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First Cloned Human Embryo
Human cloning, or at least the production of human embryos, is no longer hypothetical; a company called Advanced Cell Technology claims to have successfully done just that. DivideX0 writes: "The Scientific American has this article. Note the research was conducted in the U.S. although there are bills pending in Washington that will ban this research." There's also a story at MSNBC. Update: 11/25 16:07 GMT by T : Here's ACT's press release as well.
And i wonderr what defects theis cloned embryo has... It's a known fact that cloned DNA is weaker and ages faster than the actual original DNA.
Hey, this is my sig, if you don't like it, STOP READING MY POSTS!
The human embryo will get patented if I know american researchers....
Sad sad sad
Sadly, the public have this fun and harmless view of cloning, as brought forth by some movies such as Multiplicity. The dangers of birth defects and other pregnancy problems are still very high. Acceptable to test animals, but not to humans and human babies. Now would be a good time for a film to be made detailing the hazards of cloning.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Can you tell me any biological difference between clones and twins? (besides the fact that they were done at the same time)
Identical twins are the same person at birth who have different events in life that alter their personalities and responses to shape a new individual.
This doesn't frighten me at all. No 'soul' bullshit, because if there are souls, then it's a new one in the clone, not the same one. This has a lot of potential for good, and I don't know of much that doesn't have it for bad too. So let's all relax and think before we cry 'OH DEAR GOD SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN'.
They didn't use stem cells. That's something else but related.
... In the basic nuclear transfer technique, scientists use an extremely fine needle to suck the genetic material from a mature egg. They then inject the nucleus of the donor cell (or sometimes a whole cell) into the enucleated egg and incubate it under special conditions that prompt it to divide and grow
Cloning is one way to make stem cells for other research.
The Scientific American story says what they did
The next step [after getting permission from the ethics committee] was to recruit women willing to contribute eggs to be used in the cloning procedure and also collect cells from individuals to be cloned (the donors)
This is the same technique used to make Dolly the sheep
http://www.thehungersite.com
Unfortunately it looks like the debate in the US senate is going to be very one sided, and the senate will vote like the house did and pass a bill banning cloning research in broad strokes...including the research that was just announced, which is not meant to clone entire human beings, but an effort to conduct stem cell research to produce transplantable organs by taking dna from a patient and cloning compatible organ cells, to reduce the risk of rejection.
The long term plan for this company is to be able to use a synthetic process and skip the reproductive cells altogether, but to get there there needs to be intense research on how the stem cell process works, so that a organ specific process can be developed, which doesn't run the ethical risk of creating a whole person if some cells were quickly stolen from the lab and placed in a womb.
I find it somewhat ironic that so much research goes on with materials that have the potential to kill large amounts of human life...but research with the potential to create human life is so strongly opposed.
-jef
I'm no bible thumper. (Quite the opposite, actually)
;)
;)
But I'm a moral person, or at least, I try to be, and I find the amount of experimentation on the actual human building blocks of life to be outstripping what anyone in the public expects or even realises what can be done.
Already you can select a child that won't have a certain genetic disease - how long is it before you can select a child that has higher intelligence? Greater athleticism? Both?
Most people don't even realise that the above level of selection is not only possible, but there are people out there researching as hard as they can to try and *do* it - to be the first company to genetically engineer a "better" human.
And what will we call these new children? Gods?
And what will they call us?
Unevolved Humans? Not much better than intelligent monkeys?
And how do you suppose *they* will treat us? Wrath of Khan anyone?
This all really, really scares me, and I'm sorry if expressing my fears is considered 'trolling'
Well one might say that it's the same human life, since it's DNA is identical to your cells, and it's never offered the chance to develop into a fully independant life form (in this research). Regardless of which I have trouble buying the body farm argument in this case.
They intend to make stem cell lines, which is a far throw from making another human for harvesting. Stems cells can generate nerve or heart or bone tissue, but that's not the same as growing a person with a working brain, heart, or skeleton. A small collection of undifferentiated cells is a long distance from having full body floating in a tank.
Why should research be banned that could allow you to "grow" a new heart (or liver or whatever) if yours breaks somewhere down the line? If this research ONLY allowed people to get heart transplants without waiting on infinitely long waiting lists for someone to die, imagine the benefit to medicine.
If the U.S. bans this research, it will simply move to other countries. Imagine having to live in China or Russia for a while to get your heart transplant because saving your life this way in the U.S. is illegal.
In my opinion, the U.S. should ban cloning an entire human for whatever purpose, as this could be used for some very evil things. But banning research is stupid.
It's a shame Michael Shermer's article on ethics isn't online. Shermer finds most objections to cloning to be variations on "that's God's provenance and we shouldn't go there" which he finds absurd. "If God meant us to fly, we'd have wings" and such. Very thought-provoking, whether you agree with him or not.
If you find cloning interesting, I recommend getting the back issue.
The difference between a clone and a twin is that one of them has been artificially produced in a lab.
That's what it boils down to. The problem isn't in having a couple of identical humans running around, the ethical problem is should human beings artificially engineer human beings.
