Is Human Cloning Easier Than Thought?

The Angry Clam writes "Yahoo has this story about how human beings might be easier to clone than sheep like the (in)famous Dolly. Since most of the "cloning is unethical" arguments hinge upon the high rate of defectives produced during attempts to create Dolly, I wonder what this will mean for things like the Cloning Ban, that Italian doctor, and so forth."

Comments

I wasn't too impressed

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

The article said that this may be a solution to one of the many problems they've had cloning different animals, and even if it were the only problem, humans don't have that much of an advantage :

``It's like an airplane with two jet engines. You see two nice jet engines and you like it,'' Jirtle said. ``Why? Because you feel comfortable that there's redundancy. In mice and rats, you only have one engine. If it blows, you're done.''

For example, Killian said that only one in 300 cloned sheep embryos takes hold, and up to half of these embryos experience large offspring syndrome.

Basically they're saying that because sheep have "one engine", they're harder to clone. But they're losing half of them! I'm hardly willing to accept that "two engines", each with a fifty percent chance of failure is a significant improvement.