Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The incorporated speech read as follows

Does the Future Really Need us? was a profoundly challenging article written and published in Wired magazine in 2000 by information technology master Bill Joy who invented Java software and who was Chair of US President Clinton’s Information Technology task force. He suggested in this ground breaking article that technology was moving so fast that ‘with the manipulative advances in the physical sciences and the new, deep understanding of genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These combinations open up the opportunity to completely redesign the world, for better or worse: the replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become the realms of human endeavour’.

He argued that an intelligent robot was not too far off with computing power making it possible by 2030. “And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species—to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.” He says that it is a dream of robotics that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology.

This is already happening with the implantation of computer and nano-devices into the human body. The human and the robotic are merging. But can we achieve near immortality by downloading our consciousness, as Ray Kurzweil details in The Age of Spiritual Machines.

If we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? Will we define a homosapien as a carbon based anatomy? Will we survive our own technologies or will they make us extinct?

Joy argues that we need to stop and think about the synergies between the new technologies before we proceed. “If our own extinction is a likely or even possible outcome of our technological development shouldn’t we proceed with great caution?” he asks. “Knowing is not a rationale for not acting.”

“The nuclear, biological and chemical technologies used in 20th century weapons of mass destruction were and are largely military, developed in government laboratories. In sharp contrast the 21 Century Genetic, Nano, Robotic technologies have clear commercial uses and are being developed almost exclusively by commercial enterprises. In this age of triumphant commercialism, technology—with science as its handmaiden—is delivering a series of almost magical inventions that are the most phenomenally lucrative ever seen. We are pursuing the promise of these new technologies within the now unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives and competitive pressures.”

“This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by it s own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself as well as to a vast number of others.”

Incredibly for someone at the forefront of his Information Technology and computing field he is thinking in the same way that David Suzuki did about genetics before he (Suzuki) abandoned it.

Joy said, “Software is a tool and as a tool builder I must struggle with the uses to which the tools I make are put. I have always believed that making software more reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer better place; if I were to come to the opposite, then I would be morally obliged to stop this work. I can now imagine such a day may come.”

Stephen Hawking recently posed the question on the internet “In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?” After a month or two he wrote... “I don’t know the answer. That is why I asked the question, to get people to think about it, and to be aware of the dangers we now face.”

He then outlined the dangers as he saw them. The danger of collision with asteroids, nuclear war, climate change and the accidental or deliberate release of genetically engineered virus... “Each time we increase our technological powers, we add new possible ways in which things could go disastrously wrong. The human race faces an increasingly dangerous future. There’s a sick joke that the reason we haven’t been visited by aliens is that when a civilisation reaches our stage of development, it becomes unstable and destroys itself. In fact, I think there are other reasons why we haven’t seen any aliens, but the story shows how perilous the situation is. The long-term survival of the human race will be safe only if we spread out into space, and then to other stars. This won’t happen for at least 100 years so we have to be very careful. Perhaps, we must hope that genetic engineering will make us wise and less aggressive.”

It is sobering to think that two of the greatest thinkers in and around science are contemplating the extinction of the human species.

It is in this context of whether or not the human race will last the next 100 years or whether we will destroy ourselves that we are now debating the question of whether to permit further research and development of human cloning. Without this context cloning is part of modern reductionist science which deliberately separates everything from everything else, doesn’t feel compelled to identify the risks to any other species or life support system. This is completely the opposite to nature in which everything is interconnected. You cannot talk about one of the parts without considering the whole. Cloning must be debated in the context of all the other rapidly advancing technologies and its benefits and dangers must be seen in an holistic way. We have to think about science as well as within science.

Under the proposed legislation human cloning will only be permitted in Australia under strict conditions for research and experimentation and not human reproduction. But it is nevertheless advancing the science of cloning: the capacity to replicate a human being. It is wrong to say that just because there is no sperm involved in creating an embryo, it is not a proper embryo. It is. It is exactly the same process that created Dolly the Sheep.

If we do not think it is appropriate to clone a human being, if we cannot answer such questions as whether a clone, a copy, is fully human and equal to the person from whom he/she is copied, should we proceed to perfect the process? How does cloning generate the essence of a person, sometimes described as soul and if it can’t, then are we not creating a lesser human, or soulless category?

