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Human clones priced at $50,000
A private consortium of scientists
plans to clone a human being within the next two years. They claim they will develop ethical guidelines to determine when to clone and not to clone. This assumes the scientists that develop a technology are able to limit society's use of that technology. It also assumes scientists are the best judges as to whether society is sufficiently mature to use a given technology sanely. Both questions seem debatable to me. What do you think?
I believe one of the big controversies in the field of cloning at the moment is not the fact that exact genetic duplicates are being made, but rather that the science of cloning at the moment isn't exact. There have been a few reported incidents were clones died shortly after birth. As well, dolly the sheep had tolemeres (DNA counters that specifiy how many times more a cell can devide) as short as her mother, which may imply that if you were to have a clone, the two of you would expect to die about the same year (your clones life expectancy would be shortened by your current life span.) There are several other aspects of the science as yet undetermined.
Would it be ethical for a 50 year old woman to clone herself, only to find out 10 years later that her daughter had a life expectancy of 30?
For example.. growing up in a caring, stimulating environment will likely form a strong, creative, and well rounded person.
Conversely, growing up in a dark, sewage laden pit where passing primates hurl feces at you will produce a Slashdot troll, $cr|p+ k|dd|3, or possibly even a Republican.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Some assumptions and conclusions:
1) It seems to me that creating an object with no 'soul' is not unethical.
2) All sentience is isolated to the brain.
3) Sentience is equivalent to a 'soul'.
4) It is not impossible to manipulate genes to produce a desired cellular mass.
5) A body with no head has no sentience.
6) It is possible to create a human body with no head.
7) These bodies will likely be derogatorily called 'organ factories'.
8) Organ factories are *not* unethical.
Therefore we should start creating organ factories in order to increase our human lifespans.
Dancin Santa
Just what is the great danger of human cloning?
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Yeah, I'd rather see politicians and lawyers taking care of this stuff. They're much more ethical and are always looking out for everyone's best interests.
He said it would "develop guidelines with which the technology cannot be indiscriminately applied for anybody who wants to clone themselves".
sticks in my craw.
Why shouldn't anyone who wants to be able to clone themselves? What is everyone so afraid of with cloning? I'm not talking about grow-me-a-new-body cloning (ie, having a clone made for organ donation, etc), but about allowing cloning for anyone who wants to raise a clone of themselves, regardless of whether it's their only way to have children or not.
What is everyone so afraid of when it comes to cloning? If I want to have a child and can't find a man I consider suitable to be a father, why should I have to trust that sperm donors are going to be any better?
The closest thing to an argument against this that anyone has given me is whether parents can make the distinction between their clones and themselves. However, my mother certainly couldn't have had any more trouble recognising that I didn't exist to make up for her mistakes if I had been her clone. We don't place any restrictions on who can have children (regardless of whether we ought to; that's another argument entirely, and one I have a different opinion on depending on what day of the week it is). Why should we place restrictions on how someone can have them?
-Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
What's to get upset about? It's just a twist on in vitro fertilization, which people have been doing for a long time. I can see lots of reasons why people might want to do this (aside from the occasional case of narcissism).
I lost my wife before we had a chance to have children. It would be wonderful to have a daughter like her. She was a delightful person--the world could use another one like her (of course, that's assuming I could do as good a job of child-raising as her equally delightful parents). I am sure that there are parents who have lost children to accident or disease who feel the same way. Why roll the genetic dice again when you already had a winning throw?
The "unique identity" thing is a non-issue. After all, identical twins happen once in awhile, and they manage just fine. The fact that they are not genetically unique doesn't stop them from developing their own unique identities.
From a biological point of view, I suppose that we could get concerned about some kind of genetic monoculture. What if there is a fad for clones of some famous person, and everybody wants to have one? But clones are going to be a bit too costly for that to be an issue for quite a while. And face it, the one thing that we are *not* lacking on this globe is human genetic diversity. We can tolerate a lot of cloning while still having more genotypes in circulation than have ever before existed at one time.
I suppose there is the problem of the clone of the famous person growing up under the pressure of inflated expectations. Probably that clone of Einstein will decide to become a performance artist just to defy everybody's assumptions. But again, this isn't really any different from the problems faced every day by the sons and daughters of celebrities. It isn't easy, but they get by--occasionally, they even surpass their illustrious parents.
I think people are afraid of cloning, not because of any real threat of cloning itself, but because they perceive it as the leading edge of genetic modification, and that is indeed scary. At some point in the future, we are going to start changing our own genes. And the technology will soon be moving faster than our own generation time, which means that we will sooner or later introduce some sort of disastrous genetic "bug" that causes cancer, dementia, or worse, later in life. And it will be in a whole bunch of people before anybody realizes the problem. There will doubtless be tragedies to make thalidomide and diethylstilbesterol look like small potatoes. But it's not really cloning that is the leading edge--it is gene therapy. And that can't be stopped. Who is going to tell somebody that they aren't *allowed* to cure sickle cell? Or Huntington's Disease? But the concept of a genetic "disease" is unavoidably slippery. Once something becomes fixable, it automatically becomes a disease. Find a gene for perfect pitch? You've defined a "poor pitch perception" disease! Let's cure everybody!
I don't think it can be stopped. I don't even think it necessarily should be. Sometimes, you just have to weather the storm....