03:00
JILL COLGAN: She's called Matilda and this 11-week-old Merino lamb is Australia's answer to another sheep Dolly -- the world's first cloned mammal.
More than a scientific curio, what this young bundle of wool now represents is the very best of our hopes.
ASSOC PROF JULIAN SAVULESCU, ETHICIST, MURDOCH CHILDREN'S RESEARCH INSTITUTE: I think the potential is to revolutionise the treatment of human disease.
03:30
PROF PETER RATHJEN, HEAD, MOLECULAR BIOSCIENCE, ADELAIDE UNI: Diabetes, heart failure, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, thalassaemia and so on.
JILL COLGAN: But Matilda also represents the very worst of our fears.
KEVIN ANDREWS, MP, CHAIR, INQUIRY INTO HUMAN CLONING: I think the fear factor is a human 'Dolly'.
03:45
JILL COLGAN: From the science of cloning animals comes the chance to rid humankind of some its worst afflictions.
But it's research that comes at a cost -- one that will require Australians to carefully examine their own consciences.
DR GREG PIKE, SOUTHERN CROSS BIOETHICS INSTITUTE: I think the public needs to be fully aware that what it means is the wholesale use and, in my view, abuse of embryos.
04:11
JILL COLGAN: Tonight on Four Corners, The Clone Age.
At his home in the Adelaide Hills, Lindsay Cremin wakes every morning to the knowledge the tremors are getting worse his movement, more limited.
LINDSAY CREMIN, PARKINSON'S SUFFERER: I've gone through the night without medication, so in the morning, I'm pretty well looking for it.It effects your -- every part of the day.I mean, you get up in the morning and you want to have a shave or -- you have your breakfast and, at that time, when your medication is very low, having not taken any during the night, of course, it's very hard to control a spoon, a cup and things of that nature.
05:15
JILL COLGAN: Lindsay felt the first twinges of Parkinson's disease 10 years ago.
A former police accident investigator, with more than 30 years in the force, he went from examining other people's disasters, to experiencing one of his own.
It eventually forced him from the job.
LINDSAY CREMIN: I kept it pretty low profile for a number of years and the tremor, especially, wasn't to the point where it was that prominent, but as the years went by, it obviously became worse and I think my work mates knew there was a problem there.
05:56
JILL COLGAN: Many of the nerve cells in Lindsay's brain have lost an important chemical, called Dopamine, that controls movement, balance and coordination.
The tremors and stiffness progressively worsen.
If only the dead nerve cells in his brain could be replaced with new healthy cells, his future could be very different.
Well, the contentious science of cloning may be able to do just that.
Tucked away in the Barossa Valley, a little further up the road from Lindsay's place is a farm, a farm where the sheep ain't all ordinary sheep.
06:53
DR SIMON WALKER, TURRETFIELD RESEARCH CENTRE, SA: She was last in the line of births and in a kind of way I think I can confess and say that I'd given up hope of producing a healthy, live animal from that run.
JILL COLGAN: Matilda is a scientific first for Australia, one of two successful animal clones born days apart, in April -- both modelled on the same cloning technology that created that other more famous sheep -- Dolly.
How's she treated around the farm?
07:24
DR SIMON WALKER: Oh she's spoilt -- spoilt rotten, of course, and she just loves this milk.
Overweight and hungry.
She'd make short work of that.
And that might be your last too.
07:35
JILL COLGAN: Matilda will pave the way for breeding livestock with elite gene pools for the best wool, meat or milk.
DR SIMON WALKER: Quite a number of years ago, we appreciated that the birth of Matilda had substantial potential in terms of, not just livestock production, but in other areas -- exciting areas like medical therapies and so on. From our point of view we had a commitment to the wool industry to develop these new technologies and to make them available to industry and we saw that we had almost a moral obligation to go out and develop this technology.
08:15
JILL COLGAN: The techniques that created her could be applied to any mammal -- including man.
A cell was taken from a lamb foetus -- complete with its own DNA.
An egg was taken from another sheep and the DNA removed.
An electric current fused the cell with the egg and an embryo was created.
That means when Matilda was produced she was an exact copy of the DNA in the cell -- a clone of the original foetus.
