Moonflake, I’m having a hard time seeing quite what your point is. Organ transplants, vaccinations etc. are all procedures that save the lives of people who would indisputably have died without them. Nobody started doing heart transplants on perfectly healthy teenagers just because one day it might save someone else’s life, so it was OK if they died in 5 days time. Nobody started vaccinating perfectly healthy children because one day someone else might benefit. No, they vaccinated children who were already going to die.
In both cases the successes of those early medical procedures allowed the technique to spread to less critical conditions, such as corneal tranplants and 'flu vaccines, but people didn’t just start practicing physically dangerous and ethically dubious techniques on healthy people just in case one day it might save a life of someone else somewhere in the world. That would be plainly wrong.
Yet this is precisley what you are suggesting for human cloning. we know there are huge risks involved for the infant. We know it is ethically as problematic as an issue can get without being unambiguously illegal. There isn’t even a skeric of evidence that cloning humans will save any lives. Yet you are proposing we go ahead with a high risk of producing deformed, retarded or otherwise handicapped children because it’s in the spirit of scientific adventure.
Bollocks I say. It’s a morally repugnant suggestion. When there is hard evidence from animals trials that the risk to the infant is minimal. And when there is hard evidence from the animal trials that the birth of the infant will actually benefit someone then we can consider the idea. But the idea of condeming a person to a literal lifetime of illness just because we want to find out if that can help someone else is a disgusting proposal.
Yes, I’ve * read * the book, several times. Huxley was trying to point out, among other things, that the power of reproduction is a tremendous power, one which affects not only individuals but all of society. You propose to introduce a radically new means of reproducing, yet you obviously have not given any thought whatsoever to the possible or probable social impact this new method will have (assuming this method is actually viable as a means of reproduction, which remains questionable). And you haven’t even begun to explain why cloning should be desirable. I see no benefit whatsoever in “bringing back people long dead.” You might be able to clone Einstein or Shakespeare from scrap DNA, but the person you create will not even come close to being an exact duplicate of the person whose genes you used. The rich might want brain-dead clones on life support kept around to use as a spare organ supply, but if that thought doesn’t horrify you you’re too cold-blooded to be running around loose.
Look, I know you see yourself as a bold thinker bravely forging ahead into areas the rest of us cowardly ordinary mortals are afraid to enter, but you obviously have not given this subject any serious thought at all. You’re just trying to show off how bold and daring you are. Before you blithely suggest that humanity accept a radical new means of reproduction with little or no thought about long range consequences, you damned well better have some powerful reasons for adopting this new method. And I see none whatsoever in anything that’s been proposed on this thread. There simply is no compelling reason to adopt cloning, and the potential dangers are staggering.
Provided that the clone bodies are acephalic, it doesn’t bother me in the least (except for the implication that it would be too expensive for me to afford, which can be solved by advancing the state of the art).
Whether people “accept” it or not is up to each of them. I suspect that when it becomes common knowledge that a clone isn’t a continuation of what makes you you, few will consider it worth the bother.
What social repercussions? Seriously. Cloning creates a human baby, it would only have a severe social impact if we threw out 200 years of consitutional law and decreed that clones weren’t entitled to the same human rights everyone else is entitled to. Unless you think we’re going to repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments any time soon, clones will be treated exactly the same as everyone else, they won’t be slaves, they won’t be owned by corporations, they won’t be raised as circus freaks.
Cloning is not a radical new method of reproduction. Cloning occurs naturally, it has occured IN MY FAMILY, I have sisters who are clones of each other. Does only one of my sisters have a soul? Does only one of them have human rights? Can one of my sisters be sold into slavery? Is one sister the property of the other sister, simply because they both have identical DNA? Would it be legally OK for one sister to murder the other sister and remove her organs for transplantation? Even if one sister had been born healthy, and the other sister been born brain dead, would the brain dead sister have been the property of the healthy sister?
