ENDEAVOUR FORUM NEWSLETTER No. 124, OCTOBER 2006

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 A patient of mine with advanced Parkinson’s disease hopes to be the first man treated with stem cells from the back of his nose. He is among the dozens of patients with various genetic illnesses whose stem cells have been collected for research at the Griffith University Adult Stem Cell Centre.

There are cautious, very cautious, grounds for hope for my patient, given that Griffith has successfully used these adult stem cells to treat Parkinson’s in rats, and is planning primate trials. If all goes well, human trials will follow.

His case is an example of the true state of stem cell science versus its political distortion. In the public mind embryonic stem cells and cloning are the main event, whereas in reality they are a conjurer’s side-show. Adult stem cells are now safely used for 70 human conditions (stemcellresearch.org); embryonic stem cells remain both unusable and dangerous. The cloning lobby dreams of creating ‘patient-specific stem cells’ for research; adult stem cell researchers have already achieved that goal.

Leading cloning advocate Professor Alan Trounson has clarified for the public that cloning is not about cell therapies for Parkinson’s or spinal injury, but is limited to the more modest research goal of creating ‘patient-specific stem cells’ for studying disease and developing drugs. He states: “It’s not about cells for therapy. This is about cells that give us an opportunity to discover what causes a disease and whether we can interfere with that.”

Fine – but that is exactly what Griffith has already achieved with adult stem cells. They now possess an expanding range of ‘patient-specific stem cells’, superior to anything cloning could make, since they are free of the genetic damage inherent in cloning. These adult stem cells are easily obtained from patients with any disease, readily transformed into the required cell type (brain, muscle, kidney, liver) and useful for genetic study of the disease and development of effective drugs.

Cloning has been left for dead, and Griffith Professor Alan Mackay-Sim has written its obituary - telling the Lockhart enquiry into Australia’s cloning laws: “It is probable that such stem cell lines as these will render therapeutic cloning irrelevant and impractical”.

If that view is correct, what possible justification is there for pursuing cloning? I put that question to a cloning advocate at Johns Hopkins University last month. He could think of no residual role for cloning if the Griffith claims are correct – but, he added, “It sounds too good to be true”.

 It is true, and that is good news for people like Gary Allsop, paralysed from a spinal injury, who is well known to Victorians as an advocate for cloning. Perhaps the Griffith research will direct Mr Allsop away from that futile fantasy.

Only last week he called on Canberra to permit cloning, saying “We have the science. We have the funds.” But human cloning is not so much ‘science’ as an artful mix of blatant fraud and fairy-tales, and if Allsop really believes that stem cells from cloned embryos could ever be used for his spinal injury, he has been cruelly misled.

Perhaps he was wowed by recent television footage of paralysed rats moving their legs after treatment with embryonic stem cells, not realising that better results in rats were achieved years ago using adult stem cells (Ramon-Cueto 2000), and more importantly that embryonic stem cells cannot be used in the human spine, due to their tumour-forming tendency. Above all, does he not realise that adult stem cells have now progressed to trials in paralysed humans, not rats, published only last week in the Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine?

 As to his comment, ‘we have the funds’, Allsop should consider the warning of another paralysed man, Jim Kelly, who has changed from advocating cloning to opposing it, on the grounds that cloning science is shoddy and scarce research funds are better spent on adult stem cells. Kelly writes: “Under the guise of ‘keeping all options open’, colossal resources are being siphoned away from practical and foreseeable causes for medical hope.”

Our limited resources should be spent only on research that is both compelling and ethically sound, not on a scientific monstrosity that demands the deliberate creation and killing of human embryos.

Premier Bracks, a keen advocate of cloning embryos, should spend taxpayers’ money both ethically and effectively. He should explain to the public why he considers it right to create human embryos with their destruction in mind. If he cannot refute the Griffith University claim that their patient-specific adult stem cells make cloning ‘irrelevant and impractical’, he must reconsider his misguided support for cloning.

 My patient understands what the Premier does not: that genuine medical hope lies with the magnificent science of adult stem cells, not cloning - which must be rejected as both ethically wrong and scientifically redundant.

Pope John Paul II said that all research using stem cells from human embryos is “morally unacceptable.” In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), John Paul said, “This moral condemnation also regards procedures that exploit living human embryos and fetuses — sometimes ‘produced’ for this purpose by in vitro fertilization — either to be used as ‘biological material’ or as providers of organs or tissue for transplants in the treatment of certain diseases. “The killing of innocent human creatures, even if carried out to help others, constitutes an absolutely unacceptable act.”