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Dear Member of the Western Australia Parliament,

An unprecedented breakthrough in stem cell science has made cloning – and its supporting legislation - redundant.

No longer is SCNT-cloning the only way to obtain ‘patient-matched’ embryonic stem cells, which are so desired by researchers. The new method of direct reprogramming of adult cells – taking skin cells and using a few genetic factors to restore them to the equivalent of embryonic stem cells – achieves the same outcome, without ever creating or destroying a human embryo.

This Parliament may be the first in the world to consider the case for cloning since this alternative path was blazed, only three months ago. An ethically non-contentious path to the same scientific goal.  I have compiled for you highlights of this dramatic event. You will see in the reports from November 2007 the repeated theme of an exciting scientific breakthrough that also resolves deep ethical tensions.

Consider Professor Ian Wilmut, who cloned Dolly the sheep and who holds the UK license to clone human embryos, simply walking away from cloning in favour of direct reprogramming of adult cells – which he considers “100 times more interesting”, and also “easier to accept socially”.

Likewise, Professor James Thomson, who first discovered human embryonic stem cells and also co-discovered the new ‘iPS’ direct reprogramming technique in humans, speaks of how this breakthrough will make the current ethical impasse over embryos and cloning “just a funny historical footnote”.

Other overseas scientists and ethicists describe this discovery as “an earthquake for both the science and politics of stem cells’, and as the ‘Holy Grail’ of stem cell science. One cloning expert says that the ethicists will just have to find something else to worry about now!

In Australia, the former Chair of the Lockhart Review into our cloning laws, Professor Loane Skene, celebrates this “exciting breakthrough” and observes that it “takes away the step of using the egg and creating the embryo which is particularly ethically contentious”.

Leading Australian experts like Professors Alan Trounson, Richard Boyd and Martin Pera, all indicate the shift away from cloning to this new alternative. They appreciate the freedom from ethical concerns, including the troubling question for cloning of ‘Where will all the eggs come from?’

The demise of cloning is happy news for both science and society. Now the great field of stem cell science, untainted by the creation of human embryos solely for research, can have our united support.

If the Federal Parliament had known what the Parliament of Western Australia now knows, it is likely there would never have been a Bill to permit cloning. May your deliberations lead to a rejection of laws that are ethically worrying, and now scientifically redundant.

vangend@machousemedical.com.au;