No, no, no. If a rich person goes to an IVF clinic and says they want help concieving a baby, does that baby become the property of that rich person? No. What about if the baby has the same DNA as the rich person? Still no. Human beings are not property. What if the rich person asked the doctors to pith the baby in utero (since the baby would have to be gestated in the womb of a human mother), so that the baby would grow up without a brain? What doctor would do that, to cause a baby to be born brain-dead? No doctor would perform such a procedure, and any that would perform it would be disbarred. A rich person doesn’t have the right to induce birth defects into a baby, because the baby is not their property.
With today’s technology we have sperm donation, egg donation, in vitro fertillization, and surrogate pregnancy. A person could theoretically go to a clinic, find a sperm donor, find an egg donor, create embryos in vitro from the gametes, then have the embryos implanted in a surrogate mother, and when the baby is born be the full legal parent of the baby. The doctors aren’t the parent, the hospital isn’t the parent, the corporation the doctors work for isn’t the parent, the corporation the parent works for isn’t the parent, and none of them are the owners of the baby either, slavery is illegal.
How would it be different if the embryo didn’t come from sperm donation and egg donation, but from nuclear transfer? The only difference is that the baby would be the identical twin of some other person…maybe the parent, maybe one of the parent’s genetic relatives, maybe some unrelated third party. It doesn’t matter once the baby is created. If a parent is an unfit parent we already have mechanisms for terminating parental rights, and IVF clinics already attempt to screen out obvious unfit parents.
Is there any particular reason to create human clones on purpose? I can’t really think of one, although it certainly didn’t harm my family when we had cloning occur by accident, I’m rather fond of my sisters and I’m not sorry they were born. Human cloning will always be a novelty, there will be no broad social impact because the social issues raised by infrequent cloning where clones are treated just like every other person have already been raised and answered by identical twinning, IVF and adoption.
Sure, if you want to create a slave society where millions of human beings are grown in vats and treated as livestock simply because they weren’t created by ordinary fucking, that’s going to raise ethical issues. But those ethical issues have nothing to do with cloning, and everything to do with slavery. Since slavery was abolished in this country you’d have to convince me that slavery has a good chance of coming back, and that the return of slavery will be more likely if cloning isn’t made illegal.
Since there are very few good reasons to create human clones, there will be very few human clones created. However, there are also very few reasons to put in jail people who want a cloned baby or doctors who help them create a cloned baby. How does it help to make the procedure illegal? Who exactly are we helping? What exactly are we preventing? You can’t point to Brave New World, and say, “This is what happens if you allow cloning!” You have to explain how, if we don’t put people who create human clones in jail we’ll eventually end up at Brave New World.
What social issues are raised? None. Wait, social issues are raised, but they are easily answered with a little thought and a little common sense, and once they have been answered no serious objections are left standing. I can answer each and every objection to human cloning…but those objections have to be specific, I can’t answer armwaving and dire but vague predictions.
And the simplest answer to almost every objection is that cloning creates a human baby like all other human babies, and that baby will have the exact same human rights that every other human baby has.
Thank you Blake, for your pleasant welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards. Repugnant indeed.
To explain further: You mentioned how animal trials will show us whether it is safe or not, and that is partly my point. Step 1: Animal Trials. If that’s safe, then we move on to step 2: non-life threatening human trials, aborting in the first trimester. But eventually we will have to get to the final step and produce a living human baby. And yes, even up to step 2, we still can’t be 100% certain that it’s safe, which is why every medicine eventually must be tested on a human. I am not advocating randomized cloning of millions of people with no tests. My point is that at some stage we will need to actually find out if we can clone someone safely. Up till then, everything we say in this thread is conjecture, because their is no proof that cloning is safe/ not safe.
Now, most current legislature is seeking to ban human cloning, but a lot of it is also seeking to ban animal cloning and any other cloning research. Those self same tests that you admitted will lead us on the path to discovering if it’s good or bad. I’m not saying ‘go ahead and clone the kids and see what happens.’ I’m saying that because politicians and knee-jerkers are afraid that at some point we might undergo human trials, they want to stop all cloning research altogether. I’m sure you see how silly this is.
My point about heart transplants (and adding to that your point about vaccination, which, btw, was tested on a healthy child - by definition it is prevention not cure) is that the logical conclusion of any medical study is human trials. But people are so afraid of that step in the process that they wish to halt all other steps. This is not something that has been proven dangerous, or life threatening - this is the stifling of knowledge and progress without any proof of that knowledge or progress being harmful.
