Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I had the privilege of chairing the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs during its recent inquiry into the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Bill 2006. The committee’s report was tabled last week, and I hope as many of our colleagues as possible have had the chance to read it in that time.

Senators will be aware that the community affairs committee has been especially busy over the last year on a succession of references, each with a vexing and controversial moral dimension: the abortion drug RU486, the transparent advertising of pregnancy counselling services and, most recently, the cloning of human embryos for scientific research. For me, however, this last inquiry was the most challenging, the most far-reaching and the most disturbing. It was disturbing in that this legislation, the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Bill 2006, redefines the ethical boundaries of Australian science more fundamentally than any decision of this parliament in recent memory.

Let me dwell on that point for a moment. It would dismay me if any senators were to sit this one out and, for the sake of other priorities, not seriously address the intellectual questions that are raised. Let me assure such senators, if they exist, that the cloning of human embryos for research, if permitted by this parliament, will generate many more debates in the future around the nature of the brave new world we have entered. It is an issue to which we will need to return again and again, with ever more complex legislative responses, as the manipulation of the human genetic sequence raises more and more intriguing and surprising possibilities.

The proponents of this branch of science believe that this line of research can lead to the discovery of cures for a host of diseases in human beings. Its opponents argue that such research around the world has to date produced no such cures, that conceptually the process cannot produce the results promised and that, even if it could, the research comes at a considerable price—that is, the destruction of human life at its earliest stage. There is no dispute that every Australian and every senator in this place wishes to see diseases like diabetes and leukaemia defeated. Nor is there any dispute about whether embryonic stem cell research should take place. That debate was held in 2002, and the research has been taking place under the current legislative regime.

The crux of this debate and, in fact, the sole question that we face in this debate is whether this parliament will authorise and enshrine in legislation the bringing forth of human life—human embryos created through cloning, in other words—in order that those human lives can be used and then destroyed in research. The proponents of the amending bills do not and cannot point to any principle upon which this parliament can or should amend the legislative regime that has been put in place since the detailed inquiry and debates in 2002. I believe there is no principle that can justify the creation of human life in order to destroy it. But I accept that there are many senators who do not share my views about when life begins. Those senators do not equate a clump of human cells rapidly dividing in a test tube to a human being replete with rights, and I accept that the gulf between those two perspectives is probably unbridgeable.

To those senators, however, I address a further concern that I ask them to carefully ponder. Let us suppose this legislation passes and becomes law and in a few short years time, while those senators are still sitting in this place, the cloning scientists come back again and say, ‘Our research hasn’t produced the miracle cures yet, but that’s because we’ve discovered that we need to extend the life of the embryos we’re experimenting on from 14 to 28 days before destroying them in order to find the answers we need.’ What do we say to those requests? How do we distinguish between the value of an embryo at 14 days and that of one at 28 days of life—by how it looks?

Let me add a further variation on this conundrum. Scientists announce that in this not-too-distant future scenario it is possible to clone an embryo from a person with a diseased kidney, lung or eye and grow that embryo to the foetus stage, where its genetically identical kidney, eye or lung can be harvested to be transplanted into the sick donor. All that stands in our way, the scientists say, is for parliament to further extend the period during which cloned human organisms can be kept alive. And, of course, as you would understand, there quickly appears a lobby of Australians who would benefit from this great advance who clamour for parliament to do just that.

What would we say to such a clamour—that creating human embryos to become spare parts for other human beings is wrong? Indeed, I am sure we would. But what do we then say when the scientists respond: ‘But, Senator, you gave us the right in 2006 to create human embryos for the therapeutic benefit of other human beings. What we now propose is a difference of degree but not of concept.’ And, of course, they would be right. What response can there be to that argument, for in fact at that point it would be evident to anybody that the clear ethical boundary we seek will be behind us, not in front of us? We will have passed the point of no return.

