Friday Rave

NOW is the time for a serious debate on cloning in Australia – for at least two reasons. The laws on stem cells and cloning are being reviewed, and today is the last day for the public to send their opinions to former Federal Court judge John Lockhart's committee. And cloning is already on our doorstep.
Last May, Woo Suk Hwang and his colleagues at Seoul National University showed just how easy human cloning can be.
But public debate has been strangely absent.
At present, human cloning is banned outright in Australia. That ban, however, covers two different things. It outlaws not only the cloning of human babies but also therapeutic cloning, the aim of which is to copy the cells of a human being – an entirely different proposition.
No one in Australia wants to overturn the ban on reproductive cloning, but there are good reasons to lift the ban on therapeutic cloning.
What does therapeutic cloning offer us? For one thing, merely by shedding a skin cell, a person might acquire a perfectly matched reservoir of embryonic stem cells: the biological gold that can regenerate any organ.
And, thanks to the South Koreans, it is clear that the technique is within the reach of any scientist willing to persevere.
The Korean researchers started with a skin cell and removed its nucleus, the "hard drive" that tells that cell to be a skin cell. They then inserted that nucleus into a donated egg cell, whose own nucleus had been removed. The data in the surrounding egg fluid reprogrammed the skin nucleus, telling it to run the program for "embryo". And the reprogrammed cell was allowed to divide and develop for five days until it formed a ball of 100 cells.
It's this ball of cells that is the object of contention. For doctrinal Catholics, it should not have been created in the first place, but once generated, they say, it merits the same rights as any fully fledged human being.

The South Koreans destroyed the embryo by removing a clump of 30 cells and cultivating them in a dish. Most of the cells immediately started changing into brain or skin cells, simultaneously running out of proliferative puff. But a rare cell maintained its youthful state, it multiplied exuberantly and retained an unspent potential to form any tissue of the body. That was an embryonic stem cell.
Not only could the South Koreans make this technique work, they could do so efficiently.
These stem cell lines were made for patients suffering from genetic blood diseases, juvenile diabetes and spinal cord injuries.
Sometime in the not-too-distant future, the South Koreans will use such embryonic stem cells like seeds to grow tissue grafts. But these grafts will not need to be accompanied by deadly immune-suppressing drugs, because they will have come from a patient's own cells.
Let's not oversell things here: it's unlikely patients will be seeing these "cures" for several years. For one thing, researchers have to make sure the grafts won't cause cancers.
There is, however, another more immediate payoff if we allow therapeutic cloning. It could provide researchers with new cell lines that are faithful replicas of debilitating human diseases. And these can be used to screen drugs at a rate of up to 100,000 a day.
To reach an ethical and just decision on whether Australia should go ahead with therapeutic cloning, it is necessary to weigh up the good that might come from it against the bad.
Yet so far, there has been very little heard of the good side.
It's time for Australia to have a robust debate along these lines.

So, are you in favor of any types of cloning?

till next time, Michelle.