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Send out the Clones?
ParticleGirl writes "This morning, congress called for a federal ban on human cloning. The associated press has an article. This follows the International Cloning Ban which took effect last month. This is research into human cloning for any reason, this is "importing a clone" ...a kid born of cloning overseas can't come into the U.S.? And other weird stuff." If god is all powerful, then can't this just be another way he works? Personally I don't care if there's a god or not: I want clones. I wanna grow spare hearts in a vat. I wanna have a brainless clone in a tube in case I blow out my liver drinking whiskey. And as soon as we get really good with the genetic engineering, I want my own half height clone to mow my lawn.
... and I'm the clone. I work my butt off, and I never know where the hell my money goes. I think the Real Me is sitting on a beach in Hawaii, siphoning off half the money I make, laughing like hell.
for example, I want to clone myself, then get my clone a sex change and a boob job, and then I'll have someone who'll put out. I just can't decide if that's more like incest or a really exotic form of masturbation.
I'm curious as to why this process must be banned now. Sure, cloning has a huge "ickyness" factor, but I get the feeling that most of these ethical dilemmas are being "resolved" by individuals who are not rationally approching the matter.
Many of the concerns are with the (lack of )safety of the procedure. Cloning is associated (when performed with other mammals) with extremely low success rates. However, that does not mean that the problems are unsolvable. Perhaps a ten to fifteen year ban on human cloning would be more advisable, subject to review if the problem is solved.
We must remember that in vitro fertilization also has problems associated with implantantation, yet few argue that IVF is ethically problematic because of these problems.
Human cloning, is at presnt, ethically problematical becuase of the high mortality rate. But this does not mean `There is no need for this technology to ever be used with humans,'' (to quote Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kans).
The problem appers to be that the future of cloning humans lies with two groups of people who want to force the issue. The time is not right for bold intrepid scientists to drag humanity kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Nor is it right for lawmakers to read a few papers, listen to a few scientists, and decide the issue for all time.
With advances in cloning technology, it may be possible to replicate mammals with a very high degree of success. At that point, the application of this technology to humans should commence.
Although new technologies often cause new problems, no solutions are ever found with ignorance. The U.S. is only harming itself in the long run.
The legislation prohibits the importation of clones. This is unconstitutional and will be struck down by the Supreme Court if ever enacted. Human clones are humans. The "all men are created equal" clause of the declaration of independance is a lens that the judicial branch uses to interpret law. Preventing the "importation" of a clone (would that be immigration?) would be treating the human clone differently than anyone else.
Furthermore, being a clone could be considered a medical condition. If successfully argued as such, then human clones have protection against discrimination from the government, private employeers, loan officers, etc.
Human clones are human. That's the point. They have all the same legal rights as any other human. Treating them specially for legal purposes will quickly be challenged and, probably, ruled unconstitutional.
Dave
"I shall call him...CmdrTaquito."
And as soon as we get really good with the genetic engineering, I want my own half height clone to mow my lawn.
For some strange reason, I now have Sir Mix-a-Lot stuck in my head.
"36-24-36? Only if she's five-three!"
Someone, help!
My pleasure. The series began on Jan 8, 1990 (skip the Sundays) and continues to February 1, 1990.
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``There is no need for this technology to ever be used with humans,'' said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.
Three Years Later:
Doctor: Well, Sen. Brownback, your liver and heart are failing. There is some great cloning technology in China that would let you live for an extra 10-15 years. I guess we can't use that on you here though. It's not legal here, sorry.
What? No, you can't go to China and have that procedure. If you did you would not be allowed back in the US. No clones in the US remember?
Now I am not too familiar with American politics (I am Canadian) but:
``The scientists who created Dolly had over 200 attempts before Dolly was born,'' said Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., a physician. ``The prior attempts resulted in malformed, sickly creatures that had to be euthanized.
``We cannot allow this scenario to play out with humans,'' said Weldon, who is co-sponsoring the House bill with Bart Stupak, D-Mich.