The House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics, in 1994, stated the obvious fact:

Issues of life and death do not lend themselves to clear definition ... to create an exception to the general prohibition of intentional killing would inevitably open the way to its further erosion whether by design, by inadvertence, or by the human tendency to test the limits of any regulation.

Indeed, what was stark in the evidence before the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs was the inability or unwillingness of those advocating therapeutic cloning, including the scientists actually wanting to conduct it, to explain the proper ethical limits of this research. Some even tried to deny that somatic cell nuclear transfer was cloning. This uncertainty was highlighted by Professor Kerridge of the Lockhart committee, who admitted that the proper limits of scientific inquiry may indeed change in the future as so-called community standards change.

Professor Alan Trounson, a high-profile proponent of therapeutic cloning, typified the difficulty in leaving the setting of these limits to scientists themselves when, in commenting on the Human Embryo Experimentation Bill 1985, he said:

I would do anything to cure disease ... I don’t care if it is a floodgate. If it opens an opportunity to treat really serious disease and disabilities it is all right with me.

I respect Professor Trounson’s enthusiasm, but I cannot respect his ‘whatever it takes’ attitude. It is our job as parliamentarians to look over the horizon and determine where a less regulated approach to scientific inquiry might lead. We do not allow journalists to write the laws of defamation or company directors to decide the rules on insider trading. Similarly, it cannot be left to scientists to decide what experiments they can conduct on human beings.

I believe the balance struck by all sides of the Australian parliament in 2002 was right. That approach did allow embryonic stem cell research to be conducted in Australia, and indeed it is being conducted today. Not only does this legislation unravel that consensus in a way which will be deeply divisive, not just in the broader community but in the scientific one as well, but it sets us on a path for many more such debates as new and problematic applications of this technology give rise to ethical dilemmas which it will fall on this parliament to resolve. Are our moral compasses ready to deal with these complex questions? I very much doubt it. Let me make the prediction that, if this bill passes, we will again, during the political life of many present senators, be considering legislation to further widen the scope of this area of scientific research and it will not get any easier the more times we do it.

I want to respond to a number of claims supporters of this legislation have made in the course of the community affairs committee inquiry. Proponents of the bill have suggested that there is a distinction between an embryo created by the fusion of sperm and egg and an embryo created by cloning. The implication of this claim seems to be that a cloned embryo is not quite as human as a naturally fertilised one, so destroying it after experimentation is not quite as bad. Of course, the techniques or processes for bringing it into existence are different. The result, however, is the same: it is a human embryo. That was readily acknowledged by the members of the Lockhart committee. Professor Skene, the deputy chair of the Lockhart committee, said to the community affairs committee:

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.

That makes it quite clear that an embryo created by somatic cell nuclear transfer is not an artificial entity that can only exist in a Petri dish. It has real potential for independent human existence. After all, it was this very process that led to the birth of Dolly the sheep—a real sheep, albeit a very sick one.

Another contentious proposition is that there will be no cures for a host of debilitating diseases unless therapeutic cloning is permitted in Australia. There was a great deal of evidence before the committee concerning the potential of adult versus embryonic stem cells as the source of cures for diseases. In terms of runs on the board, it did seem to me that the evidence before the committee suggested very strongly that adult stem cell research was a long way ahead of embryonic stem cells, taking into account overseas research, where the position between the two technologies is more ‘competitive’. Adult stem cells are already being used in 80 therapies around the world. In the United States there are more than 1,200 Food and Drug Administration approved clinical trials in relation to adult stem cells.

There are no clinical trials in relation to human embryonic stem cells. Even the Lockhart review observed that, to date, human embryonic stem cell research:

… has not reached the stage needed to start clinical trials (ie proof of principle of a safe and efficacious treatment in animal models).

There was significant medical evidence from researchers and clinicians to similar effect given to the Senate community affairs committee.

