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See… the enemy would bog down engaging our the Army of the Grand Tetons in the field. They would never reach the rear areas. Ummm… nvm.
Absolutely not. I think that the tremendous failure rate of cloning is a DARNED GOOD REASON not to use it on human beings. This isn’t “after-the-fact rationalizing”; rather, it’s a consideration that makes human cloning extremely unethical.
Since one would never recognize a clone as such simply by looking at one, there’d be, to my mind, no way to ensure one’s bigotry is appropriately targeted, and therefore no way to reliably confer second class citizenship.
I have the impression that some believe clones would be gestated in a machine or vat in a secret facility miles below Cheyenne mountain or something. Although I’m severely oversimplifying it, the reality is the embryo resulting from the cloning process would be implanted into the uterus of an endometrially receptive woman who’d bring the child to term as though it were a natural pregnancy. Why wouldn’t the child have the same rights as anyone else?
Ah. Basically, every time a cell divides, the end bits on its chromosomes get cut off by the mechanics of duplicating themselves. The DNA at the end of the chromosomes is the telomere, which apparently exists just to protect the meaningful DNA further down on the chromosome from being lost from cell division. Some of the telomere gets chopped off, instead of some of the functional DNA.
Interesting, that I’ve seen a few mentions of cloned cows and mice that had longer telomeres than normal, whereas Dolly the sheep had shorter telomeres. Anybody know which side human cloning experiments fell on?
Re: telomeres
What if the DNA from a stem cell is cloned? Do stem cells suffer the same telomere shortening as regular cells?
Didn’t anybody here see Multiplicity? You can’t make a copy of a copy!
As I understand it, human reproduction via the traditional biological route has a high failure rate as well. Shall we debate the ethics of ovulation+sexual intercourse as a method of baby-making?
I think there is also a distrust of WHY someone would want to be cloned. Other then someone doing it once, just to show it can be done, the first reasons that pop up, at least for me, are:
- replacement body parts
- ego - I’m so good, the world needs more of me.
- control - this baby/clone will be mine, ALL MINE. Bwahahaha.
The idea of a rich someone, and let’s admit cloning would take money, would be able to create a clone for any of the above reasons is, for me, a majority of the Ewww factor.
People already have children for your reasons 2 and 3.
Not really. The most of the scientists (but not all) think it’s not related, but they haven’t actually studied it.
Unless there is a very high rate of that cancer, I’d say the impetus is to prove that it was not related.
But the current methods used to produce animal clones have a much higher failure rate than, say, IVF. IVF is ethical because babies produced via IVF don’t have higher rates of health problems compared to babies concieved in vivo. It typically takes only a couple of fertilized eggs to produce a baby with IVF. For animal cloning, it might take hundreds.
And the problem is that ethically we can extract animal eggs at will, even if it means the death of the egg donor animal. But we can’t do that for humans. Each human egg requires fairly invasive procedures on the egg donor. For someone providing their own eggs for IVF, this is fine, because we’ll only need a few. Even for egg donors to other people this isn’t so much of a problem, because again, we only need a few eggs, and typically only one or two or three such procedures are needed per viable embryo.
But with cloning, given current methods we’d need hundreds of human eggs to produce one baby. And this is simply not practical, even if the prospective parent of the cloned baby is a multi-millionaire. It’s expensive enough for people to pay (oops, I mean “compensate”) for donated eggs when they only need a few. Hundreds are pretty much out of the question.
And of course, the unknown health issues for cloned babies. Right now animal clones are all over the map…some seem healthy, some have major health issues. Until we have a better grasp of this, creating human cloned babies is out of the question.
That’s where the tatoos come in.
Maybe I watch too much junk out of Hollywood.
But there IS a foolproof way to make a perfect, healthy clone. Separate the cells at the earliest stages of division and each becomes an identical embryo. If the siblings are kept viable in cold storage, an adult could create a clone many years later. Is there any problem with doing this, and is this currently banned?
Well, of course, that can only be done with test-tube babies, or if the mother finds out she’s pregnant within a few days of getting pregnant and goes straight to the lab. Not very practical.
This is nothing new. Identical twins can and have had sex.
Again, cloning produces a human baby. What doctors are going to tattoo a newborn baby to identify it as a slave?
Slavery is illegal in this country, and in every other country where cloning might take place. Why would you imagine that the possibility of cloning would inspire lawmakers to revoke the 13th and 14th Amendments? What’s in it for them? The possibility that they could have their own organ-slaves?
But face facts. How many people in the world desperately need organs? And how many of those people are incredibly wealthy, wealthy enough to pay for the creation of a very expensive baby, and raise that baby to adulthood? And how many of those organ-transplant-needing wealthy people are also amoral enough to be fine with killing another human being to get the organs they need? And how many doctors would be comfortable with going along with the plan, rather than calling the police?
And wouldn’t it be simpler just to kidnap third world orphans for their organs?
I can’t answer that without violating a bulletin board no-no.
If it can be done safely this way, would people still have a problem with IVF “clones”? You wind up with an identical-looking human.
If the only problem people have with cloning is with the safety and reliability, then once those problems are sorted out, would we still ban human cloning?
I see the slippery slope going both ways. Sure, some might worry that if we allow human cloning, then what stops us from genetic manipulation? But the slippery slope has already started with IVF, which nobody would even think to ban IVF these days. But if we allow infertile couples the right to enhance their fertility, why shouldn’t we allow someone the right to identical reproduction?
If we must ban identical clones, then why stop there and not ban all unnatural reproductive processes altogether?
Yep. We’re much closer to creating human clones than we are to creating artificial wombs. This whole business about creating clones for organ harvest is ludicrous. Why just because it is a DNA replica of someone would it be disposable or second class? That’s like saying when identical twins are born there is no need for the second one except to use it for organs.
Huh? I don’t understand. If I said something that made you angry, I can’t imagine what that might be. That’s if you’re talking about insulting people outside the Pit. But that doesn’t seem likely, so there must be some other board rule, but I can’t figure out what you’re talking about.
Raising clones as organ slaves just doesn’t make sense. I suppose it could happen in places like North Korea, where an absolute dictator can grow clones for organ harvest. But banning human cloning in western countries certainly can’t prevent dictators from harvesting organs from their identical twins.
The only thing we need to do is recognize that cloning creates a human baby, and that baby will born from the womb of a human mother for the forseeable future. That human baby will have all the human and civil rights of every other human baby. In countries that violate human rights routinely, that baby might become a slave…but every other citizen of that country is similarly a slave.
And even if we had uterine replicators so we could grow cloned babies in vitro, it seems to me that it would still be much more common to grow conventionally fertillized embroys in vitro, rather than cloned babies. All the parents who currently seek out surrogate mothers could simply use a uterine replicator. And then once it’s mainstreamed for infertile women, using a uterine replicator will be seen as the mark of a spoiled yuppie mother who doesn’t want to undergo natural childbearing.
But even so, such a method can’t be used to create an army of slave soldiers, because at the end you still have a human baby, who has to be raised to young adulthood before they’re worth anything. And given that parents already raise children to the age of 18 for free, what fascist regime is going to invest in a decades-long childrearing program, when they can simply conscript as many already existing 18 year olds as they like, and send them to the front lines? Or if you want to indoctrinate the kids thoroughly, conscript them at age 10 instead of at birth, and you halve the cost of creating your slave army.