Admit it: you copied that right out of a Focus on the Family pamphlet, didn’t you?
Stranger
There is a huge difference between “fairly common” and “practically inevitable.” Nobody denies that miscarriages do occur; however, under normal conditions, most pregnancies are indeed carried to full term. And even if we do allow for high miscarriage rates, that doesn’t excuse human cloning. It’s one thing to let nature take it’s course; it’s another thing to deliberately create a multitude of human lives knowing full well that they are practically doomed to an early (and quite possibly horrific) death… or worse.
None of those are what I’d call freakish, but even if they were, they would still constitute only a small portion of all births.
No offense, but at the risk of spouting cliches, I really think you’re missing the forest for the trees. Sure, miscarriages and genetic defects do occur. Some of those defects are even freakish. Nevertheless, barring severe nutritional or environmental problems, they only constitute a small number of the actual births. That’s why in industrialized nations, most parents look forward to having a child, rather than asking, “Oh, no! What kind of horrible defect should we expect this time?”
In contrast, human cloning is a genetic minefield. There’s just no way to make the process reliable without making a whole lot of abominable mistakes in the process.
I addressed that point earlier.
And how long will it take before you get anywhere close to a 50% to 75% success rate?
Therein lies the problem. As I’ve said before, you cannot make the process reliable without a lot of experimentation. It’s the experimentation process that people find unethical – and rightfully so.
Cute joke… but while I’m an in favor of levity, I don’t think that this does anything to diminish the serious nature of the concerns regarding cloning.
Massimo Pigliucci was at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, while I was attending. He tended to attract a lot of creationist whackos to the area. At least I assume he did. They might have been native.
While I doubt the quote is verbatim, there was, sadly, indeed a tract on human cloning much to that effect (UTK cloned several cows) nestled in amongst the pamphlets about how evolution is Satan’s sneaky way of getting us to reject Yahweh Incarnate’s precious body fluids and the irrefutable evidence of dinosaurs in the Old Testament.
I think you’re talking past each other. Unless you find it unethical to attempt to reproduce (or have sex when the probability is non trivial) knowing the high rejection rate prior to significant progress of a pregnancy, the equivalent objection to cloning isn’t particularly valid.
If 50 to 75% of embryos fail to flourish, 50 to 75% of cloned embryos failing to flourish is par with nature.
Perhaps you didn’t see post 33?
Friend, despite your claim that it’s a “foolproof” technique, you yourself admitted that you don’t know if this has been done or if it’s feasible. With all due respect, it sounds to me that you’re just pulling that idea of of thin air. If if were as simple as that, and if the results were guaranteed as you claim, then why don’t we have any massive support of this idea from the scientific community?
That’s the nature of science, friend. You can’t arbitrarily declare that it’s foolproof without adequate experimentation – and it’s the experimentation that’s ethically problematic.
Heck, we don’t even have an outstanding success rate when it comes to animal cloning. If the process were as simple as you described, surely this marvelous technique would have been adopted by now, right?
And besides, even that method would require considerable experimentation in order to ensure that it’s safe and reliable. In other words, it might work, but that’s far from guaranteed, and so the ethical objections remain.
I thought it was the other way around, and actually it was miscarriages (often unnoticed ones) that were in the majority.
I would argue that you can turn your argument back on you. If the goal of cloning is a much higher success rate than natural reproduction, by turning your back on it you’re deliberately ignoring a chance to save many lives. I’d understand if you feel differently, but in my book the results of deliberate action and deliberate inaction are morally equivalent.
What are the stats? Seriously, I agree that seperately all these things are a tiny percentage of the population. But what about added up together? What source are you using to say it’s just a small amount?
Actually, that same attitude would be expected if people just believed the chance to be low, as you do. And i’m not entirely sure why you’re disregarding nutritional or environmental problems. I could be missing the forest for the trees, but you haven’t shown me the forest is there.
Ah, but once it is reliable, the general idea is that it would be better. And like I said, I see the refusal to try to get to that point as being equally wrong in dooming those naturally created “abominable mistakes” to their fate.
It’s as reliable as IVF. The trick is you’re not making a copy of adult cells, instead you are just inducing identical twinning with a bit of time delay.
The scientific community is more interested in cloning because you can make a lot more clones than twins, and you can do it after the fact. My method requires advance planning and cold storage of the clones (twins).
Do you have any facts to back up your claims, or are you the one pulling things out of thin air?
And yet, in the same posting (#33), you yourself admitted that you don’t know if there would be any problems with using this approach. Apparently though, that doesn’t stop you from declaring that this method is “foolproof” and “as reliable as IVF.”
Look, it’s pretty obvious that if an approach has never been tried, it would be foolish to declare that it’s foolproof – especially when it comes to matters that are as incompletely understood as human embryology.
Naturally. That doesn’t mean that there would be zero interest in this approach, though. Any scientist can tell you that they tend to pursue multiple approaches… and yet, despite your declaration that your method would be “foolproof” (a horribly naive declaration), there has been no outpouring of support for your technique, even among scientists who oppose cloning.
I meant relatively foolproof, as compared to the gloom and doom failure rates being bandied about. Nothing is guaranteed, of course.
