Why worry about it? At most, its likely to be just another way of having babies. Its not likely this procedure will prove more attractive than the standard. Hence, we’re not going to be swamped with clones.
Some of the stuff I’ve read suggests cloning isn’t so hot a reproductive system because the causative cells, if you will, are already “aged” and confer that age onward.
If that’s the case, the problem solves itself. Very few people are going to birth and nurture a sickly child just to see one’s genetic structure reflected yet again.
I agree with cloning on a purely scientific level, but completely disagree with IVF. If you can’t have children, why can’t you just admit that and move on? Say if you do have children, aren’t you then putting the burden of one day maybe not being able to have children too on them?
But as for cloning, I think it’s enough to say that it could be used to further scientific understanding. A controlled genetic make-up would be very handy in trying to fight illness and disease.
What cloning does not provide for is time. I think it would be worth waiting for the demise of dolly before assuming that cloning can be done without harming a life.
If you had the choice to be a clone, would you be one?
I know I wouldn’t.
AFAIK, even the Roslin Institute itself has not been able to replicate its success in producing Dolly (and as MEB pointed out, there are some concerns about her adult health).
While cloning technology has no doubt been refined in the past 5 years, we don’t have anything like a big enough animal sample as yet to fully understand what we’re dealing with, let alone trying to apply its use to human beings.
Dolly is the only one of the Roslin Institute lambs carried to term who survived - most of the others had severe birth defects, and even those which did not subsequently died.
We have not yet tracked either Dolly or the lamb to which she gave birth long enough to know exactly what mechanisms allowed Dolly to survive or what - specifically - is causing her premature aging (and whether that same factor will induce premature aging in her offspring).
Clearly, some parents are willing to take the risk of using a technology the safety of which has yet to be proven in animals, let alone humans - I only hope that they fully understand the magnitude of the risks they are assuming, and that they haven’t made their choice based on the misguided philosophies of the Raelian sect.
I still am not convinced at the “the technology isn’t perfected yet, thus we should not do it until it is” line of reasoning. Humanity has never been that afraid to take bold steps in new directions, and that’s a good thing. If we took this “don’t do it until we have it perfected” approach to every new idea, we’d never accomplish anything, and would probably still be living in caves. The only way to perfect the technology is to play around with it. Yes, play around with it. Experiment, try new things, new ideas. Yes, even with “precious human life.” I don’t mean to sound callous, but I think experimenting and making scientific advances is the essense of humanity. Since when have we ever not tried something new because there were risks it might not work? We learn from our mistakes, and we’ll never learn how to clone properly unless we make some mistakes. I’ll spare you the “gotta break and egg” cliché because it’s just not appropriate here
Just out of curiosity Kalt, our current level of experience with cloning technology suggests that - at least in its early days - human cloning will produce a significant number of children with severe birth defects; should the parents of those children be allowed to opt for having them euthanased as has been done to severely malformed clones of other mammals?
I would suggest that the difference between cloning and other technologies is that in the past we have studied the application of a procedure to other mammals many times and for many years before attempting to apply it to humans - we seem unwilling, in this case, to wait until the “failure” factor in animals has been significantly reduced and until enough clones of different species have reproduced for us to have some idea of how clones will express their genetic makeup in the next generation.
Reproductive cloning is not a life-saving or otherwise essential technology - if anything, we should be holding it to a higher standard of safety than those technologies which offer the only possible alternative to death.
It destroys the need for males. With cloning put into place, all we need is women to perpetuate the species.
Oh yeah, and the above mentioned males would go without nookie, since they no longer have the excuse “but we need to perpetuate the species!” to get laid.
On a more serious note: There’s the issue of making someone for the purpose of them being exactly the same as somebody else. What if we clone Einstein, and everyone expects the clone to follow in Einstein’s footsteps, but all the pressure put on him just makes him a complete failure and destroys his life?
And what about people who make clones just to have an organ doner on hand?
