Well with the sniper, “sniper” isn’t a good example but it would be someone who’s physically perfect for the job they’re to undertake. Because this perfect being would be extremely rare, you can’t just go out and abduct one but once they get their hands on the DNA, it’ll be sure to be worth a lot. With the mind, people may be tempted to test it whether that’s true or not. There have been lots of experiments done on humans in our history so this would probably not be excepted.
With diseases, some diseases are linked to DNA so if the baby had an identical DNA, they may get the disease at a more developed stage than the “mother” was when she was a baby. This is with my assumed premise that DNA may change over the span of one’s life. So when you clone a 40 year old, you’ll get a baby but with some DNA of a 40 year old.
The section you didn’t get is that right now if we cloned with current (publicized) technology, the clone would probably end up similarly as Dolly did. Dolly died at a younger age than the mother which suggests that she may have had grown up with damaged DNA. When it is humans, the symptoms of that would be more visible. Maybe you get a five year old kid with sore backs? I would understand if you disagreed but it shouldn’t be too hard to understand what I mean(no offense intended, but it’s a simple somewhat popularized concepts).
Re: my premise of DNA changing over one’s life. Are there conclusive research on that?(I don’t know) Maybe these are answered questions but when someone loses a leg, it becomes a stump; Is the DNA of the person changed or does the DNA still contain the blueprint of the leg? Also, would the DNA from the cells at the stump of a leg be identical to the DNA at other normal parts of that person’s body?
No it isn’t. A person who has fucks their clone isn’t fucking themselves, they’re fucking their identical twin.
Suppose you have a pervert who has the fantasy of fucking themselves. So this pervert decides to create a clone of themselves, raise the clone to fuckable age, and then fuck the clone. Really? This is a nightmare scenario that creates a legal and ethical problem for the rest of us?
It doesn’t present any more of an ethical problem than any other parent who sexually abuses their children. Yeah, the sexual abuse of children is a big problem, but honestly, how is cloning going to make the problem worse? You really think there is a large pool of child molesters out there who are refraining from having sex with children because those children aren’t their clones? How many of these people exist? If Micheal Jackson wants to fuck a tiny version of himself, he can pay a woman to have sex with him and fuck that regularly created child. You think Micheal Jackson can’t find children to molest today? That his unnatural urges are thwarted because cloning technology is not yet mature?
No I haven’t read it. Is it a book I would be able to find at a public library?
Well have you ever tried competing with people who are better than you at a whole other level? If you believe in supernaturals (better than the norm, not super crazy shit), then copying that DNA would be priceless.
Well it probably wouldn’t be foster families. Something more controlled and cheap is what I’d expect for such a scenario. And yeah, sniper wasn’t the best example. Imagine sniper’s importance 50 years back though, that’s the kind of skill level I’m referring to.
There are clone-haters right now already - religious people. Yeah, clone-hating wouldn’t be as large-scaled or instinctive as racism but do you honestly think there aren’t going to be clone-haters? With any given topic, there are people who’d think much differently than you. Heck, I bet there are even people who believes 1+1 != 2 just to be skeptical.
Unlicensed workers? These people would probably work quite secretively and if the client threatens to sue, his life would probably be in danger. (That may be a little naive of me since these kinds of lives are often portrayed in movies and those are clearly fiction. Still, it exists in probably smaller degrees than in movies).
And how do we clone perfectly without trial and error?
Well, doesn’t the technology between cloning and genetic engineering overlap for some parts? I guess I was referring more towards genetic engineering though.
If sniper is a poor example, then what jobs are there that require someone to be physically perfect for them? And where would you find the physically perfect specimen? The most likely arena for this that I can think of is sports, and even then there’s more to it than simply your physical form. If you cloned Lance Armstrong, it’s unlikely that you’d get a cyclist just like him. The child might have a leg up on your average young cyclist if through environmental pressures the child was as passionate about it as he is (or pressured into it), but it wouldn’t necessarily be anything truly remarkable or enough to justify the expense.
And then of course there’s the fact that men whose fathers had testicular cancer are four times more likely to develop it–imagine the odds if you’re cloned from a cancer survivor!
Michael Phelps? Okay, you might get a world class swimmer there, as he is built almost perfectly for his sport. Then again, that build is also strongly associated with Marfan syndrome. I have no idea if he has the mutations in the fibrillin-1 gene that cause it, but if he does then so would his clone. So, there’s another potential crapshoot for a cloned athlete.
I appreciate you actually asking the questions. Many just live happily in their ignorance.
Okay, first, DNA, unless acted upon by an outside mutative influence, doesn’t change. The DNA you had when you were born is the same DNA you will die with, regardless of whatever physical mishaps you experience in life. So, to answer your question, yes, if you lose a leg your DNA doesn’t change as a result, and still contains the complete blueprint for two legs, as evidenced by amputees who subsequently have childen with normal appendages.
As far as diseases are concerned, all things being equal, if the donor has a marker that predisposes her to osteoporosis at age 45, the clone would also have that marker, which would express itself around the age of 45 as well, again, all things being equal. There’s no reason to expect the clone will exhibit signs of osteoporosis at 20, especially since the affliction is one that expresses over a lifetime of physical exertion.
