HERE’S A STORY! LOCKHART CHAIR ADVISES WORLD CLONING LOBBY

Yesterday this blog established to everyone’s satisfaction that the acting Chair of the Lockhart committee, Loane Skene, is acting improperly by acting at all, since her statutory Committee officially dropped its final curtain on December 19th 2005. Continuing to trade on the name of a defunct Committee for purposes of political agitation does not respect the ‘disinterestedness’ of an expert advisory committee.

Today, that word ‘disinterestedness’ will be laughed off the stage.

Have you heard the joke about the Committee appointed to make a ‘disinterested’ inquiry into cloning, whose acting Chair is also an advisor to the world’s main lobby group for cloning? I kid you not.

Loane Skene is ethical advisor to the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) as recorded HERE. In that position she is, quote, “responsible for representing the Society’s ethical viewpoint” – which is a viewpoint advocating ‘therapeutic’ cloning, and nobody disputes that Skene fulfils her duty to the ISSCR very well. The obvious question is whether there is a conflict of duties – on the one hand to lobby for cloning on behalf of the ISSCR, and on the other to be a ‘disinterested’ and open-minded member of a statutory committee surveying public attitudes on cloning.

The ISSCR has been prominent in lobbying for cloning both at the international level (see HERE) and in the current Australian debate – where Prof Paul Simmons, currently President of the ISSCR, is one of the leading Australian advocates for cloning. He has had warm praise for Skene’s Committee recently, busy as it has been in lobbying for their shared goal of research cloning.

It gets funnier. Anyone with a Google can see that Skene was already on the record supporting so-called ‘therapeutic’ cloning as far back as 2000 – yet only ten days ago she told us that she entered the Lockhart Committee with no position on the matter!

The Age, August 19, 2006: "Loane Skene says she didn't have a position on therapeutic cloning when she joined the committee, though as a long-time participant in debates on the legalities and ethics of assisted reproduction, she was in favour of the pursuit of technologies that improve fertility. She says her views evolved through six months of reading the voluminous data and, more importantly, listening to submissions. 'I certainly changed my view. I can't speak for the others.'" End quote.

But Skene certainly did have a position on therapeutic cloning on the record as far back as 2000. She addressed the Federal Parliamentary Inquiry into the Scientific, Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Human Cloning in March 2000, and argued that there was no ethical objection to creating embryos for research by ‘therapeutic’ cloning: “Even if one regards reproductive cloning as contravening human dignity, surely the same is not true of therapeutic cloning.”

Indeed, in her clearly stated view, therapeutic cloning is justified by the possibility of gains for medical research. “One can best serve the ‘dignity of a person by trying to save the person’s life and health. I do not believe that any ‘dignity’ interest of the embryo outweighs the interests of a dying or diseased person”.

That, I submit, is not the statement of a person who “didn’t have a position on therapeutic cloning when she joined the (Lockhart) committee”!

It is, instead, a well presented position at one ethical pole of the current debate: that it is acceptable – even imperative - to create and destroy one human life (that of the cloned embryo) for the benefit of another life (that of the patient).

The acting Chair of the Lockhart Committee is, on the available evidence, a card-carrying cloning advocate who argued the case before a Parliamentary committee in 2000, and advises the world’s leading cloning lobby group, the ISSCR.

What then, are MPs and Senators to make of Skene’s claims to have had ‘no position prior to joining the committee’, indeed that her views only ‘evolved over 6 months’ under the kind tutelage of those who made submissions and gave testimony?

They are claims to an appearance of the ‘openmindedness’ befitting a ‘disinterested’ committee advising on a contentious subject. They are claims that will fool nobody.