Suppose I wanted to pass my genes to offspring, but didn’t want to do it via traditional reproduction. Is it possible, with today’s technology, to create a child using solely my own genetic material? Does it matter if I am male or female? (Assume a healthy adult donor)
Would the offspring be legitimately mine? And what kind of dollar pricetag would it take to undertake such an enterprise successfully?
This is called Human Cloning. It is illegal in the United States and elsewhere.
The question was, “Is it possible?”, not “Is it legal?”. I am uncertain whether the techology exists, as yet, to bring a human cloning to fruition.
As to whether the resulting child would legitimately be your offspring, it might be more accurate to call it your sibling, and your parents’ offspring.
Cite?
With current cloning technologies it might be possible, but current cloning techniques require an egg, so technically for it to be from you alone, I would say it could only work currently for a female.
The chance of success would appear to still be very low but cloning is making significant progress since Dolly the Sheep.
The cost would be very high and have to be done outside of the US. As there is no way to know how many tries it would take and there has been no reported successes at cloning humans, guessing at the cost would be futile.
The offspring could well be considered yours, especially if you were female and acted as the host mother to the successful fertile ovum.
Jim
The Raëlians claimed to have cloned a human back in 2002. Aliens helped them.
Hwang Woo-Suk of Seoul National University claimed to have cloned human embryos in 2004. He got busted for fraud.
As far as I know, no one’s managed to clone a human yet. Maybe the folks in black helicopters have done so, but if so, they aren’t talking.
Another interesting possibility: I read somewhere that they made stem cells turn into sperm cells. This raises the possibility of a woman’s adult stem cells being turned into sperm, and used to fertilize her own egg. Don’t recall if the sperm was made from embryonic or adult stem cells, and I’m pretty sure it was done with rats, so it may not be possible with humans at all, non-embryonic or not.
Here you go. Specifically, you want the states which outlaw “reproductive cloning.”
Huh. I thought the only laws were against government funding for it. Okay, thanks.
Have they worked out the problem with the shortened telomeres yet? As I understand it, Dolly died of something resembling old age when she should have still been very young, since her chromosones were already age-damaged.
Which part?
I’ve seen claims they have for Cats, I think the article was about 3 months back in the New Scientist. I do not subscribe, so I will not be able to find it. I also do not remember the scientific detail, so possible felines do not suffer from “shortened telomeres”.
Could you possibly sum up what “shortened telomeres” are? You are over my head. *
Jim
Is Parthenogenesis a possibility?
It creates offspring from a single parent, but isn’t cloning per se:
Aha, something I finally know! Telomeres are short repeated sequences of DNA at the end of your chromosomes. Due to the nature of the DNA replication process, your body is unable to copy the very ends of your DNA, but since telomeres don’t code for anything, it’s ok to lose them. Eventually you will run out of telomere sequences and the cell will stop dividing. Shortening of the telomeres has a role in aging and in cancer, but I am not a geneticist and can’t really tell you what. 
Here’s a link to the wikipedia entry on telomeres, if I didn’t explain it well.
Great Nutshell, I had already checked the Wiki article after I posted, but your post sums it up very nicely in proper layman terms.
Thank you,
Jim
Mice. Using embryonic stem cells.
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[li]Nayernia K, Nolte J, Michelmann HW, et al. 2006. In vitro-differentiated embryonic stem cells give rise to male gametes that can generate offspring mice. Developmental Cell, Jul; 11(1):125-32.[/li][/ul]
Unfortunately, the Y chromosome contains several genes necessary for sperm development, so you need to start with male stem cells. On the other hand, it is possible (at least with mice) to get male cells to produce eggs, so you could get a uniparental non-clone by taking a male cell, doing nuclear transfer to produce cloned ES cells, differentiating them to become eggs (which so far has not been done convincingly in any species) and fertilizing them with the donor’s sperm. You’d still need a female to donate the eggs for the nuclear transfer, and a host mother, but all of the genetic material would come from the man (except for mitochondria).
And the major problem with cloning seems to be imprinting rather than telomeres.
JRB
Damn, I wrote a neat post about all cells, not only sex cells, mutating, and then I remembered twins and realized that mutations after conception must even themselves out or something.
But could you, against all respectable odds, get a white kid with a black arm, for example?
At a guess, that could happen with a chimera, given appropriate fathers. But IANAB, nor a MS.
Am I right that if a human were to develop from the genetic code created by joining together the two half-codes contained in two randomly picked specimens of my sperm, then about 3/4 of that offspring’s genes would have two identical alleles?
My reasoning is:
I have either, say, DD, Dd, dD, or dd, each with the same probability
If I have DD, then my offspring will have DD.
If I have dd, then my offspring will have dd.
If I have Dd, then my offspring could have DD, Dd, dD, or dd
Same if I have dD.
Count up all the possible DDs, and you get 6/16. Count up the dds, and you get 6/16. Meaning 12/16, meaning 3/4.
This is different (right?) than the normal course of events, where the presence of a second contributor of DNA changes the probability so that just 1/2 of the genes consist of the same allele twice over.
-FrL-