09:05
DR SIMON WALKER: Frankly, I see cloning, particularly in the medical areas, as being absolutely fantastic. It might well be to cell degenerative diseases what immunisation did to infectious diseases.
JILL COLGAN: Perhaps the process that gave us Matilda could produce a human clone. But researchers have a very different target -- tailor-made tissue -- spare parts to replace all the disease ravaged areas of our bodies -- hearts, brains, livers, pancreas, blood and more. To tackle diseases for which there are no known cures.
09:48
PROF PETER RATHJEN: In effect, those applications are any disease which has, at its basis, the loss of cells. So diabetes, heart failure, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, thalassaemia and so on.
JILL COLGAN: So-called therapeutic cloning is the science that may help Lindsay. We'd move from a world of treating disease with surgery and drugs, to one where we use our own cells to heal our bodies.
KEVIN ANDREWS: This is one of the most fundamental changes, I suspect, most revolutionary changes, I suspect, that's ever likely to have occurred in medicine in human history.
10:29
DR JOHN SMEATON, CEO, BRESAGEN: It's probably THE race that's going on in human medicine at the moment. The prize is enormous because of the wide-ranging applications of this technology and, of course, the fact that it's treating what had previously been intractable diseases.
JILL COLGAN: There's already one type of cell replacement that could leap ahead with the help of therapeutic cloning. The beneficiaries? Child victims of leukaemia whose own bodies fight to reject the very bone marrow transplants that would save them.
Melbourne teenager Wade Osborne is one of the lucky ones. He survived leukaemia diagnosed when he was just 10 years old.
11:24
WADE OSBORNE: Me back started playing up.
Me legs just collapsed.
JILL COLGAN: Chemotherapy, though gruelling, seemed to work.
WADE OSBORNE: I just felt terrible all the time.
DIANNE OSBORNE, WADE'S MOTHER: He was in remission, I think, about 18 months and we went to the hospital just for a normal check-up one day and Wade had relapsed.
It was like being hit by a freight train.
11:57
JILL COLGAN: Wade's last option was a bone marrow transplant.
To stop his body rejecting the donor bone marrow meant taking him to the brink of death and back again.
PAUL OSBORNE, WADE'S FATHER: It was the worst time, watching him do every physical motion -- vomiting, diarrhoea, shot up on morphine for about twelve days.
12:20
PROF BOB WILLIAMSON, MURDOCH CHILDREN'S RESEARCH INSTITUTE: To be absolutely honest, a child who goes through a bone marrow transplant goes to hell and back as a result of all of the combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy and anti-rejection therapy.
The children have to be taken to a point where their immune system is really knocked out in order to let them accept the bone marrow that's being given to them because it isn't identical to their own cells. And so the body has all of these mechanisms to reject cells that are from another person.
13:00
JILL COLGAN: The transplant worked, but it will take five years before doctors can sound the all clear for Wade. For those children unable to find a compatible donor or whose bodies reject the transplant, the outcome is fatal.
What therapeutic cloning offers doctors is the vision of being able to give children perfectly matched bone marrow grown from their own cells.
PROF BOB WILLIAMSON: If we had a way to provide children with bone marrow that was compatible, that was from themselves, that had the same markers as their own body cells, we would solve an enormous proportion of these problems and, to be honest, it would revolutionise treatment in the field of leukaemia.
13:52
JILL COLGAN: Now, to explore the potential of therapeutic cloning, the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne wants to start ground-breaking experiments for a new leukaemia treatment -- possibly a cure.
Echoing the process that created Matilda, a cell would be selected, this time from a sick child, complete with that child's DNA. A donor human egg would be stripped of its DNA, the cell then fused with the egg and an embryo created.
That embryo would contain only the DNA of the sick child -- a clone -- and cells cultivated from the embryo would perfectly match those of the child.
14:41
DR TIMOTHY HASSALL, ROYAL CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL, MELBOURNE: I think it's very, very exciting because it will give us the opportunity, firstly, if we can manipulate these cells and grow up marrows in the laboratory for people -- firstly, for those patients and families who don't have a donor either in the family or that we can find in the registry, and, secondly, if we can manipulate these cells to sort of recognise leukaemic cells as being foreign and encourage the immune response to fight leukaemic cells as well -- that's all very encouraging. It's a little way off, but it's very exciting material.