Is this a contraditcion in terms with what the Republicans are trying to to with abortion in the US (or do they see it as a continuation of the same issue?)
Although I am arguing on a slippery slope here, if cloning *DOES* get approved somewhere for humans, what rights would a clone have?
You can't abort "natural" fetuses, but cloned ones? Thats ok!!
Ah yes, the new slave trade. Come down to Wal-Mart and buy yourself a new Chinese-Engineered clone, if you are unsatified with their performance, remeber you can just not feed them, and throw them in the trash!
(Here I am picking China as a leader in Bio-tech, but maybe I should have picked Cuba, I understand that they are very advanced on this front...)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
...because it's not worthwhile. What would be the advantage of creating a baby that's an exact genetic copy of someone, and then waiting years for it to be able to walk, talk, and think? I could see some advantages to cloning body parts, but cloning a whole person will never be worthwhile. Unless of course we've developed something that can accelerate your growth tremendously and also dump knowledge directly into the brain, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
At least Congress isn't going after mutants. Yet.
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All the posts on here are stating the obvious such as how cloning is just a scientific tool, or how twins are clones, or making silly jokes. Everyone has missed the REAL social issue at work here. Clones WILL be created, and when they are, the world will hate them and shun them! Clones will be just as human as you and I, but they will be outcast and feared by society at large. It's the new wave of discrimination, and there will be a whole new debate about whether they are "real" people. And no one will think to ask the clones...
End result? Restraints on developing a new technology, which will thus remain experimental and unpredictable for much longer than is necessary.
I smell technophobia and political grandstanding.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Actually, you're missing the point. This kind of anti-cloning sentiment is very consistent with pro-life attitudes. Basically, there were a few unviable attempts at Dolly that had to be put down, and many, many more that never sucessfully grew past the initial stages of fertilization.
Pro-life people hold that a fertilized human zygote has just as much right to live as a newborn baby. They are both people, even though one is far more dependent on their mother for survival than the other. Thus, the creation of hundreds of malformed, doomed to die human beings would be considered abhorrent. This is the same mindset that considers fetal stem cell research as unethical, because it essentially involves harvesting murdered people.
Let me reiterate. The objection is that you are creating (and killing) hundreds of people to attempt to get one successful attempt. They are not saying that it's okay to abort cloned people while its not okay to abort others. They are saying that the necessity to abort failed attempts or to let them continue living broken lives with their deformities is sufficient reason to ban human cloning research.
I find an outright ban to be a bad idea, but as someone who is pro-life, I find the current failure rate to be unacceptable. You can't clone a human nowdays without doing something a little unethical. (I'm not even going to respond to CmdrTaco's outright appeal for the creation of subhuman slaves and mindless people to be killed so that their bodies can be harvested for your own immortality.)
Here's my proposal:
We should have a complete moratorium on human cloning until the cloning of mammals has a failure rate approaching natural human pregnancy. Only then can we attempt it on humans. As is, cloning is far too risky to attempt with humans. We should fund research into cloning of other animals before we attempt it with people. It's just too soon right now. If we try right now, the failured attempts, and the ruined children that come out of them, will create a public backlash that could destroy all cloning research for decades, if not longer. We cannot allow premature attempts to ruin the future of cloning.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Although I am arguing on a slippery slope here, if cloning *DOES* get approved somewhere for humans, what rights would a clone have? You've fallen into the TV Clone trap. You know the one where we grow clones in incubators and make them into adults before they get to get out and do anything. The truth is much more benign. If they clone you, they put you into a non-artificual real life mamary based famale incubator and let you gestate for nine months. After this time, you are freed from your prison but you get to spend the next sixteen to twenty-four years with your own personal slaves who do your bidding and let you wreck their car. At the end of that time they throw you out and tell you not to come back until you've got your own mamalian based replicant masters that they can give money to, bounce on their knees and then send home. From the perspective of the law it is as unlikely that anybody but your doctor would know that you are cloned, much as you don't know who around you is a test tube baby. In the view of congress however it is probably a bit of a good idea to ban cloning at this point in time. I don't believe it is because Congress knows what they are doing. They don't. Neither, on the other hand, do the people who want to clone other people. Put it in perspective: If the people who had invented the atomic bomb had known what they were setting up the last half of the twentieth century for, do you think they would have agreed to do it?