It is naive to believe that once mastered, this capacity will not be tested in conjunction with the other technologies to improve the cloned person or manipulate the cloned person for military or other purposes. Imagine an intelligent clone who has had the section of the brain that triggers fear suppressed. Imagine that clone with a nano skin the pores of which close when it senses toxic gas. Would that clone be regarded as human or a machine for warfare? Would his/her rights be equal to those of his/her inferior original stock? Will the enhancing of human performance exacerbate the gulf between those who will be improved by technological convergence and those who will remain unimproved by choice or social economic status? Will we think it is okay to experiment with enhancing a clone in a way that we would not experiment on a human created with egg and sperm?

Respect for human life and dignity is at the heart of our legal and moral code. Equality is the basis of our democracy. We are putting in place a regime that does not respect a SCNT embryo in the same way that we respect an egg/sperm embryo and nor do we consider it equal. By differentiating between SCNT embryo and an egg/sperm embryo we are undermining our own legal and moral code and creating two classes of embryo, defining the difference between them on the spurious grounds of the relationship we have with one of them.

In their report to the United Nations entitled, Science Faith and New Technologies: Transforming Life, The World Council of Churches asks, “What will happen to the unimproved? Will physical enhancement become a social imperative as well as an enforceable legal one? In 2004 a US Court ruled that prison officials were allowed forcibly to medicate a death row inmate to make him sane enough to execute. In a world where human improvement or enhancement becomes a technological imperative the rights of people who do not meet the norm, for example people with disabilities, will be further eroded and impairments or disabilities will be perceived as technological challenges rather then issues of social justice. How long before democratic dissent is viewed as correctable impairment as well?”

The argument that this will not occur does not stand scrutiny. Scientists split the atom for peaceful purposes but it was not used that way. Our society has come to accept almost without question new scientific breakthroughs without realising their potential synergistic consequences.

We now have convergent technologies enabled by means of computer mediated technologies. The National Science Foundation explains, “The phrase convergent technologies refers to the synergetic combination of four major NBIC (nano-bio-info-cogno) provinces of science and technology, each of which is currently progressing at a rapid rate: Nanoscience and nanotechnology; biotechnology and biomedicine, including genetic engineering, information technology, including advanced computing and communications and cognitive science including cognitive neuroscience.”

Let me give you an example of a world we hardly know exists and has been approved by authorities supposedly acting in the public interest. Researchers in nanotechnology are seeking to exploit the Periodic Table of elements. Whilst they cannot patent an element found in its natural form, they can patent a purified form of it that has industrial uses. “Whereas biotechnology patents make claims on biological products and processes, nanotechnology patents may literally stake claims on chemical elements. ”(Transforming Life)

In Hong Kong silver nanoparticles, highly toxic to pathogens and bacteria are being used to disinfect the Metro. But this could have a devastating effect on bacteria in natural systems and has already been shown to be toxic to mammalian cells. They damage rats’ brains and liver cells but are already in use in Hong Kong and are being considered for use in the London Underground.

In Hong Kong also, in spite of the dangers, nano silver has been approved as a base for a spray on female condom and was released commercially last year. No woman purchasing this spray could be deemed to have given informed consent.

As a concerned citizen opposed to cloning and increasingly concerned about the capital and military application of science, I need to know who will benefit and who will bear the risk of cloning experiments.

Whilst much has been said about embryonic cloning, it is adult stem cells that are providing real promise of breakthrough and cure without the vexatious, practical and ethical problems of SCNT. The claims in the media of safe and efficacious cures from embryonic stem cells are not borne out in the Biotext literature review conducted for the Lockhart Inquiry. The Korean research into embryonic stem cells has been proven to be a fraud and much of what has been written, including by the Lockhart Inquiry was based on that work.

The people who will benefit immediately are the drug and pharmaceutical companies and the people who are at immediate risk are women.

As the Gene Ethics Network argues, “The precautionary principle requires any review of the costs and possible benefits of a new technology, to consider both present proposed uses and also all reasonably predictable or foreseeable future uses including all future uses that would become feasible if further development of the technology were permitted now.”

The cloning research that is proposed can go nowhere without women. Women’s bodies are required to provide ova. The procedure has risks both long term and short term. It is clear that women will not provide ova without incentive either financial or preference in IVF or in the belief that it is altruistic. All involve exploitation. There is not a sufficient supply of eggs for this experimentation and will not be without payment or inducement or criminality involved.

The fact that Britain began with a ban on financial incentives and is now removing it because of a lack of donated eggs is a case in point. Eastern European women and many Asian and African women are trafficked already. Now there will be increased incentive for the unscrupulous to use women for profit. Many have been rendered infertile already because of what has been done to them in British clinics. Abuse of human rights and harvesting organs and body parts in China from political prisoners and those on death row are common place. If prisoners are already being used for body parts in China, why will they not become a source of eggs forcibly taken?

