I’m not convinced we’re wise enough to deal with the implications of gunpowder, but here we are.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter what reservations we have or what we outlaw. If it can be done, someone will do it. So saddle up.
problem: with these suggestions as law, corporations would be able to own people.
what is your opinion on that, ** Lemur866**?
Poor choice of words on my part. I’m not talking about changing the code. Rather, cloning would still require making the cells do things they wouldn’t normally do – whereas in vitro fertilization requires getting the ovum and spermatozoa together, and nature take its course.
Rman: Wouldn’t the laws regarding “regular” humans still apply? To the best of my knowledge, it’s illegal for a corporation to own or to be the legal guardian of a child even if said corporation was responsible for the child’s birth. Businesses can’t adopt babies. And even if they could, they’d still be held to the same legal parenthood standards as you or me. Right?
I don’t think we’ll ever see the Time-Warner-AOL-Disney-Microsoft-AT&T-Pfizer-Chicago Reader Eugenics Lab exploiting their pack of cloned children for nefarious reasons. Anything’s possible, but I find it unlikely.
Personally, I think the potential good cloning offers the world is wonderful and that the “complete ban on cloning” that GWB, according to the article cited in the OP, wants to ensure is terrible.
Not that it matters. Sooner or later somebody somewhere is going to clone a human.
Me too. I agree with you.
:: s l ow m o t i o n d o u b l e - t a k e::
Did december just say “I agree with the Democrats” ??
I disagree. Successful, reliable cloning would be no different from such drugs; however, before cloning can be made reliable, we can expect an awful lot of failures along the way, with no guarantee of success.
Where did I say that I have a problem with the use of drugs that encourage twinning? I’ve looked through the entire thread, and I could not find a single reference to such. (I do have a problem with using fertility drugs when these drugs can be expected to cause a dangerous multiple birth, but that’s not quite the same as using a twinning drug.)
JThunder, a question: if a woman has a family history of miscarriages, gets pregnant, and then miscarries herself, and then wants to continue trying to have a baby, is this unethical in your estimation?
This isn’t a dig, I’m simply curious: why do you think we are ethically required to only clone if there is no chance of failure when pregnancy has failures?
As someone living in a nation which is about to give limited approval to human embyonic stem cell research (and believe me, the approval is extremely restrictive), I’m curious about why so many people in this thread seem to equate “human cloning” with creating “minimes”.
We already clone human cells in research every day. We’ve been deliberately growing human cells for years for one medical reason or another. In this country at least we already clone human stem cells. The only ethical problem people seem to have is when those techniques are applied to embryonic stem cells; thus, in this country for the time being research will be limited to embyos otherwise destined for destruction.
At this point in time we cannot clone a complete human being, and I would have grave concerns about any move towards approval of reproductive cloning. But “conception” - as we understand it - doesn’t occur in the current process. We aren’t talking about putting a denucleated egg and a few other cells in a test tube and letting them “do what comes naturally”.
We already grow human skin in this country to be used in skin grafts for burns patients. The cells used are those of the burns patient. If growing human skin cells for burns patients isn’t immoral, how can growing other human cells be immoral.
Probably not within my own lifetime, but almost certainly within that of my children, we will reach a stage where we can extract stem cells from an embryo in utero and the technology to which so many are currently opposed will allow every child to be born with it’s own reserve bank of stem cells. Think about the implications of that - think of how many lives would be totally changed if we had that ability right now.
No technology is perfect; even our most basic forms of medical care don’t have 100% success rates, but we don’t use failure rates to argue against heart surgery, organ transplants, chemotherapy or hip replacements. There will be failures in the application of this technology.
This little black duck, however, would proudly and willingly donate her ova to be denucleated if only that were allowable (and why the hell CAN’T I donate my ovaries for that purpose just like I can donate other organs for research or transplant) to see this research continue.
I agree whole-heartedly. However, all is not lost. The proposed legislation, the (Brownback Bill, I’m assuming) isn’t the only proposed legislation out there. There is also the Harkin Bill, the title of which is “Human Cloning Ban and Stem Cell Research Protection Act.” Both this bill and the Brownback bill would make it illegal to clone a human for reproductive purposes. However, the Brownback bill goes a step further and bans any form of human cloning, including stem cells. The Harkin bill allows for stem cell research (theraputic cloning).
To me the Harkin Bill seems to be the smartest way to go. We don’t need to create a copy (for as much of a copy as it could be) of a person, but it’d be nice to keep the people we have around in better shape. And with a ban on reproductive cloning we wouldn’t encounter the trial & error peroid that JThunder seems so concerned with.
Another thing that gets me is the fact that Great Britian passed a bill that made stem cell research legel. They already have a head start on the US, but if the Brownback bill passes, there will be a flow of talent OUT of the US, which is never good. And any treatments the Brits come up with involving stem cells (or anything else involving cloning) would be illegal in the US.