Just as identical twins have distinct personalities and character traits, so clones will differ from their genetic parent according to environmental influences (and quite possibly in ways brought about by the cloning process itself). Even if we could arrange for Einstein’s clone to have the precise same influences in his life at the exact times they came into Einstein’s, we cannot assume that Einstein’s clone would make the same choices as his genetic parent.
Theoretically, therapeutic cloning could solve the problem of compatible organs without clones being allowed to progress much beyond the blastocyst stage. We’d simply use the undifferentiated cells to grow whatever organ needed replacing.
I can’t see a time when growing a complete clone for “spare parts” is going to be viable - that clone would share any genetic predispositions towards disease the “parent” had and would need to be maintained throughout life “just in case”. To be useful as a potential donor of all organs throughout life, it would need to be close in size to the original unless science came up with some way to fast track physical growth in the clone within the period between organ failure and death in the “parent”.
A great many people didn’t see it that way in pre-human IVF days. They were no less horrified at the concept of “test tube babies.” That changed rather quickly after the first IVF baby was born.
Why is cloning unnatural? Isn’t it a product of the evolution of the human brain’s ability to cope with problems?
That is a little like saying “if you have clogged arteries, why can’t you just admit that and move on?”
By the time those children are grown, maybe there will be even more solutions to the problems than just cloning. Or, perhaps, by that time, cloning won’t be out of the ordinary. At any rate, I don’t think there are laws in most countries that ban passing on other genetic “burdens.”
Like I said in the OP, I never see a day where we’ll be cloning little “mini me’s” solely for spare parts (keeping them locked up in little cages like veal calfs as it seems to be suggested).
should the parents of those children be allowed to opt for having them euthanased as has been done to severely malformed clones of other mammals?
That seems like the most compassionate thing to do. Of course that’s presuming a worst-case scenario.
I would say that not only is it the most compassionate option, but it’s the one which most serves the purpose of scientific discovery. If we are prepared to allow the use of reproductive cloning in humans while it is still a highly experimental and high risk procedure in animals, then we need to be prepared to make the human experiments we are conducting part of our overall body of scientific knowledge on the subject. If we’re going to offer a technology we know to be imperfect (bear in mind that any drug which induced such a high rate of miscarriage and birth defects would never be allowed on the market), then we need to be willing to perfect that technology as fast as possible - and that means finding out what went wrong and why at the earliest opportunity.
I find that easy to believe but hard to understand.
Because the genes from the donor cell must be reactivated.
If a way were found to isolate true stem cells from an adult–cells that are completely undifferentiated–then cloning could proceed using that genetic material and sidestepping most of the problems of cloning.
Bringing together sperm and egg outside of a Fallopian tube is somewhat unnatural, but it’s not inherently dangerous or risky. Attempting to “rejuvenate” specialized adult genetic material isn’t just grossly unnatural, it’s highly dangerous (to the hypothetical resulting offspring).
There are some interesting links to policy and discussion papers on this page.
Of particular interest are the two staff working papers from the President’s Council on Bioethics, as one paper makes the argument for reproductive cloning and the other argues against it.
It is usually hard to understand such attitudes in retrospect, I think. Someday people will probably find it hard to understand why there was so much ruckus about cloning.
Maybe I am not understanding what you mean by “unnatural” and “grossly unnatural.”
Apart from anything else, cloning is an asexual method of reproduction. Every other method of assisted reproduction we’ve used to date has still been a modified form of sexual reproduction. We can’t even begin to predict the longterm implications of using a method of reproduction which simply doesn’t occur naturally in humans. We might as well be trying to induce humans to lay eggs and gestate them by putting them in an incubator until they hatch.
While artificial insemination and IVF attracted a great deal of controversy when they were first used in humans, they’d been used in animals successfully for many years beforehand without producing the same kind of catastrophic outcomes which have been associated with mammalian cloning. While we are assuming that it will ultimately be possible to produce healthy clones who live normal lifespans and whose offspring suffer no teratogenic anomalies, such an outcome is by no means certain.