Who will guarantee that cadavers will not be harvested? Who will guarantee that desperate refugees will not be a source of eggs in exchange for permanent asylum? Who will say that young women burdened by debt from university fees or under pressure with a mortgage will not sell their eggs? Some argue that they should be paid since the corporations will make millions from the patents derived from their donations.

Pressure will be brought to bear on those already vulnerable in the IVF programme to give eggs in return for reduced costs or advancement in the queue. The use of lab staff to donate eggs to the experiments of Dr Woo Suk Hwang demonstrates what can happen in the interests of furthering national pride in economies of knowledge and credibility. Altruism will be encouraged on the basis of an imminent cure for a relative or friend playing on women’s compassion.

Women are not commodities. Women’s body parts are not for sale. Women are not selfish walking repositories of eggs that are being wasted because women will not donate them. The fact that we are having this debate about finding ways to encourage women to undergo invasive procedures that have no benefit to themselves and give up body parts demonstrates of itself how far down the road we are to arguing that the advancement of science justifies harming women. No woman can give informed consent because we do not know what the health risks and impact of the hormonal stimulating drugs involved will have years down the track. The end does not justify the means.

The world is globalised. No one can guarantee that research developed here will be kept here. A breakthrough anywhere is replicated in labs around the world regardless of the ethical or regulatory regime in Australia and rapidly commercialised by multinational companies for enormous profit. Private capital will be able to access the results and the public interest may or may not be served. Consider the HIV/AIDS drugs developed in the public interest. Why are they refused to poor countries as generic drugs? Why are African children, and communities in PNG suffering and dying when drugs exist to help them? The PET scanner helps cancer patients who can pay, the poor suffer. Why would a treatment or enhancement derived from cloning be available to anyone other than the industrialised north? Why is work being done on cloning but until Bill Gates came along, not being done on curing malaria, the killer of the world’s poor?

Any Australian researcher who successfully clones a human will have set the human race on a new course because the ethics we may apply will certainly not be applied elsewhere as we have learned from South Korea, Britain and China. We might argue that no human clone can live beyond 14 days but will those in UK labs do the same once they know how to do it? We may move to try to prevent exploitation of women but ask the Eastern European women left infertile after harvesting of their eggs in British labs who protected them?

We argue that each human being is unique, that human life is precious and sacred but we are contemplating a technology that profoundly challenges that notion.

We are even stretching the definitions of what is human and what is animal. I strongly object to the creation of human-animal hybrids.

What of the results of the animal experiments involved in cloning for therapeutic purposes?

Whilst no human-animal material is permitted to be implanted into a woman, given the definition of such an embryo as not human, how long will it be before restrictions are lifted and such an embryo will be allowed to live more than 14 days and be implanted into an animal? Is that ethical given the mitochondrial DNA it carries?

As the Gene Ethics Network’s Bob Phelps argues, “An enucleated animal oocyte also contains mitochondrial DNA that interacts with nuclear DNA in ways that are little understood. A hybrid embryo clone produced by SCNT from a human somatic cell into an enucleated animal oocyte would have mixed animal (mitochondrial) and human (mitochondrial and nuclear) DNA in each cell.” You cannot define a hybrid embryo as not a human embryo because all of its nuclear DNA would be of human origin.

Is such a creature animal or human? Will we use human genetic material to improve the intelligence or performance of animals?

What of the animals used in this cloning experimentation? How many animals will be euthanised to access their eggs to reduce the number of human eggs required to determine the fertility of male sperm?

I support the precautionary principle. I recognise the promise of adult stem cells for research and therapeutic purposes and as with all others hope that it may produce the cures so longed for, but I reject human cloning. I reject human-animal hybrids. I reject the commodification of women. I believe that Australia should establish an Office of New Technology to independently and rigorously assess new technologies in the light of the convergence of science and technologies that are capable of redesigning matter, of transforming life, and of challenging the very idea of what it is to be human.

What is the essence of our humanity? We think we understand Nature and the Cosmos and have a right to transform it. Our mistakes, like global warming are threatening the very life support systems of the planet. Henry Thoreau once said that we will be rich “in proportion to the number of things which we can afford to leave alone.” Humankind is part of the natural world. Mother Earth has provided us with awe, mystery, inspiration and the life support systems for our survival for time immemorial. We are not her master and to the extent that we have attempted through human arrogance to be so, we may well have put ourselves on the path to extinction.