"YES!" SAYS THE SENATE REPORT - "IT'S A LIVING HUMAN EMBRYO!"

No, your Blogger didn’t kick the bucket, he only turned a little pail... Thanks to Richard and Rita for filling in over the last fortnight.

Back in time to celebrate a small but significant victory for truth, both scientific and moral, over the ‘great lie at the heart of the cloning debate’ (see earlier Blog).

The cloning lobby is in ignominious retreat from the sneaky little lie that cloning ‘does not create a human embryo’ – the lie that was proposed last year by the International Society for Stem Cell Research, faithfully parroted by certain key scientists, MPs and journalists, and now buried in a hastily dug grave by the Senate cloning inquiry.

Quelle joie, to read in the majority report of the Senate Committee – the bad guys – the admission that the embryo made by cloning would indeed be just the same as an IVF embryo, and no word other than ‘embryo’ is to be used:
3.13 The representatives of Do No Harm tabled at the hearing on Tuesday 25th November an Editorial from Nature which says ’Whether taken from a fertility clinic or made through cloning, a blastocyst embryo has the potential to become a full functional organism’.1 This is exactly what the Lockhart Committee addressed in ensuring that an embryo created by SCNT is encompassed by the definition of embryo.

There is nothing to be happy about in the rest of the majority report - mostly baseless scientific claims and dodgy ethical reasoning - but that one little paragraph of intellectual backdown is a triumph. A triumph for the numerous contributors to the Inquiry – through submissions and testimony - who relentlessly reinforced the truth that cloning creates a living human embryo, nothing less, and who have, to a great extent, defeated the Great Lie.

Now it appears the debate can take place with all Senators in agreement that the ‘entity’ made by cloning is a human embryo. Then they just have to decide the same question they debated in 2002: whether it is ‘morally permissible’, in Sen Patterson’s phrase, to create such embryos solely for research.

The actual opportunity to table the Nature Editorial was provided by an observation by Senator Fierravanti-Wells. She quoted the important admission by Prof Loane Skene earlier in the inquiry that the Lockhart Committee ‘did not shy away’ from calling the cloned embryo an embryo – even though they still, for unexplained reasons of pure prejudice, held it in ethical contempt:

Senator FIERRAVANTI-WELLS—Senator Webber made some comments about whether this SCNT entity was an embryo or not an embryo. I would like to take you back to what Professor Skene actually said at the hearing on Friday. She stated:
Other people have said to us that what we are talking about today, a somatic cell nuclear transfer embryo, is better not being called an embryo. We did not shy away from calling it an embryo because it is conceivable, as happened with Dolly the sheep, that if that entity were put into a woman, after a lot of care, it could in fact develop into a foetus. So we did call it an embryo. We still regarded it, as many other people did who made submissions to us, as having a different moral status from the embryos that are created in fertility programs.

In short, irrespective of the science, what Professor Skene is saying here is that it does come down to a moral issue. It does come down to the ethics of what this entity really is. We have heard a lot of evidence about the science on both sides. But this is not about adult stem cells versus embryonic stem cells; this is about whether the community is prepared to take that quantum leap, to take that ethical leap… and to go down the route of human cloning, to go down the route of a process that does lead to cloning.

Dr van Gend, I wanted to not only clarify the exchange that was happening but also hear a comment from yourself, and others who may have a comment, in relation to that.

Dr van Gend—This has always been at the heart of the debate. In 2002 the parliament said that you cannot create new embryos for research. There was a ethical roadblock set up on the path of those who want cloning and the only way around that roadblock was to pretend that in fact the cloned embryo is not an embryo.

This has been done by Professor Williamson, for instance, who says, ‘No, because there’s not an egg or a sperm, it’s not an embryo.’ It is an ‘intermediate cellular product’—that is what he said in the Sydney Morning Herald. Dolly the sheep had no sperm, and Dolly the sheep was a living creature. It is superstitious to pretend that because an embryo comes about via different means it is not an embryo when it looks, behaves and grows like an embryo.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised when Professor Skene made that comment because, as you know, she is ethical adviser to the International Society for Stem Cell Research, which is the world’s leading cloning lobby. …last year that very society decreed that we would not call it an embryo, we would call it a different word because it had emotional connotations. I will table this editorial in Nature magazine from July last year. The Nature journal condemned the International Society for Stem Cell Research in a very short editorial called ‘Playing the name game’. It said: Stem-cell biologists should not try to change the definition of the word ‘embryo’. In this very powerful, brief editorial…it said:
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 diehard opponents of the 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.

That was the obvious strategy of the cloning lobby: change the terms of the debate, say it is not an embryo. I believe that members of this committee will shed light amongst their Senate colleagues that there is no place for name games in our legislative assembly. Call things what they are: a blastocyst embryo, an IVF embryo, a cloning embryo are embryos which can become fully functional organisms.

