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Cloned Animals Show Grave Health Problems
selectspec writes: "According to this article in the nytimes, scientists are reporting unexpected levels of defects in sheep and other animals cloned in recent years. Apparently, the cloned DNA is more susceptible to damage during the procedure. This pretty much rules out cloning humans for now." The pivotal battle of bioengineering gets a rain delay.
Who cares if Kournikova clone #1 goes defective after a while - just toss her out of bed and bring on #2 and #3. They're all the same y'know!
So I'd say this news is a good thing, if it means that the feasibility of creating human clones is delayed until the furor on both sides of the current debate has calmed down.
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
Not to stray too far off-topic, but it seems to me that we are headed for monstrous problems of biblical proportions, revealing the real lesson behind the parable of eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Mankind cannot be trusted with this information, because he can't help himself, even though he call himself a responsible scientist.
Well, this is only "god awful" from the perspective of humans. Think about the human race from a meta-stance. When kudzu takes over the habitat, we throw up our arms and say "oh, look what it did!". When we take over the habitat of, say, himalayan black bears and they face extinction, it's "oh well, we've got to live somewhere".
Introducing foreign species to habitats is destined to wreak havoc on those habitats, no question about that. However, it is dumb to think of nature in terms of status quo. Nature constantly adjusts and reworks its balanced structure. Today kudzu took over half the Southern US, tomorrow another organism will make use of this vast amount of food supply and kill off most of kudzu. The nature will find a way to regulate itself.
We, as humans, should be less concerned about "preserving nature", but really we should concern ourselves with the fact that we are making the environment unfriendly to the survival of our own species. Life has many forms and even if we screw the environment many times over, some sort of life will continue to exist. The problem is that Earth won't be suitable to sustain Homo Sapiens Sapiens and we will have to either live under glass roofs in an artificial environment, or modify ourselves in order to be able to survive in a new habitat.
Either way is rather grim, although some people wouldn't see anything wrong with genetic modifications (think X-men). :)
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Bullshit. There's all kinds of evidence that telomerase is active in the vast majority of cancers. Even the most cursory search on Medline will show this to be the case. Just a few references (of literally hundereds):
Telomeres (of which there are thousands, as I recall, on the end of each chromosome) are duplicated by a different mechanism. So, when a cell copies it's DNA, a telomere is lost,
The "telomere" normally refers to the entire structure.
However, for complicated reasons which, I'm afraid, you computer types really wouldn't understand
Yeah, whatever. So you're a graduate student, are you? Please tell me it isn't in mol bio or anything medicine related.
I respectfully disagree with your condescending statement that, in essence, someone without knowledge of a field may not comment on it. While I agree that scientific study often goes far afield of one person's ability to understand all of what goes on in a given esoteric specialized field, the fact that one may have an opinion on the ramifications of the research needs to be respected. In fact, scientists often lose perspective completely in their zeal to continue their research. In a field I know a little more about, recall that it was Einstein who wrote the letter to (Truman?) warning him of the dangers of nuclear research. Contrast him with Edmund Teller who scoffed at the concerned scientists and pushed hard for the "Super" as he called it (the H-Bomb). Some scientists are moral and some lose their heads, it's as simple as that, but for a person of average intelligence to be disqualified in commenting on, say, the above story is to allow for the possibility that the debate about the chickens becomes limited exclusively to wolves. I agree that there will always be uninformed opinions, but I would prefer to ignore them and go on with the discussion rather than shouting them down and humiliating them so as to teach others a lesson.
Thank you for clarifying those important points about cancer and the Adenine string, I suspected it was a little off, however interesting.
Anyway, cloning is not the END of the world, as neither are kudzu, killer bees, and love bugs. It is a powerful technology that has a great inherent danger, and it may very well lead to the end of the world as we know it. Already we are contemplating a world in which eating meat becomes somewhat rare, as a direct result of things such as cows eating their ancestors' brains (a genetically-related disease if I am not mistaken). Scientists are aware of these but it doesn't necessarily stop them. How are we (as uninformed script kiddies) to reconcile Wired magazine's recent cover article "You Again: A Human will be Cloned this Year" with the abovementioned article?