Much of the evidence put to the committee in support of the value of adult stem cell research was in fact acknowledged by the proponents of cloning. It was argued by some witnesses that adult stem cells are safer than human embryonic stem cells. They avoid all of the immune-rejection and immune-suppression problems associated with human embryonic stem cells. They are safer also because they are much less prone to the incidence of volatile cancer formation that currently afflicts human embryonic stem cell research. Another argument put to the committee was that there simply will not be enough embryos to pursue embryonic stem cell research unless we clone more. A large supply of eggs and embryos are needed, so the case goes, for these lifesaving cures to be found, and cloning is the only path for that to occur.

The NHMRC confirmed that, as at 31 December 2003, there were 104,830 embryos in frozen storage in Australia—presumably there are more today. These are left over from fertility treatment processes. However, under the regulatory regime established in 2002, the licensing committee has issued just nine licences pursuant to which embryos have been made available for research. Of these nine licences, five have been issued in relation to fertility treatment. The NHMRC has confirmed that only one licence is directed at treating a specific medical condition. There is a striking disjunction between, on the one hand, claims about the need for access to embryos so that embryonic stem cells can be procured and research conducted to relieve disease and, on the other, the fact that only one licence has been issued for such a purpose.

This led the committee to quite reasonably ask: with over 100,000 embryos available for research, how many embryos have actually been used across all areas under the current legislative regime? The answer from the NHMRC was just 178—out of 100,000 embryos. Less than one-tenth of one per cent of those embryos have been used. If embryonic stem cells are the miracle weapons to fight diseases that the proponents of the bill claim they are, why so few licences? Why only one licence to research disease and why such a small number of embryos used to date? Something does not quite stack up.

Another point that was put to the committee was that the scientific community overwhelmingly backs embryonic stem cell research and cloning for that purpose. I concede that the majority of scientific umbrella organisations did back this bill, but I dispute that those witnesses who oppose it can be painted as the lunatic fringe. The committee heard emphatic testimony challenging this legislation from the likes of Professor John Martin, Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Melbourne, and Professor Alan Mackay-Sim, the director of the Eskitis Institute for Cell and Molecular Therapies at Griffith University. The opinions of such people cannot be dismissed lightly. They are respected leaders in their fields. The reality is that there is fierce dispute within the scientific community, both here and abroad, about this technology, and passing this bill will not end that. The respected British journal of medicine the Lancet put it this way in 2001:

... given the large supply of discarded embryos that is available ... the creation of embryos solely for the purpose of producing human stem cells is not only unnecessary but also a step too far.

With this legislation, we stand at the threshold of a place we have not been before. I put it to the Senate that if we pass through this doorway we will inevitably be drawn to explore every room in this house, whether that enriches us as human beings or not. We can already guess what exists in some rooms, because science has taken us there in a theoretical sense: splicing the genome of human beings to enhance some characteristics and suppress others, creating organisms with more than two parents, genetically redesigning our children to suit our tastes and our pockets and creating hybrids of humans and animals for the supply of human spare parts. And when the entrances of those rooms are reached, the imploring arguments of those pioneering these developments will be the same as they are today: that science must have the right to discover what lies beyond our knowledge and that therapeutic gains outweigh any ethical considerations. Former US Chief Justice Earl Warren said:

In civilised life, law floats on a sea of ethics.

We take laws out of that environment at our peril. This legislation dramatically departs from the ethical framework which the parliament unanimously acknowledged just four years ago. Indeed, it proceeds without any clear indication of what its ethical parameters concerning therapeutic cloning actually are. What is the ethical justification for choosing 14 days as opposed to 28 days? If that sort of question has not been answered, what prevents that boundary being extended incrementally into the future? We will be taking a very large step if we pass this legislation. The question is not: do we accept that life can be terminated at this stage after 14 days? The question is, really: is it okay to destroy one form of human life for the benefit of another?

If we accept that the therapeutic possibility exists, we must countenance the many circumstances in which that might occur. I do not believe the parliament has been fully apprised of those possibilities and those implications in putting this legislation forward today. I ask senators to consider very carefully where this legislation leaves the Australian community and to reject this legislation because of the many uncertainties that surround it.