Don’t medical researchers test new drugs and surgical techniques on animals before experimenting with them on humans? If they could consistently clone chimpanzees that are healthier than sexually reproduced ones, wouldn’t that fill the bill?
Epiphany… Archemides, Newton, Einstein…it happens. But I would allow technical practice on chimpanzees. Would you?
I want my MONKEY-MAN!
In my opinion, no. Success on chimpanzees is no guarantee of success on humans. At best, it would just be a rough indication of success.
Medical researches often do test drugs and surgical techniques on animals first, but they must ultimately be tested on humans as well. Animal testing may reduce the amount of human experimentation required, but it would never eliminate it.
Ephiphany will only get you so far. Cloning techniques must still be tested on humans in order to evaluate their validity.
Besides, the revolutionary ideas of Newton, Einstein and Archimedes were mostly mathematical in nature. They were also based on plausible thought experiments – and of course, they still required experimental validation.
In contrast, no amount of thought experimentation would guarantee a reliable cloning technique. Any biologist who said, “Aha! I thought of a near-perfect cloning technique! I haven’t conducted any experiments whatsoever, but we may as well proceed. I already know it’ll work!” would not be considered a credible scientist.
Well, all new medical techniques pose some risk. Generally, new techniques are tested on non-human animals; if the technique works on non-human animals, that’s evidence that it will work on humans, but not totally conclusive. Test-tube babies or fertility drugs were presumably also tested out on laboratory animals first, yet the time came when those techniques were used on humans for the first time.
Of course, any cloned fetuses that would be deformed could simply be aborted… Then the question becomes about abortion (with which I and many other people have no problem with).
Damnit, I’m a clone, apparently ( http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=101480 ), and some of this annoys me-- especially the hackneyed “Boys from Brazil” “10,000 Hitlers” sort of idea.
As an identical twin perhaps I have peculiar notions concerning nature versus nurture, but statements along the lines of “People who want to clone themselves will tend to try their damn best to have the clones maintain what power they originally have in perpetuity” strike me as patently ludicrous. The clone is an individual. We don’t assume what a child will be like on account of his father, and we don’t lock up the twin of a felon for safety’ sake.
(This, of course, is a different issue than the problem of stem-cell research, which makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, although I am not sure why yet. I guess I don’t know enough about the process yet to know how to feel about it.)