You sound like an informed source. What are your thoughts on the ethics of cloning in light of the current state of the art? It's more than just being able to stick a nanometer pipette into a nucleus. I agree that research should probably continue, but even though I am pro-choice, I shudder at the thought of creating cloned human life for any reason. Many are sanguine, including Matt Ridley. We experienced this sort of moral dilemma when we were able to make test tube babies, it is true (through a process much like cloning), and it is also true that we are all pretty much okay with that now. But with all the litigation about parental custody over frozen embryos and sperm today, with lesbian couples having children without the benefit of a father, you can't tell me it doesn't pose real and critical moral dilemmas.
Now we're going to get men who want to have their wife back at any price after she died in a car accident so he creates a girl out of his wife's DNA. Think about it - and very much in the Frankenstein sense, in the soliloquy where he confronts his creator on top of the mountain (highly recommended passage BTW, if not the whole book) - what Right did the good Doctor have to create the monster? And what claim does the man have over his daughter, er, baby wife, er, whatever he had created?
Some questions should not ever need to raised, do you agree?
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
And so we need to examine the rules for playing God, what that is all about, and the reasons why we want to clone. Without examining this we leave ourselves open to all kinds of criticism, bullets, and other consequences. Of course, if you are a god, you might have the option of not caring, or you may care too much. Opinions vary.
Part of playing at a God in this is being totally responsible for the act and for the consequences. Now you will have some that will say "I want to do it, and not be responsible for the results." Aside from the illogic of this, there is a certain similarity to criminal thought that some will find disturbing.
So part of this is in determining what your definition of a God is, what is a god responsible for, etc.
You also have to determine why you are doing the clone in the first place.Why are you doing this?
You also have to determine the fate of the human result. This is very sticky because it gets into the abortion issues, and the fates of embryos, etc. And you have to decide your position on this, and the fate of the people if they are born. After all, there is the argument that you wouldn't try of some these things after the birth event.
You also have to inspect the fruits of all of these actions for all lines of consequences. It is very usual to argue towards a pre-defined end-result, putting on blinders to other consequences. Leading to the "I didn't know it was loaded" argument when things go bad. This leads into the political arguments about such things as cloned armies (star wars), body part banks, and paranoid visions from the third Reich.
Which means that you need to sort what is means to be a god to in order to cover all of the loose ends. Even if it is to say that you are not responsible for that disaster over there, that belongs to the henchmen.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
All of the fore mentioned errors are those of technique. Of course there are going to be problems, like any technology in its infancy. Just like there were problems (and still are) with organ transplants, there will be problems with cloning. That doesn't mean anything is inherently baaaaddd, which is what the article makes it out to be.
This is just another article to scare the general public. The media likes doing that, and this is laden with religious innuendoes and scenes from science fiction. Science has always been held up by those who don't understand it, those who don't want it (because of lost industry -- see the industrial revolution), and those who think it's evil for whatever arbitrary reason.
Cloning a person isn't anything bad, even if it doesn't work 100%. The natural body makes mistakes too, just look at all the birth defects, genetic disorders, etc. It's just matter, so what would be different?
I think cloning was an issue which was just another area of research in genetic engineering until it became a political issue on the back of candidate cards, and they let the average Joe-blow hole and his frizzy hair wife have their 20 seconds of fame telling the world how bad it is. Or the president who uses such creative analogies as "...the warning light on the dashboard of America." have his say in it.
Ultimately, human and animal cloning will become the norm., despite the "errors" of first generation technology. I don't see it hindered by it at all; More like annoyed. All we need now is someone to make the first step, which you know is going to happen, before cloning starts to happen en masse--pretty soon it'll be at your local hospital.
Then, there will be another issue for everyone to concentrate on (e.g. world keeps turning, life goes on, blah blah)...
Love the media and frizzy haired, completely homogeneous general population.
Here's some good reading material on cloning I thought I should share from bookmarks. I know I should've posted them before but caffiene deficiency will do that.
D.N.Army: the Implications of Human Cloning on Future Military Forces
Bioethics of Cloning
HumanCloning.org
I have a shitload more so if anyone wants any email me for em. (you surely can find my email address now can you)
Well I know it has little to do with Dolly, but many people have taken the wrong views and assumptions of what cloning really is.
