In Brisbane I stayed with my good friends from my Valencia days, Salvador, Margot and family. We spent some of the time on North Stradbroke Island where Salva made a most magnificent paella for us after Sunday Mass. I swam off Flinders Beach which, together with Main Beach, are the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen. 
I also saw my first Koala bear - a mother with its baby, perched in an inert and intoxicated way in a gum tree. 
We even saw a whale passing by Lookout Point on the Island. This is one of the finest locations I have ever encountered in my life and it was a wonderful preface to the Priest's Conference which then took place in the city. Dr David van Gend gave honour in his conference to the Japanese physician Shinya Yamanaka whose work in 2007 has made cloning and the supposed need to use embryonic stem cells utterly obsolete.
This great man has developed a technique for creating totally viable and usable stem cells from skin tissue, which makes the culture of death procedures of cloning and harvesting stem cells from embryos wholly irrelevant. His work invites the world to look at the embryo in wonder at how a whole human person can exist in such a small thing and expand and develop in the same way in which the Universe did.
1 comment:
Hi Father,
I am enjoying your blog very much but just need to make little correction. Koalas are not bears. Bears have tails - Koalas do not. They are simply called Koalas - Koala bear is a common mistake made by non-australians.
Rebecca F
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