And don’t tell me that there aren’t life-saving discoveries associated with cloning - rejection free organ transplant is one of them, and you probably won’t even need a living clone for that, just the technology to harvest and clone tissue from your own organs. But without more study we will never know. That is my point.
Moonflake I still have difficulty seeing your point.
You still haven’t got around the problem that you are advocating human cloning trials on the off chance that there may be some health benefits somewhere. Right here, in this thread, we are not debating animal cloning,. Animal cloning is commonplace worldwide. Just today it was announced that someone had cloned a dog, but the procedure has become so commonplace that it didn’t even make the news. So the issue of animals trials really has no basis.
Animal trials of cloning as as legal as any other animal medical trial. Maybe some people do want a blanket ban on cloning, but that’s; rather like supporting the Ku Klux Klan party because some people want a blanket ban on racial profiling. It’s a false dilemma. There’s no need to support an extremist position just because you are a moderate. Human cloning at present is as morally repugnant an act as it is possible to imagine, I don’t have to support it because I don’t; object to animal cloning. I am capable of holding both positions simultaneously.
And yes, Jenner vaccinated a healthy child, ultimately with a killer disease. I’m sure you are not suggesting this was ethical? And yet you are suggesting precisely the same thing be done with human cloning. You are proposing we clone humans just to establish what the effects will be. Given what we know the negative effects are that’s just wrong. There’s no other way t put it.
Human ‘trials’ are all well and good, if we have completed all other trials and obtained positive results, and if we know that there is a high probability of benefit. At present all trials have shown horrible results, so horrific I don’t even like to think if them being applied to humans. Moreover there is no evidence whatsoever of even potential benefits.
And I will tell you there aren’t lifesaving discoveries to be obtained from cloning. And I will tell you that because there isn’t any evidence at all of any such results. You don’t need to clone tissue to produce artificial organs. Organ cell s will replicate themselves quite happily in the vast majority of cases, while stem cell techniques are applicable in the remainder of cases. I get the impression from this that you don’t have a real good grasp on what cloning actually The only way to get organs form clones would be to either produce an anencephalic vegetable or to grow functional humans so you can rip out their kidneys later in life. Neither option seems very palatable. is.
So yeah, I will tell you there are no health benefits from cloning because to say otherwise is an appeal to ignorance.
In one sentence: suggestions put forward thus far on why we should ban or support cloning are pointless as there is a lack of factual evidence to support the claims in one direction or another, purely because there has been insufficient research on the topic thus far.
To elaborate, in case i’m still not being clear: I’m not for or against human cloning as there is no evidence yet for or against it. Anyone who picks a side in this argument is doing it without the medical fact to back them up. A human has not been cloned (despite what the Raelians would have you believe) therefore there is no factual evidence on the mental, physical, emotional, legal or social impact on being a human clone or producing a human clone. All is conjecture.
I would advocate ongoing research into cloning, simply because to ban something on the basis of conjecture is truly ridiculous.
I disagree. A great many critics of human cloning object precisely because of the lack of medical data that assures its safety. In other words, they are taking a stance precisely because we have no assurances of its safety, since this raises all sorts of repugnant ethical objections.
First, I don’t know anyone looking to ban animal cloning, animal cloning is uncontroversial given that we have decided we can kill animals for food or medical experiments.
Next, of course today human cloning is unethical, because it hasn’t been proven safe in animal trials. Cloning mammals is still an experimental procedure. Experimental procedures are unethical when performed on humans unless the person has a life threatening problem with no proven treatment. However, since cloning doesn’t address any life threating problem in humans there are no circumstances where it would be ethical to clone humans until mammal cloning is no longer experimental.
Cloning will teach us quite a bit, and our experiments with mammal cloning could eventually save untold human lives, because the apparant accelerated aging of cloned mammals can teach us a lot about aging itself. If we learn what causes the cloned mammals to start with “old” cells, and learn to address those problems, we can treat aging in humans. Of course, that’s still no reason to begin cloning human babies, treatments suggested by animal cloning research can be tried on humans even if no human babies are ever cloned.
