Great Wisdom Found "Down Under"

The Aussies have pulled one out of their collective hats. Let's hope other countries, namely the US take notice and get a clue.

Australian Senate OKs Cloning Embryos

By ROD McGUIRK, Associated Press Writer
5 hours ago

CANBERRA, Australia - Australia's Senate narrowly voted Tuesday to lift the country's ban on cloning human embryos for stem cell research.

The bill, which was approved 34-32, would relax rules on stem cell research and allow therapeutic cloning of embryos for medical research.

Well let us hope they contiue to have wisdom and see fit to allow ACTUAL TREATMENTS from Therapeutic Cloned Stem Cells. Otherwise there is no use for such Embryoic research that intends the use of the actual stem cells therein produced. The only other use is to identify the means by which the cells become pluripotent/totipotent (able to become any needed cell type and regerate thereafter) In other words finding a means to revert adult cells into stem cells that look every bit like they came from an embryo without actually having done so.

The emotional debate on the legislation introduced by a former health minister, Sen. Kay Patterson, began Monday.

Opponents, including Health Minister Tony Abbott, warned that therapeutic cloning is open to abuse and could create animal-human hybrids.

Oh for shame! Little man with tiny brain attempts to scare us with monsters. Oh dear oh dear... lions and tigers and bears... in our genes... oh my!! Learn some actual science moron, we already have animal parts in us, we ARE ANIMALS first of all. More to the point though we carry within us the evolutionary legacy of a zillion things so mundane as even yeast, hence it being so hard to cure yeast infections because our bodies do not readily recognize the yeast as foreign material.

Parliament passed Australia's first laws on stem cell research in 2002, allowing scientists to extract stem cells from spare embryos intended for in vitro fertilization but preventing them from using them for cloning.

This was extremely short sighted of them. This is because the only true benefit of using cloned embryos to harvest stem cells from is to tissue match the nucleus donor so that that donor patient does not suffer immune response tissue rejection. Such rejection would of course have to occur and would of course endanger the lives of patients if one were to use in-vitro left overs. Opponents to ESR rarely ever come forward with that tidbit of information.

Should the bill pass the House, all cloned embryos would have to be destroyed within 14 days and could not be implanted in a woman.

Last minute amendments to the bill proposed by the Australian Democrats minor opposition party, increased from 10 to 15 years the prison sentence for flouting safeguards designed to prevent abuse of embryonic cloning.

Another amendment prevented researchers from getting licenses for creating human-animal hybrid embryos.More short sightredness but for now they are on the right track.

Regarding the dreaded CLONES, oh dear oh my!!

I call for it again, for anyone to give me a plausible rational reason that cloning is wrong, without invoking mysticism or irrational "Yuck Factor" appeals to rediculous knee jerk emotionality not based in science.

As always please refer to the original article found here for missing elements not found in this blog entry.