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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.
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."
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?
Can your IM do this?
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.
I agree with you in that solutions are never found with ignorance, I don't think that the U.S. is really approaching this one from the point of ignorance. The idea to ban human cloning is really resting on the fact that you will get many many defective fetuses who will die on their own, have to be aborted or euthenized, or will live in pain. This is inhuman for a technology that won't really have that much payoff in the sense we're looking for. Why do you need to clone a human being? Organs? We can do better than what we're doing now, and we can do the research on animals to get it right first. The U.S. isn't harming itself by banning human cloning any more than it isn't hurting itself by banning torture.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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.
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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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."
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...
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
>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.