Beware the wood elf!!!
Now it looks as though there genuinely are some problems with the clones having reduced viability, so there are some very serious long term health issues to clear up.
So what? There's no ban against giving birth to a baby with a genetic defect that would limit it's life, why should their be one on creating a broken clone? What's the moral difference?
(And if the answer is "choice" I'd point out there's no ban against people who know there's a high chance of passing on a genetic disease from having kids)
It only makes sense to put a hold on human cloning until the clones are actually likely to be as healthy as an ordinary baby...
Sounds good, but you've got to give somebody the power to define "likely" and "healthy" and "ordinary". And once those restrictions are put on clones, what's to keep that power from being applied to regular old-fasioned conception?
People take for granted the freedom to pretty much breed however they like, so why shouldn't that same freedom apply to cloning?
These politicians are fighting to destroy some core American Values.
After all, who but a clone can better illustrate that All Men Are Created Equal?
Can your IM do this?
I want my own half height clone to mow my lawn.
Hmm, seems to me that the ownership of a living being by another living being is referred to as "slavery". No matter what color, etc. this is still the same issue.
I would rather have R2-D2 mowing my lawn, such as one of these Mowbots
- passion
Twins are clones.
What is being proposed under current cloning, that is the process which produced the Dolly sheep, is essentially the creation of an identical twin who is much younger than you are.
What were you immagining a clone was ? Some sort of Star Trek transporter echo ? If we create an embryo from one of your cells, then it still has to be implanted in womb that will not reject it and then raised to adulthood.
As such, cloning is much more of an incremental advance than the reactions of congress and slashdot would suggest. Parents of a sickly child already occasionally choose to have additional children to increase the number of potentional organ or marrow donors for the first child, an ethically problematic decision because you are bringing someone into the world with a purpose or implied obligation.
You say "Just wait until the KKK can begin brewing their own perfect children." But that's exactly what they think they are doing already, by marrying white women and raising their children to be racists.
In India and China many pregnancies are tested for sex and aborted on those grounds. In the US this surely happens too; people also test for various genetic diseases such as Down's syndrome and choose to abort pregnancies based on that. Can you immagine how a mother who had aborted a Down's syndrome pregnancy feels when she finally has a child, and the kid decides to make himself retarded by sniffing glue ?
People will be bad parents regardless of the tools science offers them or the tools congress denies them. The ability to create an identical twin embryo from an adult won't change all that much. Idiots will want to clone dozens of Sarah Michelle Gellers, so what ? Some of them will probably grow up ugly, and then we'll learn a bit more about how the womb and environment effect our development.
"Order your very own clone of clone of [Brittney Spears / N*Sync boy / etc] now from us and get a 2nd clone at half price!!" /. users hate Windows or think Microsoft is out to get them!
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I hear you. The biggest problem I see is that already there is an "import ban" on clones. Shouldn't that be an "immigration ban," or are we deciding before cloning has even succeeded that clones will be nothing more than property? Didn't these guys see Blade Runner?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I believe that a bunch of barely post-Renaissance Europeans had the same ideas about people with different colored skin. That turned out well, didn't it?
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Twins are not clones. They're not always even identical.
Twins are the result of either: a) Two eggs were released this month, and both of them are now impregnated, or b) (more rare), one egg is impregnated and then splits, resulting in identical twins. HOWEVER: From the moment they split, twins develop differently, live differently.
I support a ban on cloning for now, until the majority of the US matures enough to handle the technology they're getting themselves into.