Speedy's not a clone
360 degrees of Karma
Um unless you haven't had a full understanding of this, Dolly was supposed to be the perfect clone of a sheep. Maybe its me misreading or something, but DNA testing holds the fixes for bad DNA and its DNA which makes the building blocks for life. Cloning something out of the blue will not fix any imperfections within anythings DNA
Ever notice that those in support of cloning either have extraordinary gains from it, finances, a loved one who is sick or died. Ever notice how they;re the ones to wholeheartedly vie for cloning. Last time I saw anyone outside of these means say "Hey why not just make a clone for the hey of it" was.... never Am I allowed to infer or must my opinion on the matter be revoked because someone doesn't neccessarily like what I say, or maybe misinteprets or misunderstand it?
It was a misprint but now that you mention it, lets take a close DNA exam of a Panda, how its body is composed, what illnesses is it succeptable to and act from there, you don't neccessarily need to clone an animal to save it if its endangered. You could study up on it and determine better situations for the remaining animals to survive in greater fashions.
You assume cloning will make things better whereas DNA is already there, its the building blocks of life not some copy or shoddily produce replica of it. So heres for your arguments sake...
Lets create say 10,000 clones to create, watch as they grow, learn, etc. Then lets watch these people (remember they're still people your clones) suffer through sicknesses and diseases while we play with copying life.
You have such a great idea
360 degrees of Karma
We have what, 6 billion people on this planet? Which is ,oh say,... 5 billion too many. Is cloning people something we should even be thinking about? Let's maybe think about issues like overpopulation, disease, and poverty before we start artificially create people to suffer from these problems.
...you are supposed to put your DNA_FTP client into binary mode before doing the copy. Just reformat the sheep and do the copy again--it'll work, trust me.
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324006
Before Linux's debut in 1991, scientists thought UNIX could not be cloned.
"With cloning a UNIX, you are asking a kernel to recompile in minutes or, at most, in hours," said Dr. Echalan, a professor of CS at the Whitbread Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "That's where the major problem is."
Some scientists say they shudder to think what might happen if Windows(TM) is cloned with today's techniques. While arguments over the ethics of cloning Windows have dominated the debate, these scientists say the real issue is the likelihood that clones would have source abnormalities that could result in stable and reliable operation. Until that problem is solved, they say, cloning Windows should be out of the question.
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
Some corrections to your post:
Telomeres are not just Adenine repeats - you're thinking of the "Poly-A" tails added to mRNA transcripts after DNA transcription. They *are* however, AT rich (i.e. composed of more Adenines and Thiamines than Cytosines and Guanines).
Also, the presence of telomerease in NOT the standard definition of cancer, although cancer cells certainly must have a way of preventing telomere degradation. There is a LOT of other important cellular machinery that also goes wrong in cancer, and thus you simply cannot sum up and "define" cancer so easily.
The effect of telomere maintenence is not fully understood yet. Mouse cells with telomerase expressed when it normally isn't DO live for quite a long time, certainly much longer than normal mice somatic cells, but NOT forever.
In any case, cloning will NOT be the end of the world, nor will genetic engineering, as so many on Slashdot predict. If people are going to make statements about the effects of a field, they'd do best to actually have some knowledge in that field (like the author of the parent post) rather than a bunch of code-monkeys who can hack Perl and then think they know more about nature, genetics and the enivronment than people who've spent most of their lives studying it.
Sincerely,
Kevin Christie
kwchri@wm.edu
The article really sounds like it was designed to dissuade people from ever cloning a human. The first page did sound like reasonable scientific presentations, but once I got to the second page, with its grotesque descriptions and subtle language tricks, it really is obvious that this is simple anti-cloning propaganda.
I don't think I buy the argument that it is really the 'rapid' duplication causing the problems, although it can certainly be one source of error. There is already a substantial body of scientific evidence of DNA deteriorating over time within a healthy organism. Every time a cell divides, errors are introduced, and every genetic error increases the possibility of a medical problem.
When you clone an animal, you are starting with 'corrupted' DNA, which understandably causes a lot of problems after further duplication. This was thought to be the source of many of the problems with 'Dolly' the sheep.
This problem could be possibly be solved by using DNA extracted from the very young.
But, of course, the article doesn't want you to consider this as a possibility, and uses subtle language to undermine the credibility of those who may support the cloning of humans.
