THE news from Queensland senator Ron Boswell that a who's who of the Richmond Tigers has invested in cloning, perhaps to revive players from its glory days, is more than a joke.

"This is a world of high finance, patents, trades and deals where monopolies on human genes are traded like football hero cards, only the stakes are much higher," Boswell told Parliament last week. Questions need to be asked.

And the first is whether the destruction of 70,000 frozen IVF embryos will really cure patients with diabetes, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, Rett syndrome and quadriplegia.

"Let researchers do their jobs. Let science yield its miracles. We cannot lose a day," NSW Premier Bob Carr burbled a few weeks ago.

However, this tantalising hope has been exposed as bombast by a May 10 report in the Los Angeles Times, whose journalists have been asking rude questions. What they found was the hard men of biotechnology have done their sums and think the odds of achieving miracles with therapeutic cloning are "vanishingly small" and the costs sky-high.

But Geron Corporation, the leading American cloning technology firm, is not interested.

"The process is a non-starter, commercially," chief executive Thomas Okarma says. It would take "thousands of (human) eggs on an assembly line" to cure a single person.

Okarma has no moral qualms about cloning, and his company even uses "spare" IVF embryos in its research.

But like many in the biotech industry, he believes therapeutic cloning will never produce commercially viable therapies. The first reason is that creating a clone is a difficult and expensive business. The DNA has to be sucked out of a woman's egg and replaced with the patient's DNA. It is a tricky procedure which succeeds only after many attempts -- about 100 using contemporary technology. And the cloned cells can only be used for one patient.

"Where do you source that many eggs?" asks Alan Robins, chief scientific officer of BresaGen, an Adelaide-based company which does stem cell research in the US. "Sourcing eggs is a contentious issue in itself."

Women could be paid for their eggs, but this would lead to charges of exploitation. According to Okarma, the process of extracting stem cells from the clone is highly inefficient.

"We don't think it makes sense as a business model, producing cell therapies for a patient population of one," Robins says.

Perhaps millionaire celebrities like quadriplegic Christopher Reeve will be able to afford a tailor-made cure for his damaged spinal cord, but not a teenage water-skiing victim.

Another stumbling block is quality control. According to Lutz Giebel, the CEO of CyThera -- a San Diego company which holds the largest number of government-approved stem cell lines -- it is not commercially viable.

"Quality control is difficult, the FDA can't regulate it, (and) no one can afford the treatment," he says.

In April, after intense lobbying by IVF scientists, the Prime Minister, Premier Peter Beattie and the other state premiers agreed to allow embryo research on surplus embryos in the hope of achieving Carr's miracles.

But there will be no miracles for your kids -- unless you are a squillionaire.

AND after $1.9 billion was cut from the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme in this week's Budget, it is fantasy to think the Government will foot the bill for stem cell therapies.

So why are IVF scientists so eager to get their hands on these embryos if prospects for cures are so dim? Why are they ignoring other scientists' promising research and even cures for juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's disease and heart disease? These have already been achieved using adult stem cells -- and without killing human embryos.

Without the cures, how are they going to make a return on the Tigers' investment? We know from Boswell's inquiries, producing genetically identical macaque monkeys on a jungle island in Indonesia is one avenue.

Testing drugs for pharmaceutical companies is another. What else is there? And who will benefit?

Before Parliament ratifies the embryo research agreement, it ought to ask some hard questions. As Boswell said on Thursday, "imagine debating a Bill that could make a select group millionaires but not identifying who those people might be or ascertaining whether it is just that they should so profit. Imagine if the potential millionaires were the primary source of information on the issue and no one knew of their vested interest.

"We must not let the promise of miracles blind us to our duties as legislators to scrutinise, to check and to know as much as possible about the stakeholders in this issue."

Michael Cook is the editor of the bioethics e-mail newsletter Australasian Bioethics Information. michael.cook@australasianbioethics.org