Not a damn thing!
I don’t know where this notion of the ‘spare parts’ BS came from but I can’t imagine anything more laughable. These clones would be womb born real live humans. Do the objectors think they would be grown in a closet? They would be normal people raised accordingly.
I don’t buy the ‘class’ angle, either. Just because they are clones would they oppress others? Hogwash. They might even be smart enough to HELP those in need.
And if you think that cloning for the purposes of having a healthier kid is somhow different than vacinations, scientifically balanced diets, modern medical care, suppliments, pre-natal care, etc, you as seriously deluding yourselves. It’s just the next step in the learning curve.
And it’s not like anyones trying to have it mandated.
It’s artifical insemination, plain and simple when you boil it all down.
But the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Welcome to society bullied by bible-thumpers.
Me, I just want to hear more Elvis music…
[sub]snicker[/sub]
On a more serious note, I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with cloning. I’m not sure what the advantages are to cloning vs “natural” reproduction, other than research. But I see no problem with it.
A more interesting question, to my mind, is why people think a clone wouldn’t have a soul? Doesn’t this presuppose the notion that God did / could not forsee the ability of humans to create genentic duplicates of themselves?
Oh well. I guess you can’t have your grease and eat it, too.
Spoofe, I about fell over with your first Star Wars reference:
I am very afraid, for that is exactly what I was thinking. Yikes.
Anyway, cloning. What’s wrong with it? Nothing in my book. If I could I would clone a pet. If I could have spare parts, I’d clone myself. For an interesting take on the issue, watch Parts: The Clonus Horror. http://us.imdb.com/Title?0078062
Very enlightening.
Zette
Zette, I’ve seen Parts: The Clonus Horror. Interesting take on the issue, indeed! (Yeah, that’s why it was on MST3K!)
Just to reinforce what Lemur866 said: Cloning as we know it creates a unique individual with the same genotype, phenotype, but NOT mind of its “parent” (the one whose chromosomes were used to make the clone). It must be born and mature like a normal human. It has the mitochondrial DNA of the egg cell used in creating it. They are as unique as twins/triplets/etc. (especially those raised by different families). They do not posess any memories belonging to their “parent”. You have no more right to the organs of your hypothetical clone as you do to the organs of your hypothetical “normally-conceived” child. If normal humans have souls, then logically clones would have them as well.
Yeesh.
By the way, shortly after the birth of Dolly, I heard on the news that the Catholic Church/Pope declared that humans clones would not have souls. If they haven’t rescinded this declaration yet, I bet they will withing a few years.
Cloning/stem-cell research is not morally wrong, IMIO (In My Important Opinion; you were expecting IMHO from me? Not likely). Banning such research is highly unethical and immoral. What kind evil bastard wants to prevent the discovery of a cure for Parkinson’s disease, anyway?
You wanna “play God”? Genetic engineering and cloning are rookie shit. Try inventing some new kinds of subatomic particles or redefining the laws of physics; THAT’S “playing God”.
Look, I read the Wired article a few months ago too. But there is a big difference between cloning a baby and what Tuckerfan thought he read.
Certainly, human cloning is technically possible, given a few technical problems to be worked out. If we really really wanted to we could start cloning humans tomorrow, and the first babies would be born within a year.
And although we don’t know how to do it quite yet, it is certainly plausable that we could use liver cells to grow new livers, skin cells to grow new skin, etc. Tissue cultures are already done, this would be straightforward research.
But that is different than what Tuckerfan is talking about, which is somehow creating adult humans using some unspecified technique. This is completely impossible. The scenario he mentioned where
simply is not true. He misread the article. Or well, it is true, if you consider the “blank” to be an enucleated egg cell and “at some point” to be 20 years.
You cannot create whole human bodies. It is still easier to create a whole baby human than it is to create a cloned organ. We are on the cusp of creating a cloned human, we are years and years away from cloned organs, and gestating babies in vitro is not even on the horizon.
Please, let’s focus on what cloning actually is, and forget all those movies and comic books. Let me say again, in case some of you missed it: cloning creates a normal human baby, who just happens to be the identical twin of the nuclear donor. No mind control, no slavery, no duplicates, no unstoppable armies, just babies.
Max, I’m going to have to ask for a cite for the assertion that the Catholic church declared that clones would be soul-less. Yes, the church is against cloning, for the same reasons that they are against birth control, abortion, etc…it is against God’s plan. But that doesn’t mean that they would consider a clone to be a soul-less monster. Find a reference please, or retract it.
Lemur866, what do you think about the “headless clone” senario that has been proposed? My understanding is that turning off the gene that leads to the development of the head in mammals is easy–we’ve done it to mice for years–and som people have proposed that headless humans could be created as an organ supply. The idea is that a headless human is no more than a bundle of flesh. Frankly, I feel like we will probably figure out how to grow individual organs before we perfect such a technique, making it moot, and I wonder at the feasibility of findong women willing to bear children like that.
Look, headless clone ranching is infeasable. Yes, it could be done, but could it be done effectively? How are you going to find women who will gestate anencephalic babies? And once the babies are born you’ll have to keep them in intensive care wards for the rest of their lives. And if you harvest a non-paired organ from them, they will die, wasting all the other organs.