Don't start with your "potential for good" bullshit. We've seen that literally hundreds of times. This time, the point at stake is so crucial for human ethics that we should actually take the time to bother tho think of the ethical consequences beforehand.
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
If you can get your representative to draw a distinction between therapeutic cloning (make young healthy cells to repair damage in the host) and reproductive (make a baby), hats off to ya. Want to go for the jackpot? Explain it to the satisfaction of the religious right. I agree with your position, but adopting it would lose a congressman votes among the enormous "no attention for an argument longer than a bumper sticker" constituency.
As for the posts which talk about the weaker DNA and shortened life of clones, RTFA! There's a difference between cloned embyonic cells and cloned adult cells. But try explaining that to Slashdot. Much cleverer to say "Three thumbs up for cloning!" or the like and move on to other matters.
It's interesting that you put more faith in politicians to be able to make the right choices about cloning, than you do in the researchers on the front lines.
Sure there are so crazy people who want human clones NOW, but most researchers (including these) are opposed to reproductive cloning. Many however see therapuetic cloning to have a great deal of potential to benefit human medicine, and considerably less difficult ethical issues. For instance, the goal of the research announced today (were it to work perfectly) would be to create stem cells identical to the ones present in the first stage of development of the donor. In essence they are recreating something that already existed in the past because it can be of great use to the person alive right now. Unfortunately those cells were present so early in the individual's life that you could make a whole new human out of them, but only a very few people would want to give them that chance.
In the end it makes little difference, since it's doubtful that the world-wide community will ever pass enough laws to keep it from happening somewhere.
You shouldn't mix up science fiction with reality. There's nothing scary happening here. By definition, cloning does not create something new but merely duplicates something existing. The debate when something becomes 'human life' is a pure relegious debate. From a scientific point of view however, there were never more than just the cells. You have one cluster of cells, you split it and you have two clusters of cells. If it happens under natural circumstances you call the end result a twin. If you help nature a little, some people suddenly think of it as Frankenstein's monster.
Apart from all the technical details, the cloning process is somthing like: take an egg, replace DNA with DNA of choice, grow the embryo, split the embryo, proceed using mother nature's own processes. From a religious point of view this is not even supposed to be possible but the end result is kind of hard to deny (challenging the assumptions that underly some religions). However, most relegions rely on ignorance anyway so I doubt that this development will affect them in anyway.
In any case, when my liver/kidney/heart/whatever fails I would be very pleased if a backup part, constructed from my own cells, would be available rather than having to rely on third party provided parts. Everyday lots of people die because there are no donor organs available. And even if there is a donor organ it is uncertain whether the transplantation will succeed. This technology could be a great contribution to a solution to this problem.
Jilles
According to the Scientific American article (which you should read now), the company, Advanced Cell Technology, is not pursuing research on reproductive cloning. What they are pursuing is research on therapeutic cloning. Without going into details (go read the article), what this will eventually allow researchers to do is grow organs, tissues, etc. from the intended receipient's own stem cells. The stem cells are created using cloning. If this becomes reality, the benefits will be huge. It's called "regenerative medicine" (quoting their CEO) for a reason.
Reproductive cloning is more difficult. While the first stage is the same - insert new DNA into egg, prompt the start of division - reproductive cloning has many more steps required to create a baby. First of all, as far as I know, babies can't be grown in vitro, so you have to implant the cloned egg into a mother. There is massive potential for danger here, not only to the growing embryo but also to the mother. Furthermore, there are issues that have yet to be resolved, such as the possibility that cloned DNA is already "aged," leading to shorter life for the cloned person or animal. Neither of these absolutely critical issues is even touched by this research. Reproductive cloning is a long, long way off.
On the other hand, it appears therapeutic cloning is making much progress. I for one am excited by the possibilites, and I think that any legislative reaction to this research is purely reactive and would ignore the facts. I see no ethical problems with this research whatsoever, and neither did the ethical board overseeing this research.
-SymphonicMan
"SELFNESS" by Gregory Benford
The original publication by the authors describing their methods and partially also their motivation is available for free. You can get it here.
This is fairly typical for any cloning experiment. Frankly, six cells aren't a whole lot, and going from a six-celled embryo to a 100-celled one that can actually produce stem cells is no easy feat. It'll still be quite a long time before this can be used at all.
Clones made in labs always seem to die early. The trick doesn't seem to be so much how to make them, but how to keep them alive.
Plus, we don't know that organs grown from cloned stem-cells wouldn't have a shorter lifetime than regular ones, as clones tend to do - keep in mind that Dolly the sheep died very young.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Random side thought: I can just see the efforts to implement copy protection in the world of clones. The DMCA and the rest. And the ethical debates involved.
feh
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
2. genetic imprinting. Fertilized zygotes have DNA contributions from two parents, whilst cloned embryos only from one parent. DNA is often covalently modified (e.g., methylation) in a process called imprinting, where the modified allele is silenced. Modifying these silenced alleles often has deleterious consequences.