As far as Dolly is concerned, she died as a result contracting a form of lung cancer common in sheep. It had nothing to do with the cloning process, or the fact that she was a clone.
Well with technology, it just means there will be more unnatural urges that can be satisfied. For the most part I guess you’re right though and that it probably won’t affect our lives at large.
Think about how technology has already changed common legal sexual desires though. I’m sure lots of people watches computer generated porn nowadays. It’s perfectly legal but 50 years back, this idea would be absurd and unnatural.
No, a person’s DNA doesn’t change with physical changes. DNA isn’t a “blueprint” for a person, it is more like a “recipe”. A person who loses their leg doesn’t give birth to children with one leg. And a clone created from a person who lost their leg is going to grow into a normal baby.
As for the scenario of finding the perfect physical and mental specimen for a particular job and then cloning them to create dozens of perfect soldiers or whatever, it just doesn’t work that way.
Take Michael Jordan. Probably the greatest basketball player of all time. So the project is clone Michael Jordan and 20 years later you’ve got a basketball phenomenon. Step three, profit.
Except what makes you think Micheal Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time because he’s a perfect physical specimen? Sure, Jordan is extraordinarily gifted physically. But there are plenty of players riding the bench who are just as good as he is, except they don’t have the same mental game. They’d rather party and goof off instead of focus. You know all those players where they say he doesn’t have the greatest natural talent but makes up for it with hustle or heart? And all those players that they say have great natural talent but don’t hustle? What made Jordan the greatest is that he was a guy with extraordinary natural talent combined with extraordinary hustle and heart.
Except how do you clone that? The cloned child isn’t a slave. What if that cloned child doesn’t like basketball? You can train the kid from childhood to be a basketball player, you can indoctrinate him from childhood, except it turns out that children aren’t slaves. Plenty of parents try to push their kids to excell in sports, in academics, in show business. But it seems to me that the kind of parent who would want a baby Micheal Jordan to raise into the perfect basketball star is probably the kind of parent who doesn’t have a clue what it takes to raise that perfect basketball star.
And there are hundreds of kids graduating high school every year who want their shot at the NBA. Michael Jr. might have a better shot than some random kid, but what if Michael Jr. blows out his knee in college? What if Michael Jr. turns into a spoiled brat? What if he turns resentful?
You can’t engineer a child’s future place in society. Even if that child is a clone. There might be some attempts at this in the future, but unless we postulate the return of slavery I predict that most of these attempts will end up as failures.
To expand on this, that form of cancer is caused by a retrovirus that is contagious, had infected other sheep she had contact with, and is very common in sheep kept indoors, which she was during the night.
Sometimes I surprise myself how un-thoroughly I think things. I had the knowledge to guess that amputees would have children with all the body parts; it just didn’t hit me. Thanks for the clarification and example.
With diseases and identical DNA, have identical twins shown similar ages when their diseases show up? I’m not sure but I think that there are a lot of gray areas
in DNA which studying identical twins may solve, but maybe not. So Dolly dying of lung cancer, might there be a correlation between susceptibility of cancer and DNA?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Onomatopoeia View Post
As far as Dolly is concerned, she died as a result contracting a form of lung cancer common in sheep. It had nothing to do with the cloning process, or the fact that she was a clone.
To expand on this, that form of cancer is caused by a retrovirus that is contagious, had infected other sheep she had contact with, and is very common in sheep kept indoors, which she was during the night. *
Wasn’t Dolly’s mother also kept indoors? Are there more results of animal cloning that I can read?
Yes, identical twins can get hit by the same diseases. But its not cut and dried. You can have a gene that predisposes you to getting a particular form of cancer. That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to get that cancer, nor can you predict exactly when or if you’ll get it.
To expand a bit, my sisters are clones. It’s just that cloning sometimes happens by accident. And although my sisters are identical genetically they aren’t identical physically, and especially not mentally. And clones raised years apart by different parents and without the experience of being a twin are going to be even more different from each other.
Not as far as I’m aware. I believe Dolly was outside with a flock during the day and taken indoors at night as a security precaution, as there were worries about people trying to take her. The cancer she died of, BTW, is called Jaagsiekte. Most likely she was simply exposed to other members of her flock who carried the retrovirus, as several other sheep she had contact with had died of it before this.
Here is a list of cloned animals, though it’s really not terribly informative.
Actually I thought about it a little more. Have they ever tested the the cells from the stumps of amputated parts with other normal parts? Because if they were different, then the sexual genes would not have the same damage. Also, at this stage, how accurately can they measure DNA?
Every cell in your body has exactly the same DNA as every other cell. Your nerve cells, your muscle cells, your liver cells, your skin cells, your bone marrow cells, your kidney cells–all have the exact same DNA. (Your red blood cells don’t but only because red blood cells don’t have nuclei.)
Getting your leg cut off doesn’t change the DNA in the cells that make up the bones, nerves and muscles of your leg. They stay exactly the same.
