Our submission online at the Cloning Review

The Cloning Review Committee is posting yesterday's last-day-rush of submissions, including ours, to the legislative review site. There are many well worth a read, over a good red one night this week...

Ours is at the link: https://legislationreview.nhmrc.gov.au/submission/submission-165 and opens with a line of argument tediously familiar to anyone who has followed this blog since 2009, and its predecessor, the pre-Yamanaka, "Conscience versus Con Science" since 2006:

Summary statement

SCNT/cloning is a human corruption and a scientific failure. It is unethical, in that it involves the creation of living human embryos solely for research and destruction. It is unnecessary, in that the stem cell revolution of 2007 has removed the sole scientific argument for cloning: SCNT/cloning is no longer the “unique method” for obtaining patient-matched pluripotent stem cells, in fact it has never obtained even a single human stem cell for all the millions spent and all the embryos created and destroyed. The new “induced pluripotent stem cell” (iPSC) technique has succeeded magnificently in achieving patient-matched pluripotent stem cells where cloning has failed. Further, the iPSC method is ethically uncontentious: it does not use women’s eggs and does not create and destroy human embryos. This Review Committee should recommend repeal of the unethical practice of SCNT/cloning - a practice which since 2007 has no plausible justification - and recommend restoring the long-standing prohibition on the creation of human embryos solely for research.