Joe Santamaria is a practising Catholic and a member of the Family Council of Victoria and a former National President of the Australian Family Association.

With his medical background he should be well aware that stem cells produced in lab conditions are not a viable human being.

He should also be well aware that research into stem cells holds a great deal of benefit and knowledge.

If he really cared about the well being of living creatures he would do well to express concern as Yabby suggested and protest at the appalling and inhumane killing of chickens in Turkey - just for starters.

What is it about foetal cells that appear to some to hold more validity than adult women, abused children or the mistreatment of animals?

This article should have remained where it belonged - on the Catholic Weekly.

This is another example of a particular religion attempting to rule us all.

Surely Dr Santamaria (good to see that name still active in questions of the common good) and his arguments should not be judged on the grounds of his faith. Why is it that abortionists and IVF clinics are not criticised when they speak from their vested intrests but a humble Catholic doctor is?

Regarding the arguments put forward, I believe he is quite clear in his criticism of the report and its lack of attention to questions of morality, and I commend him on this.

DF, you forget of course that nobody is forcing Catholics to have an abortion or partake in IVF. So Catholics are free to live by their moral standards, yet some want to force others to live by them too.

If we examine the Catholic argument, http://www.catholic.com/library/Birth_Control.asp

what it somes down to is the biblical dogma of Onan and the holy sperms. Those of us who think that this and other Catholic preaching is a heap of nonsense, leading to more problems of unsustainability for humanity, why should we live according to Catholic dogma?

The days of religious tyranny are over by the way.

DFXK

You stated "Regarding the arguments put forward, I believe he is quite clear in his criticism of the report and its lack of attention to questions of morality".

Its his judgement of what is moral that makes him condemn the report. He should declare his interest and he is FAR from a Humble Doctor he is a leader of the pro-life movement in this country.

Dear Posters,

Dr Santamaria didn't hide his colours and it wouldn't matter for most of you how tall a mast he had! Scientists rarely display their commercial and academic qualifiers overtly. Thank heavens for google & ASIC registers...meanwhile the critics bias is supposed to sail by unchallenged in the territorial waters of the sea of humanism.

Placing aside the overt criticism of Catholism - you would think Elizabeth I was the current monarch! - and setting aside ethics / mores, the issue at hand is whether this is good science and good value for the millions of dollars of public money being directed to speculative embryonic research and away from other research.

Despite the science, we are really dealing with a combination of spin/PR skills, and elements of stockmarket speculation. Dr Florey would have little chance of discovery in such an environment.

Whichever way you cut it, this is a fundamentally dishonest article.

Dr Santamaria, in the best traditions of media spin, conflates opinion with wishful thinking, and then baldly passes it off as logical argument.

He shamelessly takes Prof. Jeeves eminently sensible warning against scientific hubris, "any attempt to elevate science to the level of an ethical system, which must be believed or accepted, immediately opens itself to abuse", to be de facto proof that such abuse exists.

Then he slips in a personal opinion, that "[i]n the fields of reproductive technology and biotechnology generally, the underlying ethical position of scientists around the world is based on utilitarianism", without feeling any need to substantiate or illustrate. Merely conducting experiments on embryos is evidence enough of their lack of ethics, in Dr Santamaria's world.

Followed up with a dismissive "there is no scientific evidence that embryonic stem cells can achieve such an outcome (recovery from crippling handicaps)".

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? All these evil scientists pursuing an impossible dream - why on earth do they bother? This is pure propaganda, and cannot possibly hope to sway an uncommitted observer such as myself.

As if to underline the point, Mr Santamaria continues "It is highly doubtful if embryonic stem cells (ESCs) can ever be used in clinical medicine ...[a]ll its claims for the treatment of any disease process are purely speculative. It is highly doubtful if such cloning can be done without a large bank of donor human ova which would then complicate the substantial problem of tissue rejection. There is no doubt that the treatment of a patient will be at a prohibitive cost. It is known that cell lines established from such embryonic stem cells tend to undergo genetic drift or changes as successive populations are generated from the original cloned cell. It is known that such cells are prone to serious tumour formation.... These are ethical issues"

No, they are matters of sciantific debate. Ethical issues have to do with right-to-life vs right-to-choose. Deliberately mixing the scientific and ethical simply exposes the spin factor.