Perth, Australia, May 9, 2008 / 02:48 am
In one of the first legislative actions involving embryonic cloning since the discovery of a breakthrough stem cell production technique, lawmakers in an Australian state have rejected legislation that would allow human cloning for research purposes, Cybercast News Service reports.
Advocates of bans on such cloning argued the new discovery has “radically changed” the field and helps justify the prohibition of research that destroys human embryos.
Last November, scientists in the U.S. and Japan reported the successful “direct reprogramming” of human adult skin cells into cells that behave like embryonic stem cells. These “induced pluripotent stem cells,” iPS cells, are considered to have significant research and therapeutic promise while avoiding the ethical problems involved in creating, manipulating, and destroying human embryos.
Cybercast News Service reports that the upper house of the Western Australia parliament on Tuesday voted down a bill presented by the Labor government that would have resembled federal legislation passed in late 2006 that lifted a ban on human “therapeutic cloning,” somatic-cell nuclear transfer.