Archbishop of Sydney

Cloning

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
26 June 2005

A Melbourne newspaper reported recently that one of Australia’s richest men went to China to be injected with embryonic stem cells to help make him younger.  The “treatment” cost US$31,000 per session, and is meant, among other things, to reduce wrinkles.

The rich are free to spend their money as they please, but no one, rich or poor should be misled by inflated or misleading expectations.  Cures of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s from stem cells are a long way off, and more likely to come from adult stem cells than the human embryonic stem cells favoured for research in Australia.

Last week the Australian government announced a review of the 2002 legislation banning human cloning, i.e. the asexual reproduction of identical human beings.  Some want the limits on this legislation to be expanded, so that there can be human clones created.  Stem cells would be extracted and the embryos destroyed to produce alternative organs for those destroyed by disease.

At the moment, everyone says they are against “reproductive cloning”; allowing a cloned embryo to be implanted in a woman’s womb and brought to birth.  But researchers now want to be allowed to create cloned embryos of patients for therapeutic purposes, to cure diseases.

The idea is to clone identical embryos of a patient for the express purpose of extracting their stem cells.  This kills the embryos, but the hope is that the stem cells acquired in this way can be introduced into the patient’s body and develop to cure a particular disease.

It also raises the prospect of “harvesting” multiple “stem cell lines” for use in pharmaceutical and other research.  Demand for these could be huge and produce a financial bonanza.

People know it is wrong to kill human beings for research or financial purposes.  Producing identical human embryos and keeping them alive long enough to extract stem cells before they are destroyed violates this principle.  The possibility that such human farming might generate huge incomes does not make such a practice legitimate.

We were all embryos once.  An embryo is the first form of an individual human being.  It should be respected in the same way, as a human.

Some scientists want to deny this basic reality by changing the language used to talk about human clones, by language games, by old fashioned spin.

So scientists are now speaking of human embryos not created by the fusion of sperm and egg as “intermediate celluar products” or “somatic nuclear transfer”.  This is double speak, misleading advertising.

Creating embryos for scientific consumption creates a subclass of humans for destruction and export.  Changing the language does not change the reality.  We are on a slippery slope.