Under current (publicized) technology, I know that human cloning may have many risks and flaws including genetic damage. It’d also be sure that the clone would be a separate individual with identical DNA, the same as identical twins. They would probably be far more different than natural twins because they would have grown up in different times.
That said, what do you people thinking about human cloning?
The technology isn’t good enough yet. Outside of that, it’s pretty much a parlor trick.
It’d be ethically questionable to let a cloned human embryo come to term at this point, because of potential risks. When we get to the point where we’re reasonably sure that it’s safe, I don’t have any problem with it, though I’d have no desire to clone myself or my loved ones. It’s the ultimate egotistical form of reproduction.
Once the technology is proven safe, it will be one of several options for people with fertility issues (including same-sex couples, and singles). I have no problem with it being used as such.
However, I fear that many people who want the technology won’t use it like that. They’ll instead be trying to replicate themselves or someone else. Perhaps as a kind of resurrection of a dead person. Well, clones won’t turn out to be any more like their genetic parent than a naturally conceived person is to theirs. I think that line of thinking would die out quickly, but between that and luddite prejudice, it wouldn’t be fun for the first generation of clones.
I say clone early, clone often. I see no down sides. It’s eventually going to happen anyway, and to actively stand in the way of scientific progress is not only idiotic but wasteful. Every new branch of science has risks. It’s best, not to mention safest, in my estimation, to have the development of the process be open and sanctioned, to be able to attract the best scientific minds to the goal. I have no problem with growing body parts from individual cells. Spare hearts, spare lungs, spare livers, all perfectly matched to the cell donor. What’s not right about that? And yes, I’m okay with cloning human beings as well.
Of course we’re probably decades away from perfecting whatever the ultimate processes will be for this, but I, for one, believe it would be better for humanity’s progress to have this ability within the next 20 years than the next 100 because of willful ignorance and blind adherence to religious dogma.
Yeah, there are clearly a lot of bad ways to use it and most practical uses are morally bad. So far you people don’t seem to mind it much with the assumption that it is safe. Maybe it’d add more to the discussion, if you don’t mind, to state your religion. Right now I’d guess that the majority of those who don’t mind cloning would be atheists.
I’m generally okay with the idea of cloning as well although it can WAY too easily be abused. For the general good, it might be wiser to keep it illegal due to the high ratio of negative uses versus positive uses. I would personally like to have a clone of myself though as a brother. That idea isn’t practical either because I would’ve liked a brother about 1-5 years different from me so it’s too late for that. At age 1-5 though I would never have had such desire so I guess it’s just too imaginary to be true.
By the way I’m atheist with somewhat Christian believes. A Christian that’s skeptical about God and can’t come to believe it 100%. All- in-all, atheist lol.
Really? Prejudice is probably the biggest aspect that is sure to be present. Countless people will look down on clones and will take generations before it wears down a little, just like racism. There are also many negative implications like mass production as labor forces, lab rats, and pornography. Ideally perfection of human cloning would mean that only the DNA is required to reproduce the person so there will be an infinite amount of new ways of revenge and humiliation when you can reproduce your enemy with just their hair. Politics would also get much nastier. That’s probably not even the half of it.
I see your point, but there are many down sides though.
Oh and war - cloning the perfect soldier.
Oh yeah, and standards that parents have for their kids. Imagine hearing “You dumbass kid, I should have made a child with smarter genes than you!” Though that’s slightly different from human cloning, the perfection of such technology would probably give that possibility also.
A few months ago we had a thread on this topic. Cloning seems to come up here every so often. Anyway, people tend to make the assumption that clones would be looked down upon, but think about it, who would even know the clone was a clone? It’s not like they’d have any distinguishing marks, or a big blinking sign on their noggin. From every concievable standpoint they’d be just like anyone else. In fact, the clone him or herself may not even be aware that they are one if their parents don’t tell them.
I don’t see the likelihood of that being higher than it is right now with naturally gestated humans.
I don’t see this at all. Just because a clone is an exact copy of the donor doesn’t at all mean that the he or she will look exactly like the donor. We are the product of our life experiences, which mold us physically just as they do emotionally. The work required to get a person into even a close approximation of physical condition of the donor would not only take a life time, but would be astronomically expensive, and because there’s no way to be absolutely sure of the outcome attempting it would be a total waste of time and money.
