically, using adult stem cells I think would probably be far more effective in medical terms than in terms of a little embryo.
We have all heard of Dolly the sheep—that supposedly great breakthrough. Dolly the sheep did not live as long as long as normal sheep usually do. Dolly developed all sorts of problems. Dolly was not an effective experiment, and poor Dolly died a very early death. Those of us who have been around for decades have probably watched those mad scientist type movies about people cloning, and clones are always portrayed as the baddies. It is something that rightly scares a lot of people.
I recently watched The Boys from Brazil. The story revolves around mad scientists and mass murderer Dr Josef Mengele, the camp doctor at Auschwitz. In that movie he creates about 95 little Adolf Hitlers, all with blue eyes, by impregnating some of Hitler’s DNA which he took from him at Berchtesgaden, according to the story. Rather than creating little kids who had the same upbringing as Hitler, he just got Hitler’s DNA in there and he was wanting to create about 95 Hitlers. In the crazy scheme he was trying to bump off all the old fathers because Schicklgruber, Hitler’s father, died at about 65, so all these guys had to die at 65. It is an entertaining movie. It is quite a gory movie, because Mengele ends up being eaten by rottweilers—which was probably an appropriate death for him. I think he probably died of old age in reality. At the end of the day, it is quite scary when you think of the prospect of DNA being used for a purpose like that. That is a powerful argument about interfering with the natural order of things and trying to effectively clone human beings, and I make that point.
I mentioned earlier Dolly the sheep. Professor Ian Wilmut of Edinburgh university is famous for cloning Dolly the sheep, and he is regarded as the father of cloning. But he has announced that he would now pursue ethical adult stem cell research following the latest breakthroughs in this field—the breakthroughs I referred to having been made late last year. Even Professor Loane Skene, a leading member of the previous government’s Lockhart committee which recommended therapeutic cloning, told the ABC:
It's a very exciting breakthrough and if it works then it wouldn't be necessary to use the embryo process any longer, which would take away a lot of the ethical concerns.
Surely that is what we should have regard to here today. Science has moved on. We now have a way of taking human cells from adults in an ethical way and using them for medical purposes in a proper way. It works; it is not pie in the sky. We do not have to go into these murky dark areas where ethics really do become very much involved and we are dealing with such things as embryos, perhaps mixing humans with animals, the stuff of those scary movies that I was referring to earlier and things like The Boys
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