The Great Lie at the heart of the cloning debate

It gets worse. We saw yesterday that Professor Loane Skene, acting Chair of the Lockhart Review Committee which recommended so-called ‘therapeutic’ cloning for Australia, has a conflict of interest in also being bound to represent the views of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. That is, to promote cloning.

But not just promote it through honest argument. The ISSCR promotes it through tried and true Orwellian methods of verbal engineering.

Just how closely was the acting Chair of our ‘disinterested’, open-minded Committee complicit in the organised lying – and I do not use those words lightly - of her Society at its meeting last year in San Francisco?

Not just any old lie. The grand, central lie of the cloning debate, the lie that alone has the power to turn a unanimous vote against the creation of human embryos by cloning, to a victory for cloning – and they know it. A very-nearly-evil lie that has as its goal the stripping of humanity from a human creature which could, like Dolly the sheep, be born as a baby, and reducing that human creature to a mere laboratory animal, meat for the consumption of science.

The lie: ‘that cloning does not create a human embryo’.

Remember that the cloning lobby has been faced with principled resistance here and overseas to the deliberate creation of human embryos for destructive research. Our Parliament in 2002 permitted research on ‘surplus’ IVF embryos, on the grounds that they were ‘going to die anyway’, but drew the ethical line at deliberately creating new embryos solely for experimentation. The United Nations last year likewise called on all member states to prohibit all forms of human cloning, with one delegate expressing the principle as: "No human life should ever be produced to be destroyed for the benefit of another."

The cloning lobby’s audacious way around this ethical roadblock? Simply to agree amongst themselves, and teach the public, that the cloned embryo is not really an embryo after all. Therefore it is hardly human. Therefore there is no ethical issue in creating or destroying it.

And the think tank that dreamt up this deception, and has taught the public to believe that no human embryo is created by cloning? The International Society for Stem Cell Research, represented on our Lockhart Committee by Loane Skene, ethical advisor to the ISSCR.

We know exactly when and where the plot was hatched: the June 2005 meeting of the ISSCR in San Francisco.

We know because their anti-scientific, grubbily political strategy was exposed in a hard-hitting editorial in the leading journal Nature, July 2005[i], entitled Playing the Name Game: Stem-cell scientists should not try to change the definition of the word ‘embryo’.

Nature accused scientists of “playing semantic games in an effort to evade scrutiny” and restated the biological truth that the entity created by cloning was just the same as the entity created by IVF fertilisation:

“Whether taken from a fertility clinic or made through cloning, a blastocyst embryo has the potential to become a fully functional organism. And appearing to deny that fact will not fool die-hard opponents of this research. If anything, it will simply open up scientists to the accusation that they are trying to distance themselves from difficult moral issues by changing the terms of the debate.”

Got that? An embryo is an embryo no matter how it is made. Cloning is simply one way of making an embryo; uniting egg and sperm is another. Each looks like an embryo, each grows like an embryo – each is an embryo.

AH! BUT WHERE’S THE SPERM???

Just how easily the public can be misled by tricksy scientists was exemplified in an Australian radio report on the Korean cloning story, 20th May 2005:

“The announcement from the South Korean scientists is a breakthrough without an ethical dilemma because the researchers did not use a fertilised egg to create the embryonic stem cells. So a human embryo was never actually created.[ii]”

When I spoke to the journalist to correct her basic biology – for which she was duly grateful – she simply said, “we just took that off the wire” – pre-packaged by the cloning lobby for public deception.

The next day, 21st May in the Sydney Morning Herald, we had an equally astonishing misrepresentation of the facts from a Melbourne Professor of Genetics who had no excuse:
“Professor Williamson said the technique reproduced genetic material from a living person and the intermediate cellular products should not be called embryos, because they were not formed by the union of egg and sperm.”

No sperm, therefore no embryos! Therefore no ethical issue! This piece of biological drivel has greatly impressed MPs in the Coalition Party Room through the mouthpiece of Dr Mal Washer. ‘Trust him’, they think to themselves, ‘he’s a doctor’ – but on this one, MPs would be well advised to get a second opinion.