And when is the anencephalic clone going to be started? When the “original” baby is born? When it is projected that the “original” person will begin to need transplant organs? You’d have to have organs similar in size to an adult’s, a baby’s heart won’t work for an adult. So you’d have to wait at least 10 years or so for the heart to grow to the correct size.
And since the organ donors are going spend their entire lives in intensive care, I imagine it would be very difficult to keep them healthy. They are going to need catheterization, IV feeding, probably respirators. I can’t imagine that it would be easy to find the army of doctors and nurses neccesary to keep such a pracice going. And since the donors would never exercize or leave the ICU I imagine that most of their organs would be unhealthy and weak. Perhaps that might be acceptable for some kinds of tissue, but what about hearts or lungs?
Even if it were determined that such a barbaric practice was ethically permissible, it would be practically impossible to carry out except for a very few dictators and billionaires. Nobody else is going to pay for the lifelong upkeep a few intensive care patients on the off chance they will need a transplant someday. Headless clone ranching is barbaric, hugely expensive, and largely un-neccesary. I think we can do without it.
Actually, I was thinking more in terms of things that you can use an infant’s organs for, not hearts and lungs. One thing that occured to me was bone marrow transplants, but the problem wiht that is that you could take the bone marrow from whoever you would clone, ergo, no need for a clone. It is my understanding that cloning the actual sick person that needed the transplant would not be feasible because identical twins stand a good chance of developing lukemia themselves. (of course, there are other things that lead to needing bone marrow transplants, but they also tend to be genetic).
The other issue would be if someone actually needed an organ for a baby/small child. If I had an infant who was going to die without a heart transplant, and if I could clone a headless version of myself and give that heart to the baby (we could test me to make sure it would match) well, honestly, I would be tempted. It certainly would be a much more ethically grey senario than “clone ranches” for the rich and famous.
The simple problem I have with cloning is that I was raised to believe that God decides who dies(Thou shalt not kill) and who lives. I believe that, as many have already stated, most people’s problem with cloning is simply that it goes against their religious beliefs. Thus, is the case with me as well.
Continuing this thread’s noble tradition of sci-fi hijacks:
Ugghhhh…that’s only if you go by that god-awful “Dark Empire” thing, and the stuff derived from it, which I most emphatically do not. In fact I am as certain as any fundamentalist christian is certain of Creation, that Palpatine died on the Death Star at the end of RotJ, period.
Lucas said it, I believe it, that settles it. 
Actually, wouldn’t the ideal solution be to clone the person who needs the organ, but edit out the genetic error?
Cloning may certainly go against many people’s religious beliefs, but I’m not quite sure how those specific religious precepts–“God decides who dies…and who lives”–relate to cloning. Even according to a very conservative Judeo-Christian view, God is no longer in the business of specially creating individual humans. If he still creates new humans, he now chooses to do so through the mechanism of human actions. In other words, every time a couple of humans decide to have sex, they’re potentially deciding that a new human will live.
I think you need to clarify your line of reasoning there.
Lemur866, I’ll concede that I may have misremembered the “clone blanks” from the Wired article. Its been a while since I read it and I haven’t had a chance to reread it, but I do believe that the technology for such a thing will come along eventually.
Yes, currently, all cloning can currently create are babies, and in the cases of the animal babies (since those have been the only ones done so far that we know about) not all of them are exactly like the original. There have been cloned cows with slightly different markings and different personalities than the original. There’s a lot that goes into making an individual and genetics is only a portion of it. That being said, if I could have myself cloned, I would. Why? I dunno, I just think its a cool idea.
As for the Headless Clone Ranching (and wouldn’t Headless Clone Ranchers be a cool band name?), I believe that the Wired magazine article said that work was being done on developing an artificial womb, so no need for finding women willing to give birth to an anencephalic baby, if you use those.
Tuckerfan, Lemur is correct when he says that artificial wombs aren’t even on the horizon, and I don’t care what Wired said. Such a thing is stil super-SF, not near-future SF.
And I have to ask, do you understand that cloning yourself would entail all the tribulations nad expenses of abopting an infant? why would reproducing all of your genetic material be so cool that you would run out and do it, but reproducing half your genetic material is likely to be seen as with panic (assuming you are a single person with no plans to become a father soon).
Manda JO, yeah, it would be almost the same as raising a child (the difference, of course, being that the kid has the same DNA as me, not simply half my DNA). Also, don’t assume that I’d be in a panic if I suddenly found out I was going to be a daddy (not that there’s any danger of that occuring anytime soon 
).
As to why I think having a clone of myself would be “cool,” I don’t really have a solid answer for you. Part of it is because I really don’t like this whole business of dying and I figure that a clone of myself, no matter how different from me in personality, knowledge, experence, etc., would still be “me” and “I” would continue on. Plus, there’s the cool technological aspect of it. I mean, how many people can say that they’ve had themselves cloned? Sounds horrible, I know, but assuming that it could be done, I’d do my best to work things out so that my clone had a “normal” (i.e. the poor bastard wouldn’t have large numbers of people hounding him, calling him the devil because they knew he was a clone, I’d keep that a secret) childhood and could grow up happy and healthy.