The Australian senate has voted to permit the use of cloned human embryos for stem cell research, sparking an emotional debate on the ethics of the scientific procedure.
New legislation overturning a four-year ban on therapeutic cloning was passed by 34 votes to 32 in a late-night session on Tuesday, marked by warnings of a nightmarish future in which scientists create monsters.
The legislation will now go before the House of Representatives, where it is expected to be approved and become law.
Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard allowed a rare conscience vote on the issue, giving senators and members of parliament the freedom to vote outside party lines.
The bill would let researchers clone human embryos so that their stem cells could be used for research that could one day finding cures for debilitating diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and spinal cord injuries.
Therapeutic cloning involves removing the nucleus of an unfertilised human egg and adding human DNA before growing it in the lab. The bill states that cloned embryos would have to be destroyed within 14 days and could not be implanted into a woman.
Australian neuroscientist Peter Schofield told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that part of the fierce debate spawned by the senate vote was focused on when life first begins. “For some, it’s the moment the sperm and egg meet or that any other cellular form that has the potential to be an embryo comes first into existence,” he said. “The reason the 14 days has been used is that’s the first point in time where there is a commitment of any of the cells in that embryo to actually become a fetus and then a baby.”
Existing laws allow stem cells to be harvested only from surplus IVF embryos only.
The new bill provoked intense and sometimes emotional argument in the senate, with government senator Julian McGauran warning of the creation of human-animal hybrids. He said the research could become “a horror story”, with “Dr Strangeloves chanting for such weird experiments as the creation of hybrid embryos, mixing humans with animals.”
A successful, last-minute amendment to the legislation by the Democrats specifically ruled out animal-human hybrids.
Howard told reporters after the senate vote he was having trouble making up his own mind about which way to vote when the legislation reaches the lower house later in November. “If somebody looks me in the face and says ‘how can you vote against the possibility that I, as a crippled person, may have available to me a wonderful medical invention, medical science that would cure my affliction’, I can’t say no to that as a human being.
“On the other hand, if someone says to me ‘you are going a step too far and interfering in fundamental concepts of the beginning of life’, that’s quite a challenging thing as well.”
Female senators tipped the balance in the vote, with 19 out of 23 approving the legislation. Democrat Senator Natasha Stott Despoja described it one of the best legislative decisions in which she had taken part.
But the senate leader of the rural-based Nationals Party, Ron Boswell, described it as a dark day in Australian politics. “We created two types of embryos, one born to live and the other created to die,” he said.
The issue is controversial worldwide with the latest high-profile intervention in the debate coming from Hollywood star Michael J Fox ahead of the US mid-term elections. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, provoked conservative fire after campaigning against President George W Bush’s veto of federal funds for embryonic stem cell research in July.