15:14
JILL COLGAN: There is, of course, a catch to all of this -- a crucial moral dilemma that may stop this exciting research from ever reaching the laboratory. To harvest the potentially life-saving cells from the embryo is a process that destroys the embryo itself.
DR GREG PIKE: Once you've removed the cells, there's no more embryo. You can't sort of continue development in any way, because, really, you've extracted the life of the embryo.
JILL COLGAN: Is that acceptable to you?
15:45
DR GREG PIKE: No, it's not at all.
JILL COLGAN: Why?
DR GREG PIKE: Because that's the destruction of an embryo and on my view and understanding of the status of the embryo, what that entity is, that is actually destroying a human being.
ASSOC PROF JULIAN SAVULESCU: What would be produced is only an embryo of 128 cells -- 128 building blocks, like a bunch of microscopic grapes. This is an embryo of a few days old. It's the same embryo that is destroyed when a woman takes the morning after pill. Now a woman can take the morning after pill, bought from the chemist, for any reason. Why can't we do the same thing to potentially produce treatments that will save thousands, if not millions of lives?
16:34
JILL COLGAN: Laws in three Australian States ban the destruction of embryos for research. But those laws were written for what was then new IVF technology -- long before anyone even thought of therapeutic cloning.
In Victoria, the legal definition of an embryo is the old-fashioned one -- the fertilisation of an egg with sperm.
The Murdoch Institute's Professor Williamson has just been given a legal opinion that because no sperm is present in cloning, what he's producing is not an embryo and his research can, legally, proceed.
17:16
PROF BOB WILLIAMSON: I hope that the community will be completely reassured that this research is ethical and is a step down a very, very positive direction, avoiding many of the problems and many of the issues which people are worried about.
JILL COLGAN: That's splitting hairs according to bioethicist, Greg Pike.
His Southern Cross Bioethics Institute is an independent ethics group, whose views accord with those of the Catholic Church.
DR GREG PIKE: Whenever we hear the word 'therapy' it's a wonderful thing. Who can argue against therapy? So the portrayal is a very serious problem and I think the public needs to be fully aware that what it means is the wholesale use and, in my view, abuse of embryos.
18:08
ASSOC PROF JULIAN SAVULESCU: My view is the ban on embryo research, particularly in this context, is thoroughly unethical. If I had a treatment that offered to cure your child of leukaemia, it would be unethical not to use it.
JILL COLGAN: This emotional conflict on where life begins and what is an embryo is now consuming a Federal Parliamentary inquiry.
This panel's job is to deliver a benchmark report for Australia this year on human cloning.
The outcome could kill, or cultivate, cloning research in this country.
18:47
DR JOHN SMEATON: A negative signal from that committee will inevitably curtail this sort of research in Australia. So that would be a national tragedy if that were to happen.
JILL COLGAN: The timing of this inquiry could not be more crucial, with Australian scientists striding for the lead in the research race.
In April, a team at the Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development, in Melbourne, laid claim to a world first.
To make therapeutic cloning work, scientists must take the next step -- to collect the cells from their tailor-made embryo and to grow them into the specific cells needed to heal the sick person.
When an embryo is formed, it starts to divide into cells.
By day five, it contains an inner mass of what are called embryonic stem cells -- ES cells. Stem cells have the amazing ability to turn into all the tissue and organs of our bodies. The challenge for scientists is to harness the cell growth -- to direct them to whatever they want them to be.
20:21
DR MARTIN PERA, HUMAN EMBRYONIC CELL BIOLOGY, MONASH INSTITUTE: We're entering, really, a new era in human biology and medicine and I think stem cells will impact, in particular, on a couple of the new eras -- areas in this era. The first is that of regenerative medicine or spare parts. This is the idea of replacing diseased or damaged tissue which is going to die, with fresh healthy cells, and stem cells have an enormous role to play in this because they're an indefinitely renewable resource of virtually any cell type in the human body. And, particularly, if we use therapeutic cloning, we can deliver particular cell types that are identical in genetic make-up to the patient who requires the graft. And that's advantageous because it means there's no rejection.
