Cloning: The Blighted Science

The Australian Senate in 2006, by the narrowest possible margin, approved the manufacture of human embryos by cloning. This overturned the long-standing ban on creating embryos solely for research; a ban upheld unanimously by the Senate only four years earlier, but now abandoned in the face of overwhelming scientific hype.

Within twelve months of the Senate vote, a paradigm shift in stem cell science rendered cloning redundant. This much is certain: if Parliament had known in 2006 what we know now, no cloning legislation would ever have been drafted, let alone approved.

Cloning is a human desecration and a scientific failure. It has always been unethical, in that it creates human embryos with their destruction in mind; it is now also clearly unnecessary. The Senate vote was carried in 2006 by the argument that cloning was the only possible way to obtain “pluripotent stem cells” that perfectly match the patient. That argument lies in shreds, in part through the failure of cloning to…