Think of the number of news reports you’ve heard announcing a scientific breakthrough which is expected to be in widespread use in 5-10 years time. The kinds of vaccines and treatments referred to in those reports are far less complex than taking the human genome and trying to reproduce it in a manner which is entirely alien to our species.
Creating the clones is the easy part. I suspect it will be many, many years before we can even bring the majority of clones to term, let alone guarantee that most of those who survive to term will be free of birth or other genetic defects induced by either the cloning process itself or external factors which we don’t currently understand.
Clogged arteries causes death to come more rapidly… not having children of your own naturally doesn’t have that same tendency does it?
IVF for humans is a stupid idea. There is already too many children in the world. Now, as for near extinct animals… IVF is a great idea. We have already wiped out too many species.
I read more than I post here, but i wanted to say I was glad to see a thoughtful thread on this subject. It seems that many people on other boards are afraid to talk about cloning in any intelligent meaningful way and just dismiss it as evil and messing with god in some way. Anyway, it’s refreshing to see that alot of you see this as an exciting medical breakthrough in science. I work in healthcare and am saddened to see my fellow RN’s be so closed about the whole subject.
I like Kalt’s and others’ logic of keeping cloning in perspective by comparing it to how people responded to the test tube baby. It’s progress. New and different yes, but that is happening all the time. I like the idea that we can now easily live to 80+ years due to our medical advancements and technology, rather than the 40 or 50 years we got to be around 100 years ago. Cloning is merely the putting into practice a piece of what science has learned in more recent years. No, there are not going to be people farms where body parts are harvested as our good ol’ boy pres seems to imply. Sure there is going to be some that use cloning in selfish ways not acceptable to others, but if we are going to ban everything that has that potential, I believe we would still be living in caves with loin cloths.
i have not heard any discussion of the aging of the clone in relation to the age of the person being cloned. the body replaces itself every 7 years. the cells have all duplicated themselves. if you clone a 50 year old man the clone starts of with 50 year old DNA. will it be boran and age at an accelerated rate? doesn’t sound like fun to me.
I’m certainly not that strong in genetics, so I can’t say whether or not that would be of concern in cloning, but if so, it seems the solution would be not to clone a 50 year old until we discover how to overcome the problem.
I am also impressed by the level of clarity shown in this thread. There is very little to argue with someone who bases their opinions about cloning on religious beliefs and/or value judgements about the “natural.” And yet this issue throws up problems that still must be addressed outside of any such framework.
I am not concerned about cloned babies being grown for spare body parts (or in the case of the Raelians, spare bodies) because it seems obvious to me that any clone created still will be a person. That person should be afforded the same rights as any other and should be protected from wackos who think it would be their right to harvest body parts from them. In any event, therapeutic cloning seems a more obvious alternative as “a person” (as I understand it) is not being raised as a sacrifice and the replacement can be grown far more quickly.
This is an interesting point but I would like to see some cites if possible. My main issue with human cloning rests on these kinds of considerations, we really don’t know enough about the long term effects of cloning on the “clonee.” It is unethical to create a human being using these methods until we can get some more clarity through research on other mammals.
The backlash from more conservative sources is really, as Kalt already suggests, another replay of the resistance we have seen to nearly every scientific advancement for the past few centuries. Attitudes will change and these people will find some other piece of the past to stubbornly cling to, but that does not invalidate some of their concerns.
How should we regard clones?
I believe, as many others here do, that a clone is a person - not the merely the sum of their DNA. A clone is a twin, do we worry about twins harvesting organs from one another? Any legal status given to clones should not work on the premise that they are an “abomination” (this word has been thrown around alot lately on TV) but that they are human and should be treated as such.
But it’s “unnatural”…
Well yes, but so what? That doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with cloning a priori. Cloning is often used in agriculture, should we have “Contains Cloned Produce” on food labels? The reality is that cloning is going to lose much of this “unnatural” stigmata over the next few generations. Most of us only have the Church and science fiction to help us form our opinions about clones. Once we begin to see that they are just like anyone else no matter where their DNA came from these misconceptions will (hopefully) fade away.