21:10
JILL COLGAN: Three months ago, the Monash team published their findings, proving they could control the differentiation of one particular type of cell in the laboratory -- nerve cells, the cells affected by a whole range of degenerative diseases.
PROF ALAN TROUNSON, MONASH INSTITUTE OF REPRODUCTION & DEVELOPMENT: We were able to direct them right from the embryonic stem cell stage, right through to the adult nerve cells. That's never been done before.
What you start to get is the nerve cells growing out from the cluster, from the ball.
So now they're sending out dendrites in a differentiation phase into now becoming nerve cells.
So they've got their heads and tails and bodies, which are the long pieces which allow nerve cells to function.
22:10
JILL COLGAN: So at this point are they now committed nerve cells?
PROF ALAN TROUNSON: They are very much committed nerve cells now.
JILL COLGAN: And so can you -- you have actually managed to control this process?
You can actually duplicate it?
PROF ALAN TROUNSON: Yes.
JILL COLGAN: You can make this happen?
PROF ALAN TROUNSON: Yes.
22:20
JILL COLGAN: Finally, it means the ability to grow nerve cells on demand.
PROF ALAN TROUNSON: Maybe in the long term, these are the cells that people need to have for transplantation that might cure some of those really difficult conditions -- the stroke condition, Alzheimer's condition and Parkinson's disease, or maybe even people who've had spinal injuries. This is a start, this is a beginning -- no more than that -- but a very exciting beginning.
23:04
JILL COLGAN: So far, Professor Trounson has sidestepped the law banning embryo destruction.
He went offshore to get his stem cells, harvesting them from surplus embryos at an IVF clinic in Singapore.
But he believes Australia's laws should change and our own IVF clinics be allowed to donate surplus embryos for stem cell research -- embryos that would otherwise be destroyed.
23:35
PROF ALAN TROUNSON: I live in a State where we throw away hundreds and hundreds of human embryos. We just trash them.
We just leave them in the trash can. We thaw them out and we leave them in the trash can. In the total time that I've been working in this area, maybe we've used about 40 or 50 embryos to get where we are now.
JILL COLGAN: But your critics say that all those embryos that are discarded, die with dignity -- that we shouldn't be using them for research -
PROF ALAN TROUNSON: There's no dignity in being trashed. I think the dignity is that they would be used to help, I mean, to help somebody who's suffering. There are a lot of people who suffer very badly. There's not an option for those people at the present time -- this is an option.
24:26
JILL COLGAN: Hahndorf, the replica of a little German village set in the Adelaide Hills, and home to Parkinson's sufferer, Lindsay Cremin.
LINDSAY CREMIN: Sometimes I've got trouble with stability and it's a bit awkward if you start bouncing into people and they're not aware of what problems that you do encounter.
JILL COLGAN: In fellow Parkinson's sufferer, Gino Pignone, Lindsay sees himself and his symptoms mirrored.
When the two get together with their families, the talk is of new treatments -- what to try next. Lindsay has already tried radical brain surgery that in itself could have killed him or left him permanently maimed.
25:13
LINDSAY CREMIN: The surgery begins with the placement of a frame attached to your skull.
They make the entry into the skull and then they create the lesions on the brain and the whole procedure is undertaken while you're awake.
GINO PIGNONE, PARKINSON'S SUFFERER: I'm still scared about the operation though. I find it uncomfortable thinking about it.
LINDSAY CREMIN: I can understand that.
GINO PIGNONE: Both my doctor and myself agree that the operation is a last resort, so we'll try everything else.
25:40
LINDSAY CREMIN: Yeah, that's fair.
JILL COLGAN: Gino, like Lindsay, has lost not only his mobility but life as he knew it before the tremors.
GINO PIGNONE: My symptoms got so bad that even my speech started freezing, so I'd be on the phone to somebody and the words wouldn't come out. December of last year, I had to retire because I just couldn't cope anymore. I eventually broke down about it, it made me cry because architecture was something that was a passion to me and it still is today. But I can't do my work anymore, which is really hard, you know?
