Alan Cadman (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Six years ago, I, with a small number of other people in this parliament, took part in an examination of the issue of human cellular research. It had become obvious to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs that this was going to be a national issue and that there was a requirement for the Commonwealth to become involved in providing an overarching approach to all the aspects of human cellular research. That committee began its inquiry into what has been an issue for the parliament ever since.

One thing that occurs to me in following the debate on therapeutic cloning is the inconsistency in the scientific argument. In the early days of 2000, it was claimed that four or five stem cell lines were all that were needed for scientists to be able to do their work and to carry it through to fruition. The stem cell lines were ‘immortal’, it was said, and so the scientists had plenty of scope even if they were allowed only four or five cell lines with which to conduct their work. That claim was changed within a couple of years to one of a need to use the so-called spare embryos from the IVF program. This would give plenty of scope for Australian scientists to make world-shattering discoveries. From those spare embryos cures for all sorts of diseases could be established. That was the evidence given to the committee, and those were the statements made by some scientists during the debate on this issue in 2002.

Nine licences have been issued for the use of surplus or spare embryos, and 178 embryos have been used. There are 104,830 available embryos that have not been used. It seems to me that the scientific claim of requiring only a narrow access to embryos was not a realistic assessment. Two years later the claim changed again to a requirement of an even greater number of embryos. For some reason or another, the availability of 104,000 spare embryos is now no longer adequate for the technology of therapeutic cloning and something else needs to be tackled.

I point out to the House as we debate the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Bill 2006 that in this place in 2002 there were only a couple of speakers on the earlier human embryo and research bills who said that they would consider therapeutic cloning. Today the House is changing its mind and is endorsing therapeutic cloning. One must wonder where the next step will be, because the ground rules are changing and the parliament is changing with them. Now there are not enough embryos, and cloned embryos are needed because they are better, are patient specific and are therefore more likely to produce good results. Dr Washer said:

This tissue, being patient specific, does not require immunosuppressive drugs that may cause a much higher risk.

That would be true if a cell were taken from a woman and transferred into her own ova. But what about males? It does not apply for males. I am sure that Dr Washer would not want to mislead the House. I listened with care as Professor Sherley, the wonderful scientist from the United States who was in Australia recently, said that any thought that this implant process is free of contaminants and that it will make the need for immunosuppressant drugs unnecessary is not accurate. It ignores the mitochondria in the cellular plasma, and so the contamination of the fluid surrounding the nucleus is about five per cent foreign DNA in every instance. There is a 95 per cent accurate reflection, but five per cent is not. There are problems with this process, and they will come to the surface in four or five years time when we will be asked to make further changes.

So I think this process is not going to lead to therapy. It is said to be therapeutic cloning; I do not believe that it is. The inaccuracies of science are illustrated by the claims made in 2002 by Professor Trounson when he said that he felt there could be a prospect of research finding solutions for the euthanasia debate and being able to assist people such as sufferers of degenerative diseases. He said:

Maybe we can take away the absolute pain and the total loss of wanting to live on in some of these people ...

That was in 2002. One needs to have a look at what results have been achieved for the investment by the Australian taxpayer of $120 million into this research. I have carefully tried to track the process and the results from $120 million. I asked the Parliamentary Library to look for reports. The Parliamentary Library said that they came up against a barrier. Commercial-in-confidence was the barrier: ‘Go away. This is private. You don’t need to know the results.’ It is of deep concern to me that this parliament cannot find out the results of the investment in research funds because it is claimed that it is commercial-in-confidence. How do we know what is happening? How do we as a parliament know whether or not there are results being achieved?

I asked an Australian scientist to have a look at some of the publications that were put out by those who claimed to be doing this research. The ones that we were able to find amounted to reviews of other people’s work. There was no instance that I could find of original work or work of a nature that is producing advances to science. Surprisingly, in this instance, for the therapeutic cloning provision that the House is discussing today, one of the scientists who cloned Dolly the sheep opposes this change. A British scientist, Dr Alan Colman, who is now working in Singapore, said that procuring the eggs needed for therapeutic cloning poses ethical problems for him. ‘I’m not one,’ he said, ‘to slow down research, but you have to ask: is it worth pursuing with current techniques or better to wait for other techniques? Stem cell cloning is a technique that could be useful, but I think it is a bit crude and inefficient at the moment. The balance of probability of the process working against the aspect of human donors giving eggs is just not good enough.’ He was quoted in the Australian of 3 August and the Age of 7 August this year.

So there we are: one of the leading scientists in this technology saying that it is crude and that the prospect of success is just not good enough. And we have people here saying: ‘Give us the money, but we won’t tell you what the results of our research will be.’ I think that purely on science alone—forget the ethics, which I feel strongly about—we are going into this with our eyes closed, and people are asking us to take it on trust.

One only has to look at the results of the efforts in Korea, where claims of all sorts were made. The Korea cloning experience was marked by falsification to hide failure and the shocking manipulation and coercion of female researchers to produce oocytes. I think that process in Korea puts a dampener right across the whole thing, particularly in the light of the information that I have been giving the House about the lack of transparency.

The government was not prepared to back Lockhart. You can say, ‘Well, that showed the prejudice of the minister.’ I do not believe that is the case. It has come in here on a private member’s assessment of what it is. The advice to the government was doubtful, but the House is going to move ahead on its own judgement. I regret that the House has chosen to set aside previous decisions and move in this direction.

I have mentioned what happened when I tried to investigate this matter. I know that Professor John Martin tried to discover what was going on. So did the Parliamentary Library. There was no disclosure. GeneWatch in the UK had a press release in November this year titled ‘New controls needed to maintain independence of science’. What are GeneWatch saying? They say:

Research conducted by GeneWatch UK, and published this week in the Journal of Medical Ethics ... shows that scientists are failing to disclose their financial interests in the form of patents.

That needs to happen. We need to know who in Australia has a financial interest in the results of this research and whether or not the Commonwealth is backing some small group of people who hope to gain for themselves exclusive rights to Commonwealth backed research.

I mentioned the ethics of this. I know that for some members of the House, some of the proponents of this bill, the concept of a chimera does not worry them. The concept of mixing animal and human cells does not worry them. I suggest that the scientists will be back here shortly proposing that there be a relaxation in regard to animal-human mixing and that there be an extension of the 14-day period that people so fervently say they will never move on. With respect to the comments by Alan Trounson when he said in August 2002 that there would be ‘no impediment’ to the commercial use of aborted human foetuses under this legislation, a bar on that is being proposed by one of my colleagues. I hope the House accepts that bar on the use of female aborted foetuses and will accept his amendment. I believe that this legislation is dramatically flawed, but that is one area that the House surely can agree to take out.

I think that in 2006 we are making a judgement on very little evidence of advance. From what I can see, the claim of totipotency for embryonic stem cell research has not been realised. The filtering of cancer has not been realised, even though that statement has been made by people in this place—and I heard Dr Washer make the statement that Alan Trounson claims that it is possible to filter out cancerous cells from this process. Sherley said, ‘Show me the evidence.’ I have not seen a single thing printed anywhere in the world that indicates that that is the case. We are talking about a senior research scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose specific task is to work in these areas, and he has not been able to identify some of the claims that are being made—and I believe wrongly made—for the processes and the discoveries that we claim we have made in Australia.

I appeal to the House to exercise a great degree of caution in this area. I think there are things which need greater transparency and greater opportunity for this parliament to examine. On an ethical basis, at the end of the day I would oppose this anyway, but purely on the science I think there is good reason to reject this legislation.

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