Results from the 2006 Swinburne National Science and Technology Monitor have found that the majority of Australians are either unsure about therapeutic cloning, or uncomfortable about it.

The Monitor is an annual survey of 1000 Australians on public attitudes to science and technology, conducted by the Australian Centre of Emerging Technologies and Society (ACETS) at Swinburne University of Technology.

The 2006 Monitor was conducted during the recent Senate debate on therapeutic cloning. It is the most in-depth survey of Australian attitudes to stem cell research so far.

Of the 1000 Australians who were surveyed, 37% were unsure about their level of comfort with therapeutic cloning; 6.5% reported being neither comfortable nor uncomfortable; 25.0% said they are uncomfortable with it; and 31.5% said that they were comfortable with therapeutic cloning.

Dr Christine Critchley, Deputy Director of ACETS commenting on the significance of the results said: “The scientific community will need to be careful that it engages with the public in therapeutic cloning and its social implications, or it might face a backlash.”

Being comfortable with therapeutic cloning wasn’t strongly associated with age, education, employment status, church attendance, political affiliation, relationship status or living in a rural, remote or urban area.

Women however, were more likely to be uncomfortable and unsure about therapeutic cloning than men, and those who stated no religion were more likely to be comfortable, whereas Catholics were more likely to be uncomfortable.

Other findings were that the majority of Australians were comfortable with stem cell research using adult cells (comfortable 69.4%; unsure: 6.5%; uncomfortable: 12.6%; neither: 11.5%) and left over IVF embryos (comfortable 55.7%; unsure: 6.0%; uncomfortable: 26.1%; neither: 12.2%).

Australians remain extremely uncomfortable with reproductive cloning. Of the 1000 Australians surveyed, 88.3% were uncomfortable with cloning human babies and 81.3% were uncomfortable with cloning domestic pets.

Dr Critchley observed that people were keen to talk about the subject in more depth than intended for the original survey length of ten minutes, with some people taking up to an hour to complete the survey and taking more time to consider their responses.