From that basis of truth, we can then proceed to ask: ‘Will we now do what we did not do in 2002? Will we now agree to create living human embryos solely for their destruction, with the sole intention of exploiting them for research?’ And if we will do that, why? What has changed since Senator Patterson’s magnificent statement of conviction in 2002 when she said: I believe strongly that it is wrong to create human embryos solely for research.

How can anything have changed so dramatically in four years, when the science has not changed? Apart from the Hwang fraud and a dubious paper from Newcastle that has never been confirmed, effectively there has been no demonstrated case of human cloning since 2002. There are embryonic stem cell research papers by the thousands but they go nowhere, because you cannot use them on humans. Nothing has changed in the public attitudes if you look at valid surveys—Swinburne and Sexton Marketing rather than phone polls by biotech groups. And nothing has changed in the ethical position, and I hope Mr Campbell will elaborate on this, that it is simply a violation of human rights to create living human entities, living human members of this species, to destroy them.
CA 112 Senate Tuesday, 24 October 2006 COMMUNITY AFFAIRS

Mr Campbell certainly did elaborate, and one of the most useful insights on the status of the embryo came from Ray, when he explained:

Mr Campbell— The thing about a cloned embryo is that, genetically, it has the human genome. Under the microscope, it looks like a human embryo. Analysed—how is it acting?—it is acting like a human embryo. And you know what? If it was not acting like a human embryo, the scientists would not be interested in it. They need a human embryo that will grow to the blastocyst stage, as a human embryo, to harvest human embryonic stem cells. So it is behaving like a human.

And we know—hypothetically, because it has not been done, but given that it has been done in animals we know—that, placed in a proper environment, the same as an embryo produced by human egg and sperm union, potentially it will grow to be a full human being. That to me seems to be just basic philosophy and science coming together in an appropriate way. That is how we define things: we look at how they behave.
CA 112 Senate Tuesday, 24 October 2006

Mind you, there is a lot of clear teaching still required to overcome the muddle that has been slung around the House by the likes of Mal Washer and Ian MacFarlane. Take, for example, the sincere efforts of Senator Webber to wipe the mud from her eyes, and see that an embryo is an embryo is an embryo…

Senator WEBBER—Can you point out to me where we are saying that we will create human embryos—new egg-sperm embryos—solely for research?

Dr van Gend— …As I explained in my opening remarks, an embryo is an embryo whether it is created by egg and sperm or whether it is created by somatic cell nuclear transfer or whether it is created by parthenogenesis as defined in our existing act, in section 7 in the definitions in the existing Prohibition of Human Cloning Act.

Senator WEBBER—So you are therefore saying to me that an egg-sperm embryo has the same status as an egg with another cell put into it that is not a sperm?

Dr van Gend—They are the same entity. If I hold one in each hand and show them to you or to some expert, you cannot tell which embryo was created by IVF sperm and egg and which embryo was created by somatic cell nuclear transfer. It looks like an embryo. It behaves like an embryo; if you put it in Dolly’s mother, it will grow to a lamb. If it looks like one and acts like one it probably is one.

Senator WEBBER—So therefore if we go down the parthenogenesis route where it is just an egg that it stimulated to the eight-cell development without anything else in it, are you saying that that is an embryo?

Dr van Gend—It is by your definition in the current act a human entity that is developing as an embryo.

Senator WEBBER—It is an egg.

Dr van Gend—It is an embryo. An egg is a cell in a female body that contains half our genetic material. It is a piece of us. An embryo is a self-contained, self-directed living entity that controls its own future. Given the right environment, as the Lockhart review admitted, the cloned embryo can develop as a normal embryo to the foetal and live birth stage. There is no dispute on that. It has not been tried yet [in humans] but it has happened in animals: Dolly the sheep, Matilda the lamb, Snuppy the puppy and so on. The process proposed by this legislation is exactly the same as what created Dolly and the other animals. Therefore you are dealing with a human entity which looks and behaves like an embryo - therefore, it is an embryo. …

Senator WEBBER—So, scientifically, an egg that is stimulated on its own, an egg with another cell implanted in it and an egg with a sperm implanted in it all look exactly the same and I cannot tell the difference at 14 days?

Dr van Gend—Correct. And if you put it in the body of a sheep, it would be born as Dolly the lamb.
CA 103 Senate Tuesday, 24 October 2006 COMMUNITY AFFAIRS

For those who want to read the Senate Committee transcripts, this is the link; there are great moments from scientists like Prof Jack Martin, Alan Mackay-Sim and James Sherley, from moral philosophers like Nick Tonti-Fillipini, Anthony Fisher and Ray Campbell, doctors like Megan Best and Eloise Piercy.

We hope that the truth that has been made clear concerning the humanness of the embryo created by cloning will guide the ethical thinking of our representatives on an issue so profound and so unexplored. As Leon Kass reminded us, “cloning is about nothing less than whether human procreation remains human.” The embryo created by cloning is human in its nature, but excluded from the circle of human belonging and care by its unnatural – its ‘inhuman’ - means of creation. Such an act of exclusion, let alone the act of exploiting the cloned embryo for research, violates the very humanity science should seek to serve.