I don’t see any, other than safety of the procedures.
How would this work now?
Not a chance. That would be MORE expensive than we have now; as the joke goes, why use high technology to produce extra babies when they are produced every day via unskilled labor ?
And that’s all that cloning gets you; babies.
No, you’d just end up with a bunch of babies, which you need to clothe and feed and educate for about 20 years. Meanwhile, your enemies will field armies a dozen times bigger than yours, and build them up 20 years faster because they just recruit adults.
What possible reason could there be for looking down on clones? Clones won’t come with giant signs. Even if some irrational people hated clones, how would they know who was a clone and who wasn’t? It would be like hating test tube babies. How do you find out?
But cloning doesn’t mass produce human beings. Cloned humans have to be gestated and cared for exactly the same way everyone else is. The baby has to be carried in a human womb, it has to have it’s diapers changed, it needs to be fed, cuddled, dressed, educated, and on and on. Do you know how much time, effort, and money it takes to raise a child?
If evil people want slaves there’s no reason in the world that would make clones more suitable as slaves compared to everyone else. Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier to kidnap third world orphans and enslave them? Or just round up people off the street?
Clones are not natural slaves. No court in the world is going to declare that cloned humans don’t have the exact same human rights as any other person. It’s not going to happen. Sure, clones might be slaves in some future dictatorship, but in that case everyone is going to be a slave. If the dictator of North Korea enslaves clones for nefarious purposes he can enslave anyone.
And how does politics get nastier? OK, you can steal a hair sample from Barack Obama and create a cloned Barack Obama baby. So? What in the world would the McCain campaign do with a baby Barack Obama? And besides, that baby isn’t going to be a slave, it’s going to be a human baby. Maybe Karl Rove could get custody of the baby, but if so he will be the legal father of the baby. We already have procedures where unfit parents can have their parental rights terminated.
Of course clones clones can be abused, just like any other children. But the fact that these children have an older identical twin doesn’t present any new ethical or legal problems. Cloning is therefore a non-issue.
Heh. Beatcha on this point by ten minutes. Great minds. Great minds. 
I know that they all start as babies, but have you ever been in a situation where another person is simply superior than you? That kind of thing would prove quite useful during war. I mean, if you can spend twenty years to train an extremely intelligent, accurate, and patient sniper, it would prove to be very useful. Surely that’s not the best example of superiority since a sniper can somewhat be easily replaced by technology. There ought to be attempt to "resurrect’ brilliant minds which is put a lot of pressure on the clone.
Onomatopoeia - I see you point which I have not previously considered since I’m quite new here. For distinguishing clones from people, there may be some ways though. For example, right now there would be genetic aging so if a twenty year-old woman has osteoporosis, people will assume she’s a clone. If genetic aging is present, there would ought to be many ways to identify clones just as we can identify people who are mixed racially (I know they’re not exactly the same).
Now let’s say people do start cloning. Before reaching perfection, they would be several steps from now till then. During this time, the flaws will be visible and very likely to be discussed by the media via magazines and talk shows (this stuff would earn them some good dough).
When the first patented technique for perfect human cloning exist, it would cost a lot of money to perform. There may be people who decide to cut corners which will create a lot of defects. There may be laws, but it’s difficult to ensure people always follow them especially if the baby clone seems fine at first. Kind of like how China produces fakes eggs. I don’t even get why they bothered making a fake of something so cheap.
Well you know what farms are like nowadays? Similar facilities could be recreated in the mass production scheme of things. Growing in the womb part, at some point (probably at least 50 years away) might become obsolete. Before then, if people really had high ambitions and strong desire to accomplish mass production, they can pay women like $5k + hospitality(maybe more) and desperate unemployed women would probably have to do it to survive.
Technology is slowly increasing unemployment rates and with an ever growing population, there would bound to be a lot of “volunteers”.
These “slaves” won’t be slaves as we know today though. They’re fine-tuned and exceptionally skilled at what they’re needed to do. They wouldn’t be doing things that anyone else can do because farming them would not be profitable for that.
Well I was never too into politics but if they can get a criminal record of a teen Barack Obama, and mixed the records, it could get nasty. A lot of controversies at the least.
Of course none of these would ever be legal but there are lots of black markets and underground systems that the law can’t always find.
