Factiva

Australia is close to legalizing human therapeutic cloning. It is close to allowing the creation of embryos in the lab for research into the fight against Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, diabetes, arthritis and other diseases. It is close to doing the right thing. Will others, including Canada, have the courage to follow?

Australia's Senate voted 34-32 yesterday to legalize the use of donated human eggs to create embryos from which stem cells might then be harvested. It would be legal to replace the nucleus of the egg with DNA from an ill person and, once the embryo reached the stage of a tiny clump of undifferentiated cells, to destroy it for its stem cells — cells capable of becoming blood, bone, muscle, any tissue. In theory, those cells would be less likely to be rejected by the body of the DNA donor.

The Senate's vote is not decisive. The bill has to go to the House of Representatives, probably next month, but it is expected to have an easier time there. The rhetoric in the Senate bordered on the feverish. “It has all the pride equal to a Nuremberg rally,” said Senator Julian McGauran, “a rally of Dr. Strangeloves chanting for such weird experiments as the creation of hybrid embryos, mixing humans with animals.” (To allay any such unrealistic concerns, the legislators amended the bill to rule out human-animal hybrids.)

On the other side, Senator Alan Ferguson, whose daughter was diagnosed 13 years ago with multiple sclerosis, said: “I would never forgive myself if I voted against this bill. . . . [It could] give medical research that extra possible opportunity to succeed in finding a cure for some of the terrible diseases which are now incurable and which afflict so many of our population.”

Allowing human therapeutic cloning is no guarantee of success, but then, neither is the use of non-cloned cells. The journal Nature Medicine reported last month that a team at the University of Rochester cured rats of a Parkinson's-like disease using human embryonic stem cells, only to find that brain tumours had started to grow in every rat treated. Science con-tinues to feel its way, investigating the potential of adult stem cells and the mining of stem cells from non-cloned embryos without destroying the embryos.

Therapeutic cloning is a promising avenue, and that promise worked its way into this week's U.S. congressional election. Actor Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, attracted publicity when he campaigned for a Democratic senator on the issue of stem-cell research and drew the ignorant fire of radio personality Rush Limbaugh. The Democrats have no lock on the fight for this research; Nancy Reagan went public with her support for the stem-cell cause in large part because of watching her (now late) husband, former Republican president Ronald Reagan, succumb to Alzheimer's. Her argument drew no sympathy from George W. Bush, who devoted his first prime-time televised speech as President, in August of 2001, to cutting federal funding for most stem-cell research, and who four months ago vetoed a congressional bill that would have restored a modest amount of that funding.

At least the United States has not banned human therapeutic cloning, despite a Bush-endorsed attempt that died in the Senate in 2001. By contrast, the former government of Paul Martin outlawed this avenue of research in Canada. A bill belatedly inspired by the 1993 report of the Royal Commission on Reproductive Technologies was put before Parliament and died on the order paper at the end of 2003. The Martin government revived it early in 2004 and passed it in the blink of an eye, though some parliamentarians clearly had no clue what the legislation was about. Liberal Senator Jim Munson made an impassioned speech in the Senate calling for the bill's passage because “stem cells hold great promise for the regeneration and repair of tissues and organs damaged by trauma and disease.”

The bill passed, and made it illegal to pursue that promise through the creation of embryos and the transfer of nuclei. Australia's example should persuade Canada to think again.

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