I am willing to be open-minded about this, are you? Here is a website which describes the process. In particular, this
[quote]
(http://www.cogforlife.org/embryonic.htm) describes it in detail: “Those cells in the 2-cell embryo through the blastocyst stage that are ‘totipotent’ can be manually separated to form new embryos, which are twins of the original”.
I don’t think it’s very hard for someone with basic tools to separate the cells. Obviously, you would not want a literal “fool” to do this, but the skills to do it are not uncommon. After separation, the embryos develop without much further intervention. At that point, one could be implanted via IVF and the rest could be put in cold storage. This seems like a rather simple and straightforward process. What makes you think this is so complex and fraught with risks?
“Relatively foolproof”? That’s just moving the goalposts.
Moreover, if the technique hasn’t been tried yet, then you can’t claim that it’s foolproof — relatively or otherwise! Heck, by your own admission (and as I’ve pointed out twice before), you yourself admit that you don’t know what kinds of complications can arise. How can you declare that it’s foolproof and every bit as safe as IVF when you have no data to support that claim?
Heck, the silence from the scientific community regarding your technique is positively deafening. Do you know something that they don’t?
Why though? You may assume this as a given, but clearly not everyone does.
JThunder, trying to have a discussion with you is positively exhausting. You seem to be fixated on the word “foolproof”. If (just pulling these numbers out of thin air for example purposes) cloning an embryo from adult cells via nuclear transfer had a 0.001% success rate and twinning had a 75% success rate, you would still be harping on me. “Silence from the scientific community”, eh? Have you even looked at my cites? I ask again: What makes you think the twinning method is so complex and fraught with risks?
Of course I assume it as a given, because why wouldn’t it be?
A clone is a human being. Since a clone is a human being, what rationale could be used to deny that clone human rights? Suppose I created a clone, and declared that the clone is my property, not a human baby, but an inhuman thing. Now, under what circumstances could I imagine that the courts would agree with me? You honestly think I could find a court in the country that would agree that the 13th and 14th Amendments don’t apply to that child, simply because that child is a clone?
We’ve banned slavery in the country, and when they banned slavery they banned slavery for everyone, they didn’t include an asterisk that excepted clones.
And to JThunder, of course it is currently unethical to clone human beings. And unless more research is done, human cloning will never be safe enough. But of course, we don’t have to do all that research on human embryos, that reasearch can be done on animals. Once we’ve perfected animal cloning, then we have no good reason to object to human cloning.
That’s not actually true. The majority of fertilized-and-implanted eggs detach and are flushed with the next menstruation. If there’s a Heaven, its adult occupants are slogging around knee-deep in failed zygotes.
I think it would be interesting to put together some Viking DNA, and produce direct offspring from a 1,000 year old human. From a scientific standpoint, it would be awesome. But at the same time, I think in a way it may be cruel in the sense that it would be a hell of a head trip for that individual to comprehend his origin in comparison to ours.
It took this country until just a few decades ago to finally decide that black adults weren’t second class citizens. We still haven’t reached a consensus on whether unborn fetuses are persons with human rights. Who knows what the political/social/technological climate will be like in 50 or 100 years? I guess I’m just not so confident that slavery and Jim Crow could never happen again-- especially as it pertains the to the topic of reproduction, where different people have radically different ideas about personhood and rights.
Well, I suppose so. Our constitution won’t last forever, and someday we might be living in a state where the human rights we take for granted no longer apply.
In such a state, who knows what the legal status of clones would be?
But the problem then isn’t that clones are slaves, the problem is that HUMAN BEINGS are slaves. A society that declares clones to be slaves is a society where the human rights of anyone can be taken away on the whim of the powers that be. Sure, this could happen. But of course, there are plenty of places in the world today where this is already true. Burma, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and so on and so on. We don’t have to imagine it, it’s already true.
But suppose you were a clone born in Burma. And stipulate that the Burmese government is illiberal, and doesn’t give a crap about human rights. You could end up a slave. But the problem is not that you’re a clone, because the same problem exists for every citizen of Burma. Everyone in Burma is a slave. And there’s no reason to imagine that the government of Burma would have any interest in harassing clones in particular. What’s in it for them? Of course, various oligarchs might raise clones as organ donors for themselves, but the suffering of two or three clones in such a scenario is pretty much drowned out by the suffering of the mass of Burmese citizens, it vanishes into the background noise. Those Burmese oligarchs have people killed every day.
The bottom line is that there is no particular reason to imagine that clones will be singled out for abuse in the future. Slave soldiers or laborers take 18 years to grow to maturity. If you want soldiers it is far easier to conscript 18 year old kids. If you want laborers there isn’t exactly a shortage of poor people willing to work for peanuts. And the vast majority of people in the world never have a disease that would be cured if only they could get an organ transplant. Sure, some do, but most people die of accidents or diseases that couldn’t be helped by an organ transplant. So how many future sociopaths are going to raise clones of themselves, on the off chance that they might someday need a liver transplant? It could happen, but the notion that in the future there will be a large number of cloned organ slaves is implausible.
If this imagined future world is wealthy, they have no need of slave laborers or slave soldiers, or slave organ donors. And if they are poor, these slaves are going to be so expensive that only a very small number of people could afford them, and be sociopathic enough to want to create them, and have the foresight to create them years and years before they are needed.
The word “clone” has too much baggage. I prefer the more neutral term “in vitro twin”.