26:54
JILL COLGAN: Even these two men, who've lost so much and who stand to benefit from the research, differ on just how far they'd go for a cure.
GINO PIGNONE: I'm Italian heritage and a Catholic. I personally have a problem with that because -- I look at it this way. You're taking, donating something from a being as I see it, a still living being that has no consent over that situation, as compared to needing a kidney donation from somebody who willingly consents. It's a totally different ball game to me. I can accept that, but I can't accept something that's taken from someone who has no consent over that situation.
JILL COLGAN: So, ethically, you would have problems with it?
GINO PIGNONE: Yes, I would.
27:40
JILL COLGAN: Even though it might provide you with a cure?
GINO PIGNONE: Yes.
LINDSAY CREMIN: Probably the ethical considerations would be of concern to me. But I think in reality if it was presented to me that I would get benefit from it and I felt confident with it, it would be a very hard thing to pass aside. I mean, if you could improve your quality of life, then it would be very hard not to undertake it.
28:20
JILL COLGAN: What Gino and Lindsay don't yet know is that this research is more advanced than they think -- and the issues more pressing.
PROF PETER RATHJEN: There are times when fields explode into action, and that's what we're seeing with stem cell research at the moment. It's frightening, it's intimidating and it's exhilarating.
28:40
JILL COLGAN: At the University of Adelaide's Department of Molecular Biosciences, one of the world's leading teams in animal cell research isn't waiting for the Parliamentary Committee to rule the research 'in' or 'out'.
Led by Professor Peter Rathjen, they're breaking new ground using mouse cell research to pave the way for cell replacement in humans.
This month, they take delivery of their first human stem cells imported from the United States, and begin experiments.
29:19
PROF PETER RATHJEN: For us, there's another very important part and that is to transfer the technology that we've developed from mouse cells and show that it works for human embryonic stem cells. So that theoretically we could take the human embryonic stem cells, differentiate them, for example, into neurons, put them back into the brain of a Parkinson's sufferer and see whether they can correct that disease.
JILL COLGAN: By 'correct' it, you mean that you'd be putting healthy cells back into the brain?
29:41
PROF PETER RATHJEN: That's correct, healthy neural cells which belong there anyway.
DR JOY RATHJEN, CELL THERAPY, MOLECULAR BIOSCIENCES, ADELAIDE UNI: The development of both the mouse and the human is very, very similar, so what we find in the laboratory which is relevant to the differentiation of mouse cells should be relevant to the differentiation of a human cell when those cells are readily available.
JILL COLGAN: So our building blocks build themselves the same way as building blocks, cell blocks in mice?
DR JOY RATHJEN: Yes, they do.
JILL COLGAN: So, as humans we're quite like mice?
DR JOY RATHJEN: We are in many ways quite like mice if you look at the genetic level.
30:20
JILL COLGAN: As well as viewing mesmerising changes in types like these cardiac cells, they've managed to control the growth of stem cells into nerve, muscle and blood cells.
They've injected their manufactured nerve cells into the brains of newborn rats and charted success.
30:52
DR ROB HIRST, CELL THERAPY, MOLECULAR BIOSCIENCES, ADELAIDE UNI: This is a brain from a two-month-old rat and I'm slicing it to check where the actual cells that I injected at birth have gone to within the brain.
Are you getting this?
So, we've actually tracked the migration of the cells throughout the rats' developmental nervous system from birth, checking at day 7 after birth, 14 after birth, 1 month, 2 months and 4 months.
PROF PETER RATHJEN: Are they actually doing anything relevant to the brain?
Can you see anything?
31:20
DR ROB HIRST: Yeah -- JILL COLGAN: In an exciting discovery in the lead-up to our filming, they found their nerve cells had progressed even better than they'd hoped.
DR ROB HIRST: You can see these guys are actually joined together, which I think is probably a good indication that there is cellular incorporation and communication between the cells.
PROF PETER RATHJEN: OK, so you think these are the axons which are telling us that not only are these cells in the brain but they've differentiated into neurons that would belong in the brain?
DR ROB HIRST: Exactly.
31:46
PROF PETER RATHJEN: And that's the result we've been after.
DR ROB HIRST: Exactly, yes.