By the way I like where this is going, discussion wise. Another thread I was in had a much more negative atmosphere. This is good though lol.
Some perv could actually go fuck themselves bring a new definition of twisted and perverted for us all to ponder. A compelling draw to an egomaniac. A legal and ethical problem for the rest.
Technology never stops. Somebody somewhere will be moving along. It may be the basis for new medical procedures or medicines. To close your eyes and say ,not here we do’nt want it, gives the positives away too. We should pursue it as fast as we can.
If you’re saying what I think you’re saying then you’re not correct. Why would you need a clone to train as a sniper when an abducted, or better and easier yet, adopted baby would achieve the same result much, much, much cheaper? As far as ‘resurrecting brilliant minds’ is concerned, creating a clone of a person wouldn’t create a person with equal, or the same, intellect. A clone is just a genetic copy of the donor. It has nothing to do with the mind.
I think you’re not understanding. A clone, as DT said, would start out as a baby, just like any other baby. There’s absolutely no reason to surmise or conclude that a clone would become osteoporotic in their twenties just because the donated cells came from someone imminently osteoporotic. If that were the case I’d get osteoporosis shortly after my mother did
I’m completely lost here. Please explain what you mean.
If funding and sanctioning of the processes were to become available research schientists would be clammoring to be part of it. There probably will be mistakes and mishaps through overexuberence, but because scrutiny would be extremely high, I don’t believe many “shortcuts” would be attempted.
If you can get cheap labor, why bother going through the expense of raising labor? Simply because the genetic donor for the clone was particularly intelligent or gifted in some area doesn’t mean the clone will be. Genetics can only account for so much; simply because a brain follows certain trends due to DNA doesn’t mean the mind will. Rather than invest in a person who isn’t guaranteed to be what you want, you can just hire people who already have the skills and abilities you need.
Now, if you want to talk genetic engineering, there’s at least a slightly higher chance of it being in some way remotely useful for “perfect soldiers” or what have you, but cloning? I don’t think so.
But even if you could take your top sniper and produce 100 clones, and pay 100 surrogate mothers to gestate them, and pay 100 foster parents to care for the children for 20 years, at the end of the day you’re left with a bunch of teenagers who have some sort of potential to be good snipers. And so what? It isn’t like the talent to be a good sniper is incredibly rare, or the demand for snipers incredibly high. And even if it was, you’d still have to convince those kids to join the military, because those kids would have the exact same human rights you and I do. They couldn’t be forced to join the military, and even if they could they don’t have to volunteer for sniper school.
As for the notion that clones could be identified by characteristic health problems, well…so what? You honestly think there are going to be clone-haters? Racism at least makes some sort of sense. What possible motive is there for clone-hatred? And even so, the thinking “Hmmm…Heather from accounting is only 21, yet she’s got osteoporosis. Must be a clone.” And then what? “And I hate clones, for some reason! So therefore I’ll…well, I’m not sure what I’ll do. I suppose I’ll be rude to her at the office christmas party and spray paint CLONE in big letters on her locker. Oh wait, that would be stupid. Why do I hate clones again?”
Lastly, while we can imagine people with a very strong desire to have a cloned child NOW regardless of the health risks, we also have to consider that these clones are going to have to be created by doctors and scientists. Doctors and hospitals who create clones knowing that these clones are very likely to suffer from serious health problems are opening themselves up to serious liability problems. What doctor is going to create a sick clone knowing that the baby’s parents are going to sue him and his clinic into the stone age?
We aren’t going to start producing human clones until the health risks to the cloned baby are negligable.
And exactly how many people are going to be clamoring for cloned babies? The reality is that cloning will always be a curiosity, because all these scenarios of supersoliders, manual laborers, or organ donors all require slavery to be legal. Allmost all cloning for nefarious purposes will quickly be seen as impractical once people realize that the clones are human babies with human rights and human minds, not slaves.
Nonsense. You might be able to clone a genetically perfect soldier, but it simply wouldn’t be worth the cost when you can get soldiers who are almost as good just by recruiting/conscripting your normal citizens and training them for a few months. And you can get them right now. And in much larger numbers. And for much cheaper, allowing you to spend the difference on tanks and missiles and other stuff that completely obliterates any advantage perfect cloned soldiers would have.
Ted_Y, have you ever read Brave New World?