MELBOURNE, April 22, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Australia has granted licences to two in-vitro fertilization clinics to begin using “excess” embryonic humans for research purposes. Melbourne IVF and Sydney IVF say they plan to experiment with the embryo children to improve IVF effectiveness. Sydney IVF also said they will use the embryos as a source of stem cells, and conduct embryo metabolism studies. Australia’s Federal Government passed a law in 2002 legalizing stem-cell research. Australia claims a surplus of 70,000 embryos in frozen storage, resulting from excess fertilization of eggs during IVF procedures. The licences to do embryonic research were granted “by the National Health and Medical Research Centre and that, to my mind, sets an unacceptable and profoundly disturbing precedent,” Independent Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “They are licences to kill,” he said. In related news, the scientists who cloned Dolly the sheep, the first cloned higher animal, has applied for a licence to clone humans. Professor Ian Wilmut, of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, told the British Broadcasting Corporation that he wants to use the cloned human embryos to study motor neuron disease. “Therapeutic cloning,” the deliberate creation of human embryos for the purpose of medical research, was legalized in the UK in 2001. Wilmut has entered an application with the UK’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority. Wilmut told the BBC, “Because at this early stage the embryo does not have that key human characteristic of being aware to me it would be immoral not to take this opportunity to study diseases.”
His is the first application for a therapeutic cloning license in the UK.
“It comes as no surprise that Professor Wilmut has decided to extend cloning from animals to human beings,” Patrick Cusworth, spokesman for the charity Life UK, said. “The fact that he does so under the banner of so-called therapeutic cloning makes no difference whatsoever to the fact that a human being is being deliberately created and then destroyed.” Read BBC coverage: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/3645037.stm Read the related LifeSiteNews.com report “Church And Senator Denounce Australia’s Approval Of Embryo Research,” at: http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2002/apr/02040804.html “Embryo Research Approval Orchestrated Via International Bioethics,” at: http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2001/oct/01101001.html