Hybrids or hyperstimulation: the ugly choice of an inhuman science.

That is the choice faced by two advocates of cloning, Senator Stott-Despoya – whose draft Bill to allow human cloning was tabled Thursday – and Chief Scientist Peacock, who addressed MPs the day before.

There is no happy middle way for the supporter of cloning. Either we harvest from women the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of eggs needed for each cloning experiment, or we harvest them from pigs or rabbits.

Thousands, in the case of Prof Hwang Woo-Suk, South Korea’s ‘Supreme Scientist’, who coerced his junior researchers into contributing to the two thousand eggs he needed to create the eleven cloned embryos that made him famous. Until it was found in December last year – the very week of the tabling of the Lockhart report – that he was a filthy fraud, his science a pile of lies, and the two thousand plus eggs had made not a single clone.

Perhaps only dozens, in the case of the Newcastle team who, around the same time as Hwang, claimed to have cloned a single embryo from three dozen eggs from eleven women. Perhaps… except their research was not published in a peer-reviewed journal, so in scientific terms it is not yet authenticated, and the team has had no further success.

It was unfortunate timing for the UK supporters of cloning, that just as officials in the UK agreed to permit discounted IVF if women donated eggs for research, a women died of complications from the ovarian hyperstimulation required to produce multiple eggs.

Hence the campaign, Hands off our Ovaries, launched on International Women’s Day, to protest the exploitation of women in this new biotechnology.

Chief Scientist Peacock came out against animal-human hybrids on the grounds that the mixing of DNA in the resultant embryo would make it a poor model for research into human disease. But in saying this, he is a lone voice against the consensus of IVF scientists and the Lockhart committee itself – which says we must use animal eggs, since there is no possibility of obtaining sufficient eggs from women.

As note in this Blog a very long time ago, August 28th, the Lockhart Review of our cloning laws itself recommends animal-human hybrid clones: “In order to reduce the need for human oocytes, transfer of human somatic cell nuclei into animal oocytes should be allowed”. See p.170 of the Report. And Senator Stott-Despoya wants to make Lockhart's animal-human hybrid fantasies law.

Likewise cloning advocate Prof Alan Trounson suggested using rabbit eggs to clone human embryos – a process which does indeed leave rabbit DNA in the embryo and makes the clone a human-animal hybrid.Trounson said last year, “Since there are plenty of rabbit eggs around, if we could make that work it would remove the concern about accessing human eggs in any numbers”.

There remain two options, then, for this wonderful new science of cloning: either commercialise women’s ovaries, putting at risk especially poorer women who will take money for their eggs – or settle for animal-human hybrid clones.

And all this for a science which is as redundant as it is wrong: a useless tinkering with embryos in order to get ‘patient specific stem cells’ that we can already get from our own adult tissues!

What really does drive scientists to lobby for cloning, given that the science is so shonky? What are we not being told?

That will be a topic for the week after next, when you regular Blogger returns.

But next week, guest Blogger Richard Egan, DO NO HARM’s agent in WA, will delve deeper into this critical issue of eggsploitation, and continue conscientiously to expose, rebut, and show due contempt for the strategy of the cloning lobby in Australia...