JILL COLGAN: Next is to use healthy nerve cells to cure diseased animals, starting by inducing Parkinson's disease in rats.
PROF PETER RATHJEN: We're now starting to see quite a bit of data that says that the ES cells can do useful things following transplantation. Over the next two to three years, what we'll start to show is that not only can they do that in normal animals, but we can use those cells to cure diseases in diseased animals. At the same time, we'll assess the safety of those cells. So, do they form cancers? Don't they form cancers? How are they best used? And at about a four to five-year period, we would then expect that we can start doing experiments in humans.
JILL COLGAN: The tests will start only after this man himself has wrestled with the difficult ethics tied to stem cell research.
The only way we can use human stem cells is to get them from an embryo. First of all, how do you feel about that situation? And given that we're not harvesting them here in Australia, we're still using the product of that embryo, even though we're importing it, for example, as the Trounson group did in Melbourne.
32:59
PROF PETER RATHJEN: What do you reckon I take the fifth on that one?
The reason I say that, it's a little bit of escapism, but I struggle myself with some of these issues. We have not yet moved to the stage of doing those sorts of experimentations so I haven't confronted them to a stage where I've worked them through intellectually myself, well enough.
33:23
JILL COLGAN: It's due to this ethical dilemma that Professor Rathjen is attempting what science has long believed impossible -- to take mature cells from our bodies and make them younger.
To in fact, make the cells regress back to the basic building blocks they were as stem cells when we were just five-day-old embryos.
This would allow a sick person to have cells extracted, reversed to stem cells and grown into whichever cell the body needed -- an exciting prospect but one that raises further ethical issues about turning back the ageing process.
34:08
PROF PETER RATHJEN: Now, you need to understand how fast the field's moving. Two years ago, that was heretical. One year ago, I was at a conference where suddenly everyone was talking about, "This is what we ought to be trying to do." Last week, in 'Science', a Swedish group reported the first experiment that shows that that can be done.
JILL COLGAN: What excites you most about that?
PROF PETER RATHJEN: The fact that we would never have to cross the ethical boundary of making human embryos or sacrificing embryos, that we would have what would appear to be potentially a robust cellular technique which simply involves taking cells out of people, growing them for a few days or a few weeks and then transplanting them back into people in order to cure a disease.
34:50
JILL COLGAN: No-one is more curious to find how far the research has gone than Gino and Lindsay.
At our request, Professor Rathjen agreed to give the two men a first-hand account of his progress.
35:12
PROF PETER RATHJEN: What we know from Parkinson's is that it's a population of cells called dopaminergic neurons that have died.
If you could replace those cells in the brain, you could overcome at least some of the symptoms. The point is, we don't have a source of cells to transplant into people's brains. We know if we can make the right cells and put them into the brain, we should cure the disease. This is just a methodology for making enough of those cells to transplant in the first place.
35:37
LINDSAY CREMIN: The procedure to transplant would be as simple as an injection?
PROF PETER RATHJEN: Yes, the idea is, we inject at the moment into our rats two microlitres of solution -- that's two thousandths of a litre -- a tiny amount of cells.
That contains about 20,000 cells and we deliver that precisely to the part of the brain that we want.
So, yes, that's what it should be.
GINO PIGNONE: I feel uncomfortable about having cells injected into me which come from an embryo or embryonic form of some type, because I see that as taking something from a living entity without consent.
PROF PETER RATHJEN: There are no hard and fast answers to these kinds of issues. It's very hard to weigh up. There are no easy solutions to those problems.
36:25
LINDSAY CREMIN, TALKING TO JILL COLGAN: I thought they'd gone further than I had anticipated and it is very easy to get excited about it and start looking at time factors. I mean, how many months or how many years before sufferers, for argument's sake, can get hold of it? So, I think we've got to really come down to earth and appreciate that they probably still have a long way to go but at the same time I think it's fair that we can maintain some enthusiasm and some hope for the future.
JILL COLGAN: Still, Gino and Lindsay were uneasy about how little the public knows about this science or where it could lead.
37:09
GINO PIGNONE: It sort of looked a lot like the IVF program where it started out to help women who were unable to get pregnant on their own to be able to have children.