Here are the proposed bills:
And I never get into politics and bills and whatnot…
Not necessarily. Miscarriage is ultimately an act of nature, rather than a willful act. Now if she had deliberately miscarried, that would be another matter.
Remember my main objection to the development of human cloning: It would require the deliberate sacrifice of many human lives, without even the guarantee of eventual success.
Please note that I didn’t quite say that. What I said is that the development of human cloning procedures will inevitably require much failure. If one could magically perfect a cloning procedure without any messy experimentation, then this objection of mine would be removed.
In other words, scientists would be deliberately creating human beings, knowing full well that these humans will be doomed to a rapid death. In contrast, the vast majority of human births are successful, and the unsuccessful ones are typically due to natural causes (barring abortions, mind you).
Well, I don’t know anyone who objects to cloning human cells. However, there’s a world of difference between human cells and human beings.
None of those techniques required the deliberate sacrifice of human beings. Neither did surgical techniques on premature infants, as mentioned earlier in this thread.
So while no technology is perfect, the lack of perfection – or even the remote guarantee of success – of human cloning adds a whole new ethical dimension to this issue. After all, these are human lives which we are talking about.
How can anyone compare these situations to cloning? When last I looked, we weren’t risking human lives in order to develop organ transplant techniques or hip replacement technology.
how is this ethically different from a couple, who know that their genetic makeup brings about a very high risk of passing along genetic conditions that will result in death? I understand that there’s physical differences, I’m interested in your assesment of ethical differences.
Nice and mellow discussion of a hot topic. I have nothing to add to the points being made, except to ask whether the growing of human tissue is equated by anyone to the actual growing of a human being. (That seemed to underly one hot-button item above.)
Also, with all the band names we’ve come up with in various threads, I think one of them ought to bring out an album entitled “Headless Clone Ranching” in honor of one post in this thread. 
Well for one thing, if these medical conditions are genetic, then such fatalities are still ultimately acts of nature. This alone represents a material difference from circumstances wherein we deliberately use artificial means to create life that is doomed to an immediate death.
To be honest, I’ve struggled before with the scenario that you posited, and I don’t have my mind entirely made up yet. However, since a material difference exists between that and cloning experimentation, I don’t see it as a conclusive argument for the latter.
JThunder, it seems to me that you are mixing terms. “Natural” and “ethical” simply aren’t the same thing, and just because something occurs naturally doesn’t make it any better.
Take my hypothetical woman for example, who has a miscarriage and is likely to have more. Yet, she is not immoral because this is an “act of nature”? How so? How is one human action (deliberately choosing to try to have a child when odds are good it will miscarry) an act of nature, but another human action (deliberately choosing to endeavor in research that will cause the same result, death of the developing child) is not?
If we take a poison from a plant and murder someone, it’s not more ethical than doing so with a synthetic poison. Yet, you say it is ultimately an act of nature when two people choose to have a baby that they know has a very high chance of death. This is somehow ‘natural’, yet the root cause is still a human decision. I’m afraid I don’t understand your distinction.
Please note that I am against reproductive cloning, but not because it is unnatural. I have heard that word used for the wrong reasons a few too many times.
You can add me to the list of people who are big-time supporters of cloning research.
The ultimate goal of such research would be to one day be able to control the growth of specific tissues. Heart getting old and diseased? Today, you can get a donor heart, IF one is available, and then spend the rest of your shortened life taking immuno-suppressent drugs with bad side effects.
One day, we may be able to create new, fresh hearts, livers, kidneys, eyes, you name it - and they would be ours. No rejection probems, no immuno-suppressants. How long might you live if you can replace most of your internal organs with fresh new ones as they age? What quality of life would we have in our old age if we could replace failing parts?
This doesn’t require cloning headless corpses. You could just target the specific organ and create that all by itself.
But in any event, the whole notion of politicians placing laws against scientific inquiry of any kind is abhorrent.
One day a couple of hundred years from now, kids are going to learn about those backwards luddites in the 21st century who actually tried to make the most promising medical research illegal, and they are going to shake their heads at our silliness in the same way that we shake our heads when we learn about Gallileo being ordered not to study the heavens.
And I’m not claiming such. However, I think there’s a clear difference between death due to natural causes (e.g. disease) and death that is deliberately induced. In the same way, I think there’s a substantial difference between creating a human being that might die due to some natural cause, and creating a human being that is doomed to die because it was artificially created.
This is quite different from saying “natural = ethical, unnatural = unethical.”
Y’know, I think it’s a bit disingenuous to dismiss these people as “luddites.” Most critics of cloning aren’t objecting out of opposition to technology per se. Rather, they are objecting due to the ethical implications of abortion.
Disagree with them if you wish, but to say that they’re luddites is just plain wrong.
But there are not ethical issues unique to cloning, the belief that there is either a fundamental misunderstanding of the relevant biology or an ethos that treats ‘natural’ as a synonym for ‘ethical’.
It’s that latter attude which is the essence of luddite thought.