REPORT TO PM TODAY SAYS: 'NO NEW SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE TO JUSTIFY CLONING'

The report released today by the Prime Minster, a report commissioned in June from mpconsulting, confirms what all informed and moderate people (especially us) have said, which is that nothing has really changed since the unanimous vote against cloning in 2002 - so why reopen the issue?

The report shows that the Lockhart Committee’s recommendations to lift the ban were based not on any scientific advance, but on two things outside their brief: their own ethical prejudice that it is acceptable to create embryos solely for research, and their unsubstantiated wish list of what cloning might achieve.[i]

This report confirms that there has been no significant scientific advance to make the case for cloning any better than it was in 2002 – and it was rejected back then by a unanimous vote of Parliament. The only new development since 2002 has been the granting of undue decision making power to an unelected and unrepresentative group of six citizens. A group who share the same radical ethical mindset in favour of permitting cloning, and animal-human hybrids, and any other inhuman experiment that scientists might request. A group whose current Chair, Loane Skene, is, as we have seen, also advisor to the world’s leading cloning lobby group.

Significantly, this report notes that the one allegedly significant scientific advance that Lockhart used to justify overturning our ban turned out, within days of tabling the Lockhart report (tabled Dec 19th 2005), to be a monumental fraud.

Because the Korean experiment under Prof Hwang was the one and only ‘authenticated’ case of cloning anywhere in the world[ii], the whole case for there being ‘scientific advances in cloning’ collapsed with the collapse of Hwang’s fraud. Therefore, the Lockhart recommendations are factually fatally flawed, and should have been withdrawn the day it was discovered (Dec 23rd 2005) that the Korean claims were fraudulent.

This report confirms that there is no new scientific reason to permit cloning – only the old justification, used to great effect in 2002, that miracle cures for Alzheimer’s are sure to come if only you allow scientists to clone, hybridise with animals, and in other ways further violate our humanity.

The public was fooled once; to listen to the Lockhart Lobby recommendations would be to be fooled twice. This new critique helps us see how groundless – scientifically as well as ethically - the Lockhart recommendations really are.

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[i] Recommendation 23 of Lockhart Report
Human somatic cell nuclear transfer should be permitted, under licence, to create and use human embryo clones for research, training and clinical application…

Comment by mpconsulting:
Since the Committee published its Report there have been some further developments which have discredited the work of the South Korean researchers. On the basis of advice from the NHMRC it would not appear that there have been any other scientific developments relevant to the question of whether the ban on the creation of embryos by SCNT should be lifted.

Despite this, it is clear that there have been developments since the legislation was introduced in 2002. However, it does not appear that these developments particularly influenced the Committee’s recommendations regarding the creation and use of embryos using SCNT. Rather the Committee’s considerations appeared to be based around the potential of SCNT for the treatment of illness and the Committee’s own resolution of the ethical issues rather than an assessment of the state of the science as at a certain point in time.

[ii] Note: The fact remains that there has not been a single confirmed case of human cloning anywhere in the world, and certainly no case even claiming to have obtained stem cells from cloned embryos. There has been no significant ‘advance’. The only case to have been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal was the Korean cloning fraud. Other claims – from the UK and China – have not been confirmed or given the status of a peer-reviewed finding, and therefore cannot be considered authentic under normal medical standards of research.