New science has emerged this month which radically undermines the already spurious case for cloning. Entirely ethical science that obtains those‘tailor-made’ stem cells that are putatively the goal of cloning, but without the creation and destruction of cloned embryos.
Sure, pursuing embryonic stem cells from any source may be a fool's errand, given their inherent instability, tumour risk, and all round inferiority to adult stem cells. But if scientists and the media are fixated on pluripotent stem cells, let them get them without messing with embryos.
Since June 7th the whole debate has been radically changed.
Now, as other State and Territory parliaments are asked to replicate Federal legislation allowing cloning, they must take into account new science that the Feds knew nothing of.
Nature journal and Stem Cell journal on 7th June published three papers confirming a simple method of turning mouse skin cells into genuine ‘pluripotent’ stem cells – the functional equivalent of embryonic stem cells. These cells are the putative goal of ‘research cloning’, but here they are reached in a simpler, saner way.
“The race is now on to apply the surprisingly straightforward procedure to human cells”, writes the Nature commentary, entitled ‘Simple switch turns cells embryonic’.
"It's unbelievable, just amazing," says Hans Schöler (a stem-cell specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster who is not involved with any of the three articles). "For me it's like Dolly [the first cloned mammal]. It's that type of accomplishment."
In a comment that sweeps away the whole ethical nightmare of creating cloned human embryos solely for research, and all the concerns about commercialising women’s eggs, Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, who pioneered the new technique, says "Neither eggs nor embryos are necessary. I've never worked with either."
Headlines around the world asked if, at last, there was a way around the socially divisive science of cloning. Time magazine from June 14th said “because Yamanaka did not use human embryos, his technique offered researchers everywhere a way to sidestep the ethical controversies that have dogged the field since its birth”.
Yamanaka himself was at the Cairns conference this month to explain his technique. "It's easy. There's no trick, no magic," he says. Captains of the cloning industry listened anxiously, no doubt, for fear that their great pot of public money might be diverted away from cloning to such simple and uncontentious science.
For they will have read Harvard researcher Chad Cowan saying that this research will change the field. Writing in Science journal, June 8th, he said: "The most amazing thing about these papers is you now take this whole idea of reprogramming out of the hands of cloning specialists and put it into the hands of anyone who can do molecular and cell biology."
And they may have read the response of a leading cloning company in the New York Times June 7th , whose CEO is up against the shortage of women’s eggs:
William M. Caldwell IV, chief executive of Advanced Cell Technology, said his company had not been able to obtain enough human eggs needed for therapeutic cloning. So the new approach, Mr. Caldwell said, is “a technology that everyone should take a hard look at.”
What Yamanaka did was to take a mouse skin cell and introduce four small proteins which reprogram the cell’s nuclear DNA to make it pluripotent – effectively the same as an embryonic stem cell.
In a classic understatement, Nature comments: “The method is inviting. Whereas cloning with humans was limited by the number of available eggs and by a tricky technique that takes some six months to master, Yamanaka's method can use the most basic cells and can be accomplished with simple lab techniques.”
Cloning has always been promoted as the only way to get embryonic stem cells that exactly match a patient – an exact match because the cloned embryo is the patient’s identical twin. But if that goal of patient-specific pluripotent stem cells is now achieved by Yamanaka’s ethically uncomplicated method, what is left for cloning?
We trust that State MPs will ask tough questions of stem cell researchers who shrug and say that we should “continue to try for human cloning anyway”. This is too profound a social issue to be decided by value-neutral scientists who simply want to ‘try everything and see where it takes us’.
The fact remains that we must not – and clearly do not have to - resort to the unethical act of creating new embryos solely for research. We do not have to violate the deepest bond of human life – that between mother and offspring – by creating living human embryos that have no natural mother, and are denied any place in the human family. Human procreation must stay human.
The cloning era, which started with a sheep from Scotland, may have effectively ended with a mouse from Japan. Meantime the great things of stem cell science will continue to come through entirely ethical means – adult stem cell research, and now the new Yamanaka technique.
The new, ethical science has come too late for the Federal, Victorian and NSW Parliaments. Unless they possess that rare quality of being able to admit a mistake and fix it.
For the remaining Parliaments there is only one question: what possible justification is left for legalising cloning?
