Senator Stott Despojas cloning Bill legalises the mix of human and animal genetic material in the same embryo, said The Nationals Leader in the Senate, Senator Ron Boswell. In doing so, Senator Stott Despoja has ignored the specific scientific advice of the nations chief scientist, Jim Peacock, who says that the use of animal eggs as part of therapeutic cloning should be banned, as reported in todays Australian. That is one bad mark against the Lockhart Report already, because it specifically called for human-animal embryo clones. Who knows what other key issues they got wrong, relying as they did on the Korean cloning research later exposed as fraudulent. Senator Stott Despoja has rushed to get her Bill into the Senate before Senator Patterson, with the result that we have a very flawed Bill that directly contradicts the advice of the chief scientist. Research shows the persistence of mitochondrial DNA from the egg in cloned animal embryos. That means that under Senator Stott Despojas proposal, animal genetic material would be mixed with human with unknown results. Research has found for example that The use of nuclear transfer can result in both donor cell and recipient oocyte mitochondrial DNA persisting through to blastocyst and being transmitted to the offspring. The degree of donor mitochondrial DNA transmission appears to be random and currently no evidence exists to explain this phenomenon2; and Offspring produced by nuclear transfer (NT) have identical nuclear DNA (nDNA). However, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) inheritance could vary considerably3. Senator Stott Despoja originally raised the prospect of animal-human cross entities at the Second Australian Stem Cell Centre Annual Scientific Conference in 2004. This is a radical agenda, unsupported by proof of principle research. When the topic is so sensitive, there should be plenty of evidence to support going down this path. That evidence doesnt exist. No expert can even tell us how many eggs and how many embryos will be needed. ENDS Media Contact 02 6277 3244 1hybrid, n. 1. the offspring of two animals 2. a half-breed; a mongrel. 3. anything derived from heterogeneous sources, or composed of elements of different or incongruous kind quoted in The Macquarie Dictionary, 1985, Macquarie Library, Sydney, p.854 2 Genetics, Vol. 172, 2515-2527, April 2006,doi:10.1534/genetics.105.055145 Aberrant Nucleo-cytoplasmic Cross-Talk Results in Donor Cell mtDNA Persistence in Cloned Embryos Rhiannon E. Lloyd, Joon-Hee Lee, Ramiro Alberio, Emma J. Bowles, Joo Ramalho-Santos, Keith H. S. Campbell and Justin C. St. John 3 Genetics, Vol. 167, 897-905, June 2004, doi:10.1534/genetics.103.025049 Paternal Mitochondrial DNA Transmission During Nonhuman Primate Nuclear Transfer Justin C. St. John and Gerald Schatten