But it sort of went beyond that point, where now they're focusing on trying to choose the sex of their child before it's even born.
And I find that disturbing.
And I don't want to see this sort of research go down that same track.
37:34
KEVIN ANDREWS: In August of 1999, the Minister for Health and Aged Care, the Honourable Michael Wooldridge, asked the committee to undertake this inquiry. The terms of reference are to review the report of the Australian Health Ethics Committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council entitled, 'Scientific, Ethical and Regulatory Considerations 'Relevant to the Cloning of Human Beings'. For this meeting the committee is operating in a public forum.
JILL COLGAN: Gino's concerns are at the core of the vocal opposition being expressed to the Federal Parliamentary inquiry on human cloning.
Many of those giving evidence are from religious and pro-life groups well-briefed and antagonistic towards the research.
38:23
WOMAN: Mary Yuleman, Catholic Women's League.
WOMAN: Kathleen Wool from the Australian Federation of Right to Life Associations -
JILL COLGAN: There is condemnation of the use of embryos for research and the fear therapeutic cloning will inevitably take us down a slippery slope to cloning humans.
This, despite the overwhelming evidence our scientists are interested in cloning only for therapy.
38:47
KEVIN ANDREWS: I think the fear factor is the human 'Dolly'. The fear factor is to, you know, replicate another Kevin Andrews or another, you know, whoever. I think there's a, um, I think my judgment is there's an intuitive concern about that.
JILL COLGAN: It now appears inevitable the committee will Arecommend Australia joins an international ban on the cloning of whole human beings.
Less clear is what to do about the issue of using human embryos for research.
Have you come to a conclusion about the unwanted IVF embryos, as to whether we should discard or use them for research?
39:29
KEVIN ANDREWS: Well, at the present time there are different responses to that in different places. I think that's an ongoing -- an ongoing discussion. So it would be premature of me to speak about issues that -- ..that the committee may well have to discuss.
39:41
JILL COLGAN: There's apprehension in some scientific quarters about the man chairing the committee, Liberal backbencher, Kevin Andrews.
He was the man whose private member's bill brought down the Northern Territory's euthanasia laws three years ago -- based on his views about the sanctity of human life.
PROF PETER RATHJEN: The key thing that I'm hoping from that committee is that they don't introduce a set of legislative rules which prevent research which everyone would agree is a good thing. Now, that might sound like a very trivial answer. In fact, it's not. We're in a difficult stage because so many of our basic concepts are being overturned experimentally almost month by month. And, so, somehow they need to find, firstly, what it is that the Australian community or the Australian public wishes to support in this kind of area. And then they need to entrench or come up with a set of guidelines, I think, which make it clear about what the intent of this research should be and the kinds of things that were allowed to go forward. But perhaps not going quite so far as trying to legislate for specifics which may turn out, in the short-term even, to have effects which no-one ever foresaw.
41:02
JILL COLGAN: The same debate is impeding research in Britain, Europe and the United States.
In addition, Australian scientists are concerned by the experience in the US, where wealthy biotechnology companies sponsor the research and slap patents on every discovery.
Australian biotech company Bresagen funds the research at Adelaide University and has already patented some of the work -- walking a fine line between sponsorship and commercial control.
If everyone keeps tying up different parts of the cell's patents, how are you all going to work together?
41:40
DR JOHN SMEATON: Oh, well, we'll be in the world bazaar of trading patents, won't we?
PROF PETER RATHJEN: In fact, it is already the case, I think, that commercial interests in the country are preventing some collaborations which would have taken place if the scientists themselves were free to go in the directions that they'd go. But by the same token, those scientists would probably not be in the position that they're in at the moment unless they'd had the resources that were provided by the commercial bodies.
42:10
JILL COLGAN: What's glaringly obvious is that the Federal Parliamentary committee cannot ignore this research.
To do nothing -- to offer no government funding, no guidelines -- will leave the research open to control by big business and out of public scrutiny altogether.
On the other hand, to ban the research will condemn Australia to the scientific wilderness, jettisoning years of work and the promise of a new era in medicine.
END 43:16
Reporter: Jill Colgan
Producer: Rebecca Latham
Research: Kate Wild