For example, after decrying the evils of human cloning, they say that there are scientists proposing the cloning of humans (Dr. Zavos and Dr. Antinori) but that "Academic scientists say they would not dare to think of cloning a human at this time." Are these two not academic? Then why was their recent workshop sponsored by a Rome university? Zavos is even a Professor Emeritus from the University of Kentucky. His credentials are solid, but the article attempts to paint him as a quack.
The end of the article reminds us that House hearings will be starting shortly regarding human cloning. Is this a bit of a 'call-to-arms' by the NYTimes?
Each time the cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. The the DNA strands aren't copied all the way to the end, and they down like a fuse. Right next to the telomeres is vital metabolic proteins, so when the telomeres are exhausted the next cell division damages those genes and kills the cell. This is, fundamentally speaking, the cell's aging process.
There's an enzyme called telomerase that protects the telomeres during cell division so they don't get shorter. This means cells with this enzyme in them can divide an unlimited number of times. In the body, this is used during early fetal delopent, for the production of sex cells (so the next generation doesn't die sooner than the previous one), and in a few other places like bone marrow stem cells where unlimited cell division is pretty much required to keep the blood supply up.
The presence of telomerase in any other cell is pretty much the definition of cancer. Cancer cells divide an unlimited number of times because they have a genetic flaw that switches on the gene for telomerase, which is present in most cells but not enabled. (This is why testicular cancer and lukemia are so common: those cells use telomerase normally, so if their division process gets damaged and runs out of control they don't die off. There's no such thing as a benign bone marrow tumor, it won't use up all its cell divisions and die off normally.)
The problem with cloning is you're starting from a cell that's already aged, and so has shorter telomeres. The baby starts out with a much shorter lifespan, and a much slower healing process because its cells don't divide as easily (due to shorter telomeres being a smaller target for the division triggering enzymes to find).
What you need to make a good clone is some way to repair the telomeres AFTER they've already partially burned down. Gluing extra AAAAA sequences onto the end of each gene.
Active telomere reconstruction basically requires nanotechnology. On the bright side, it would be about 50% of the way to extending human lifespans indefinitely. (Limited cell division's half the problem. The other half is that our DNA is a recipe, not a blueprint, which means that it lists the steps required to make something but not what the finished product should look like. With a blueprint, you can fix the finished product because you know what it should look like. With a recipe, you have to start over from the beginning and build a new one, and see what you get.)
Now you know where my email address comes from. :)
Rob
Some of the things people tend to either overlook, ignore, or just not know, is that cloning is not creating a perfect replication of life of any form. These findings will now support this.
Misconceptions:
We may be able to cure cancer if cloning leads to a better understanding of cell differentiation. Theories exist about how cloning may lead to a cure for heart attacks, a revolution in cosmetic surgery, organs for organ transplantation, and predictions abound about how cloning technology will save thousands of lives.
Wrong DNA testing will hopefully address issues surrounding health and anyone who uses cloning as an argument is blind to science and the real truth surrounding cloning.
Medical tragedies - Many people have suffered accidental medical tragedies during their lifetimes. Read about a girl who needs a kidney, a burn victim, a girl born with cosmetic deformities, a man who needs a liver, a women who is infertile because of cancer, and a father who lost his only son.
Assumptions and statements such as this are thrown in the loop by those who are in power to gain financially by supporting cloning by attempting to empathize with those suffering.
All these people favor cloning and want the science to proceed. To cure infertility - Infertile people are discriminated against. Men are made to feel like they are not "real men." Women are made to feel as if they are useless barren vessels. Worse, being infertile is often not considered a "real medical problem" and insurance companies and governments are not sympathetic.
Again when dealing with situations like this, people are apt to just fall wholeheartedly into ideas presented by people without knowing underlying factors. No scientist who expects to gain finances will tell someone "We can create a beautiful person who looks like your son, but he will still have all the issues that killed him in the first place for $30,000.00"
Endangered species could be saved - Through the research leading up to human cloning we will perfect the technology to clone animals, and thus we could forever preserve endangered species, including human beings.Animals and plants could be cloned for medical purposes - Through the research leading up to human cloning, we should discover how to clone animals and plants to produce life-saving medications.
Personally I think DNA research is a better solution. Many people think of cloning as something of a Unix command:
for file in * ; do cat TOBECLONED | sort | uniq | grep -v PROBLEMS >> NEWTHING
Samples were taken from HumanCloning.org
crackbabies cloned
360 degrees of Karma