But once animal cloning is well understood, and there are no indications that cloned human babies will have any more health risks than IVF human babies, then there will be no ethical objection to human cloning. Not that even then there will be any great NEED for human cloning…just that allowing cloning doesn’t result in any harm to anyone. Under that standard there is no social purpose to be served by banning human cloning, no social menace that needs to be controlled by putting cloners in jail.
Hang on a minute there, Blake. Where has anyone suggested that we start cloning humans right now? Obviously, human trials need to wait until the procedure is far more mature than it is right now, which is the point where this debate takes on meaning. Of course tring to clone a human today would be immoral and unethical, which is why nobody is seriously proposing it.
It’s pretty damn hard to read this as proposing anything else:
When moonflake says that there is will be absolutely no ethical, moral, or even intelligible reason to stop a scientist from asking “what happens if I clone a human” the only reasonable interpretation is that scientists should be allowed to clone humans right now, until such time as we can prove that cloning humans is dangerous.
And lest you think that maybe they are endorsing intellectual questioning, rather than potential fatal and debilitating physical actions, read that quote in context, particularly:
[quote=moonflake* People died to perfect transplants. People died to perfect vaccinations and innoculations and cures for diseases and just about every medical breakthrough we’ve ever had. People may die to prove that cloning is a viable means for saving lives - this is not a reason to stop researching human cloning before it’s even begun[/quote]
People don’t die as a result of intellectual questioning.
If you want a direct quote from moonflake saying “we should start cloning humans right now?” then I can’t provide it. But ask yourself this.
When someone says that we shouldn’t stop scientists asking “what happens if I clone human right now”, and we shouldn’t stop cloning just because it results in deaths, and then goes on to say there is insufficient evidence to stop anyone from cloning humans right now, what does that mean? If moonflake believes there is absolutely no logical reason or evidence or ethical objection to stop someone cloning a human right now then how can they possibly not be endorsing cloning humans right now? They have just said they have no possible grounds for objecting
Nonsense. There is a huge amount of factual evidence to support claims that human cloning should not be allowed.
All the animal trials have had huge failure rates. Something like 80% of implanted embryos resulted in spontaneous abortions, around 25% of the births resulted in either death of the young within the first month or such several malformations that euthanasia was required. All cloned animals show signs of accelerated and premature aging. None have lived a normal healthy lifespan.
Those facts. That is factual evidence. Unless you wish to ague that miscarriages, neonatal death and lifelong illness and deformity aren’t intolerable then those are factual reasons against human cloning.
There is no lack of research. There has been a massive amount of research, and all the research has produced the same results: cloning of mammals results in a level of spontaneous abortion, malformation and ill-health that it would be totally unacceptable to inflict on a human.
Quite clearly objections to cloning are not pointless or subject to any lack of factual evidence or research. In fact quite the opposite. All the factual evidence and research says that human cloning would have intolerable consequences. If we accept that smoking crack and drinking three quarts of liquor a day is unacceptable behaviour during pregnancy then we have to also accept that cloning, which has far worse consequences, is also unacceptable.
Whatever makes you think there is any lack of evidence here?
Those kinds of science fiction stories have been around for decades. By, say, 1975, fiction writers had speculated about countless possibilities in cloning and genetic engineering in general. Yet, now that we’re near to it being reality, people are caught flat-footed, as if it were a brand-new idea.
There may be children alive today who’ll live to be two hundred, with cloned organs and other good stuff, thanks to our screwing with nature. (Nature screwed with us first; it’s time for some payback.)
I presumed that there was an unstated caveat to the effect of, “once we get all the wrinkles ironed out.” If we can clone animals with no ill-effects, then there’s no “ethical, moral, or intelligible” reason to outlaw it. If moonflake meant something different, then I withdraw my objection.
It’s just hard to see how there could be an unwritten caveat of “when we get the wrinkles ironed out” when the author says they are referring to conditions “right now” and that people dying in the process is not a reason to stop human cloning.
I sort of assumed that people dying is a ‘wrinkle’, to say the very least.
