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Italian, U.S. Scientists Unveil Human Cloning Efforts
Lepruhkawn writes: "As described in this
Yahoo article , scientists say they plan to clone members of infertile couples. I imagine that it's not so much success that people are concerned about as the failed attempts. Alien: Resurrection anyone?"
Ah, yes. The good old days of Slashdot. Back then articles were carefully researched, double posts never occurred, and CmdrTaco carefully spell-checked everything. The site never crashed, it was solid as a rock. It was a rock. Mind you, we had to work for our articles. Back then, we didn't have this new fangled atch-tea-em-elle and atch-tea-tea-pea. We had raw text and gopher, and we liked it. To get the comments we had to carry a heavy bucket to CmdrTaco's apartment and carry the bits back ourselves. And it was uphill. Both ways.
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I have to admit that I don't quite understand the ethical hysteria that has surrounded the issue of human cloning. It's not as if "cloning" will produce an exact replica of a person, right down to the last sub-atomic particle. All that cloning would do is produce a being that is genetically identical to the being that it was cloned from. Depending on the experiences that the clone has, it will differ from the being that it was cloned from. People don't claim that identical twins are the "same person", even though they may be visually indistinguishable.
The religious argument here is a non-issue. Scientists may be able to do genetic cloning, but the most important part of human beings is the soul, and the soul is divinely created (that is, it is separate from genetics.) A human clone would be genetically identical to the cloned subject, but it would presumably be soulless. In this respect it would almost be interesting to see what the results would be. The results of this experiment would be useful theological information.
It is reasonable to assume that a cloned human would be the theological equivalent of a cat or an emu or other such animal. In other words, they are a living, sentient being, but because their origins are man-made instead of divine, they (by definition) cannot have a soul. So what would they say? What would they do? Would they be capable of moral or ethical behavior, or would they operate on pure instinct as the animal kingdom does? These are important questions, and quite frankly, I'm willing to set aside any ethical considerations in order to see them answered.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Now we can have two CmdrTaco's and TWICE the spelling mistakes/re-posts!
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There is a reason for this drive to pass on one's genes. It's called instinct. All living things exist at the most basic level to pass on their genes to the next generation. The definition of evolutionary success is just that. If the urge to pass on your genes did not exist, species would go extinct.
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I remember when Slashdot was like 'the well', a polite, well moderated haven in amongst the internet junk and filth. Nowadays its all a bit USAToday... Which is a shame.
Millions of children are waiting out there to be adopted, and yet we're spending fortunes on perfecting techniques of dubious ethical pedigree? Why? Because we're still hung up on the idea that your "bloodline" has any value? That your own genetics, in a sea of six billion other bags of dna, actually have any significance? The lengths people will go to to avoid facing up to the reality that they just don't matter! It's obscene.
For crying out loud, you're going to be dead in fifty years. Do something now to make a difference in this world by adopting and caring for an exisitng human being.
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it turns out human cloning is not possible right now. This is close to my area of research.
What people really mean about 'cloning' is the creation of new organisms that are identical genetically to adults (genetic material from fully differentiated cells). People naturally make clones earlier (twins) and artificially (fertility treatments). The real breakthrough with dolly & such was the ability to take an organism that has developed -- and hence we can observe the phenotype and turn its genotype to a new organism.
ok so along these lines: the initial dolly experiment can about from _hundreds_ of attempts. All the failures either never developed or aborted prematurely. The risks associated from harvesting that many eggs from one human would be high.
Additionally, no one has come close to performing fully differentiated genotype transfer in any higher organism close to man. A science article about a year ago had a good review of what had been tried. Turns out the success rates go dawn sharply as the genome gets more complex.
Finally there is the telomerase issue. We know aging occurs in high correlation with the shortening of end caps on the chromosomes called "telomerases" These shortened telomerases are already present in fully differentiated cells and it was measured in sheep that the cloned animals too have shorter telomerases. The result: there is strong suspicion that cloned animals may have shorter lifespan. Sequential cloning might be disastrous.