The second opinion is that yes, using egg and sperm is one way of creating an embryo, the good old-fashioned way - but there are now at least two other ways of reaching the same end point: parthenogenesis, and SCNT cloning.

You would think that Washer, an MP, would at least be aware of the definition of ‘embryo’ in the relevant Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002. The explanatory notes to that Act make clear that the definition of the word ‘embryo’:

“is intended to include: a) a human embryo created by the fertilisation of a human egg by human sperm. b) a human embryo that has had its development initiated by any means other than by the fertilisation of a human egg by human sperm.”

See? Sperm are not the only show in town. There are other means of making an embryo.

The explanatory notes specify such ‘other means’ including SCNT cloning:

“ a human egg that has had its nucleus replaced by the nucleus of a somatic cell (ie a cell from the body) by the process referred to as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT); and a parthenogenetic human embryo.”

Too true, Drs Washer and Williamson, the old medical dictionaries do state that an ‘embryo’ arises from the ‘union of egg and sperm’ – but dammit, that’ was because there was no other way back then of making an embryo! Now the dictionaries – and your own honest medical advice, perhaps – should be true to the times we live in, when there are different ways of making an embryo. Unless you have another reason for not being true to the facts?

IT’S AN EMBRYO, STUPID!

Look to our own Lockhart Committee – which did not obscure the basic biological facts the way Williamson and Washer do. In its final recommendations (see hyperlink) the Lockhart Committee acknowledged the biological fact that such a clone is of course a human embryo, and noted that the cloned embryo could, ‘given the right environment’ be born:

“The Committee agreed that human embryo clones are human embryos and that, given the right environment for development, could develop into a human being. Furthermore, if such an embryo were implanted into the body of a woman to achieve a pregnancy, this entity would certainly have the same status as any other human embryo, and were this pregnancy to result in a live birth, that child would enjoy the same rights and protection as any other child.” (page 170).

The campaign to dehumanise the cloned embryo is an international one, and in May last year one of our greatest living ethicists, a Jewish intellectual and head of the President's Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass, pleaded for honesty in public discourse about cloning:

“If we are properly to evaluate the ethics of this research and where it might lead, we must call things by their right names and not disguise what is going on with euphemism or misleading nomenclature. The initial product of the (Korean) cloning technique is without doubt a living cloned human embryo, the functional equivalent of a fertilised egg.” [iii]

If people are worried that he was on Bush’s Council and therefore suspect, equally truthful nomenclature was also used by former President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission. Its 1997 report Cloning Human Beings, explicitly stated:

“The Commission began its discussions fully recognizing that any effort in humans to transfer a somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated egg involves the creation of an embryo, with the apparent potential to be implanted in utero and developed to term.”

One could usefully adapt a phrase of that former President and sky-write over the Federal Parliament, “It’s an embryo, stupid”, in the face of all attempts to fool our representatives by misleading nomenclature.

This is tragic. Lies that are aimed to exclude the cloned embryo from the circle of human care, from any sense of belonging in the human family, are influencing decent people in Parliament. It must be that Senator Kay Paterson has come to believe this scientific absurdity, this cynical lie. How else do we explain her transformation from the MP in 2002 who made this stirring statement of ethical principle…

“I believe strongly that it is wrong to create human embryos solely for research. It is not morally permissible to develop an embryo with the intent of truncating it at an early stage for the benefit of another human being. However, utilising embryos that are excess to a couple's needs after a successful implantation is a very different matter.”

…into the MP who is drafting a Bill precisely ‘to create human embryos solely for research’ and to destroy one life for the benefit of another?

This dehumanising lie must be brought to light, and the perpetrators – as far back as Loane Skene’s ISSCR – shamed.

[i] Nature 436, 2 (7 July 2005) doi: 10.1038/436002b
[ii] ABC Radio, PM, 20th May 2005.
[iii] Kass in New York Times, May 29th 2005.