Aggregated News
CANBERRA, Australia -- Australia's Senate narrowly voted to end the country's four-year ban on cloning human embryos for stem cell research, ruling Tuesday that the potential for medical breakthroughs outweighed moral doubts.
The decision -- a rare conscience vote in a country where lawmakers are expected to follow the party line -- sets the stage for the ban to be lifted entirely. The measure now goes to Australia's House of Representatives, but lawmakers had expected the Senate to pose the biggest hurdle.
The Senate voted 34 to 32 to allow therapeutic cloning, which involves removing the nucleus of an unfertilized human egg and adding DNA to make it grow in a lab dish.
Scientists had been lobbying for lawmakers to relax rules on stem cell research and allow therapeutic cloning of embryos for medical research. Since Parliament passed Australia's first laws on stem cell research in 2002, scientists have only been allowed to extract stem cells from spare embryos created for in vitro fertilization.
Sen. Natasha Stott-Despoja, a member of the opposition Australian Democrats, praised the vote. "We have done...
The decision -- a rare conscience vote in a country where lawmakers are expected to follow the party line -- sets the stage for the ban to be lifted entirely. The measure now goes to Australia's House of Representatives, but lawmakers had expected the Senate to pose the biggest hurdle.
The Senate voted 34 to 32 to allow therapeutic cloning, which involves removing the nucleus of an unfertilized human egg and adding DNA to make it grow in a lab dish.
Scientists had been lobbying for lawmakers to relax rules on stem cell research and allow therapeutic cloning of embryos for medical research. Since Parliament passed Australia's first laws on stem cell research in 2002, scientists have only been allowed to extract stem cells from spare embryos created for in vitro fertilization.
Sen. Natasha Stott-Despoja, a member of the opposition Australian Democrats, praised the vote. "We have done...
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