Think we abused Napster? Just wait until the KKK can begin brewing their own perfect children. Think bad parents treat their kids poorly because they wanted an image of themselves? Just wait until they GET a perfect image of themselves and are still frustrated because the child has a mind of its own.
Think it won't happen that way? http://www.genochoice.com has it all.
I completely agree. I was a little offended when I read that comment. I realize that it was a joke, but it still sounded too much like slavery, which is something that is hard to laugh about. I'm glad to see that someone else felt the same way.
My feelings on the matter: If cloning were allowed, I think it would be important for us to accept them as equals in all respects.
I'm a bit dubious about a permanent ban on cloning, but a medium term moratorium seems like a very reasonable precaution. While it was initially believed that clones were going to be genetically perfect copies of their progenitors, there's always been some suspicion that there might be problems with the cells they've started from. Now it looks as though there genuinely are some problems with the clones having reduced viability, so there are some very serious long term health issues to clear up. It only makes sense to put a hold on human cloning until the clones are actually likely to be as healthy as an ordinary baby, the same way that other medical procedures are not permitted until their safety is adequately demonstrated.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I was a kid when the first test tube babies came along and many doomsayers were convinced that we were creating monsters. Many believed we needed laws to stop this research. Well, guess what, we weren't creating monsters, we were creating beautiful children using technology that has become universally acceptable today.
Cloning's not an ego trip or a mad experiment. It's an option, probably the final option, for couples that are not as fortunate as my wife and I have been. I sincerely hope that they will have every opportunity to find the happiness that I have found.
Would you *really* want someone as weak and lazy as yourself to mow your lawn. Why not just get a clone of Arnold Schwarzenegger to do it?
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Clone without a brain is a better speller ;-)
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Too many people don't realize that there is no difference (other than being genetically identical to someone else) between a normal human and a cloned human - both are people. "Spare hearts in a vat" or a "brainless clone in a tube" are no different than conceiving a child the normal way and abusing it for said purposes; a clone merely gives you a genetic match.
There is no basis for the widespread concept that clones are monsters to be feared or used for our selfish purposes.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I say we start here. When he grows up, I've got some serious questions I'd like him to answer.
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What if your half-height clone ends up kicking your ass out the door and makes YOU mow the lawn?
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
It's probably best to have a moratorium on human cloning at least until other mammals can be cloned reliably, without the horrible, somewhat random side effects they have now. Mice can't even be cloned yet properly without a high percentage of them suddenly becoming morbidly obese upon reaching what would be the human equivalent of about 30. There are also many other problems such as developmental disabilities and other "random" effects. Basically, take the mouse chromasome, munge up some random DNA and lets see if it works.
It's also pretty immoral to clone an entire human being just for their organs or for slavery. What do you do with them when they're no longer useful? Kill them? Might as well kill ageing migrant farm workers or old people in general. Lets get rid of all the handicapped and sick and retarded people while we're at it.
"It was not until their numbers had dwindled to nine that the other dwarves began to suspect Hungry."
well I hope you'll at least *dress* him differently.
Massively redundant, I know, but mine was the best execution of this extremely obvious joke.
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Twins are not clones. They're not always even identical.
Twins are the result of either: a) Two eggs were released this month, and both of them are now impregnated, or b) (more rare), one egg is impregnated and then splits, resulting in identical twins. HOWEVER: From the moment they split, twins develop differently, live differently.
And (b) is fundamentally different from a clone how exactly? Oh, I forgot, the donor's soul is cut in half and the clone gets half grafted into it. Whereas with identical twins, God has enough time to order out for a new one and have it wired down to the womb.
I support a ban on cloning for now, until the majority of the US matures enough to handle the technology they're getting themselves into.
If we did that for every tech, we'd still be living in the Stone Age.
Think we abused Napster?
No, I think the record companies abused the public with their price-fixing. Using Napster was just the public's way of saying, "fuck you too."
Just wait until the KKK can begin brewing their own perfect children.
Ok, so would these be KKK scientists doing the cloning, or would KKK couples have to pay some dough for the procedure? I'm betting most of them are too poor and too stupid for this to be much of a problem for quite awhile...
-- dR.fuZZo
I guess with no clones, Episode II will have to be re-written? (Again?)
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
I know this falls under the stem-cell research, but does the proposed law concern the cloning of a whole human, or parts? If it only applies to a human, at what percentage of a cloned human could be allowed to be cloned?
Only organs? Skin? Eyes? Bone marrow? Blood? Nerve cells? Deformed or not, a clone might still have viable nerve cells...
Just asking...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
All this law does is make cloned individuals second class citizens. Anti cloning laws are a clear violation of cloned peoples rights.
The laws should have been about insuring that cloned people have the same human rights as other people and making sure cloned children have parents and an ordinary life.
Sindri Traustason
"It takes two to lie, one to lie and one to listen"
Sindri Traustason.
Taking this semi-seriously, smart robots capable of performing menial tasks will be along before human cloning becomes possible and acceptable, IMO. I'd rather rely on a robot than a lazy slob like myself anyway.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
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at least, whichever one split off was a clone of the other.
Does that mean twins would not be allowed into the US?
Another case of technophobes not understanding what they're legislating against.
>And as soon as we get really good with the
>genetic engineering, I want my own half height
>clone to mow my lawn.
Wouldn't this also require a smaller lawn mower?
I can imagine it now, the half-height is pushing the mower up-hill, and then topples under the weight of the mower and is run over producing...really itty bitty copies of you...more or less...
So if you solve that problem with a smaller lawn-mower, then wouldn't it then take twice as long for you to mow your lawn? So basically, you'd just be wasting twice as much time as your already are, but since there are two of you, you'd be doing it twice as fast, so you're really not gaining anything by cloning. So let's just call the whole thing off and eat pizza.
Do humans really suck that much (KKK vs. the Greens - let the clone wars begin!)?
Remember that if you make something illegal, only the lawless will pursue it. In this case, that means you put technology right into the wrong hands from the getgo - where it arguably already is. You then however, remove it from the "right" hands by making it illegal.
As a society we are NOT ethically mature enough to deal with the moral ramifications of human cloning. However, the ancillary technology could be enormously valuable. I would like to someday have 2 eyes that work so that I can see in stereo (all those 3D movies and sims!) and have depth perception. I only have one eye that works due to my biological mother having ruebella (German measles) during pregnancy. I would sure like it if someone could grow me a new eye and optic nerve. I'd also like to be able to hear normally. I'm half deaf for the same reason.
If a normal body could be grown for me and I could somehow retain my mind in it, I think I would welcome that. We'll never get there tho if technology is stifled.
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
And identical twins are different from clones... how exactly? Cloned embryos will "develop differently, live differently" just like identical twins.
Now, there's evidence that cloning techniques have some serious bugs in them, and cloned embryos have genetic flaws... But that's a whole 'nother story.
Not cloning humans (yet?) is common sense and far from ignorance as some people may be thinking.
/bin/halt's evolution.
The technology, for one, isn't perfected yet. Everyone yells at Intel for releasing a chip before it's ready, but now you want them to clone a human before it's ready? Babies will be born dead or deformed and then arent going to be wanted and then put into homes or get on welfare. That's all we need.
Secondly, Taco brings up another point by his "midget to mow his grass" idea. This is slavery and THIS is against the law in the U.S. and immoral no matter how you look at it. Sadly, this would be the primary reason for cloning human beings... NOT for medical reasons.
Thirdly, the world already has a serious population problem. You really think it's a good idea to clone MORE people and continue the process of populating the planet? That means more people go hungry and die because someone can't afford to feed them 'cause he gotta worry about his clone.
Finally, everytime a baby is born it inherits certain characteristics from it's mother and father and essentially evolves. Cloning
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