3. Telomere length. Chromosomal ends are maintained by special DNA structures called telomeres. The lengths of telomeres are often different between different cell types, and usually reflects the state of differentiation of the cells. Telomeres are known to affect life span and this is probably one of the main reasons why cloned animals have poor life spans.
There are just some factors that I can think of off-hand, I'm sure there are many others. Just because organisms have identical DNA sequences do not mean that they will develop identically, even if you do not take environmental effects into consideration.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for cloning and stem cell research, but it is prudent to think through ethical concerns before plunging ahead.
NO CARRIER
And I'd really like to read the article so could the karma whores please post a mirror?
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Many people don't realize how all this relates to each other. I actually hear people talk about farming human clones as odd as that sounds.
What this is about is simply cloning a human embryonic stem cell, so that it can be used to grow human organs. Not human beings. That is all that anyone is trying to do. No one is attempting to use human beings are organ containers.
What I really want to see is if they used DNA from an adult human or another embryo. I have heard that the biggest hurdle is going to be using adult DNA so this could or could not be the holy grail...
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In my opinion, the U.S. should ban cloning an entire human for whatever purpose, as this could be used for some very evil things.
And so could normal child-rearing.
If you clone a human and bring the cloned baby to term, you have... a human baby, like any other.
Why not sidestep most of the debate arguments, and just rewrite parenthood laws to define parents as people who directly caused a child to come into existence? This will cover cloning and any other technologies that come up that could cause humans to be born in any but the old-fashioned way. It would declare clones human ("duh"), and would ensure that responsibility for these humans would be placed somewhere.
This doesn't even have to touch the abortion issue (the question of where in the line between zygote and baby a child becomes a human under the law). That can be left for the courts to fight out.
I overlooked the amount of corporate tie-ins and commercial nonsense that Episode I had, but actually cloning humans as an advertising ploy for Episode II Attack of the Clones, now that's just going too far.
I mean, Lucas using KFC and Pepsi is one thing. Cloning embryos is another.
J. Morgan
In thoery cloning would result in animals with slightly shorter chromosomes, and thus possibly age sooner. However now that we have been able to study the cloned animals there IS NO ACCELERATED AGING. It is believed that the cloned fetus produces telomerease in its cells and from what we can tell, turns back the clock on aging. Secondly the more recent cloning trials have led to a 80% success rate, which is far better then the dreadfully low rate with dolly and other earlier clones. While you may object still to even 80%, natural birth itself is full of failures. All cloning has to do before it is medically ethical for humans is to match the failure rate of normal reproduction. To get a better understanding of why cloning and stem cells is important, you need to realize where these medical breakthroughs will lead us. Simply put, stem cells/theraputic cloning can slow down and even reverse aging. Now aging is not as inevitable as you might think, for the most part aging is caused by your chromosomes getting progessively smaller every time your cells divide. The older you are, the shorter your chromosomes are. When the telomeres(ends of the chromosomes) reach a certain point the cell engages into a dormant stage where it stops dividng and alters its behavior, causing you to get old. The reason the cells stop dividing is because if they don't the telomeres get too short and your chromosomes can unravel, become massively mutated, and then become horrible cancer. MOST of your cells stop at the right time and simply age naturally, the other cells become mutated and cancerous and you die. In addition to some of your cells becoming cancerous with old age, your immune system which plays a HUGE part in stopping cancer and tumours also wears out and begins to shut down. Aging would be slowed down by inserting into your body healthy stem cells which would move around your body and fix up anything that is beginning to wear out, this would include keeping the immune system in working order. Having a healthy immune system, living and eating healthy, and making use of the latest in cancer treatments means you have an excellent chance of preventing cancer from killing you. Now the big question is how do we get a supply of stem cells. Prefferably we would extract a small amount of marrow from your bones, and then remove the stem cells from the marrow. After genetically engineering them to increase their resistance to cancer, and decreasing the rate at which they age a culture of them would be kept, from which you would get periodic injections. However reversing the aging of the stem cells may not work very well, and they also may have mutated over time. If this proceedure for harvesting stem cells fails to work, inserting your DNA into a surrogate egg and then growing it in vitro to subsequently harvest would be a viable alternative. Because stem cells are sooo powerful and have so much promise, we need to keep our options open as for how we can create stem cells. Just because aging has occured ever since animals have existed doesn't mean it has to be mandatory.
It's not old. Stem Cell research in the past has involved embryos that were created in the old-fashioned egg-and-sperm-in-test-tube way. Generally in infertility clinics. That involves creating a "new" human life (or at least, a new combination of DNA that could become a unique human), then turning it into stem cells. The stem cells in question will then contain this DNA, which might cause the body to reject them if they're implanted into a recipient.
This technique involves creating a cloned cell, from an individual's own DNA. There's no conception, no unique DNA (essentially, the embryo is as unique a "life" as the cells in my big toe). And the stem cells derived from it can be implanted into the donor without the worry of rejection.
This is really the future of stem cell research. Bush's proposed solution is to prevent the use of existing (non-cloned, leftover from fertility research) embryos for stem cell research (instead the leftovers will be destroyed in an incinerator.)
Unfortunately, there's no Federal law on the creation of cloned embryos, and no real notion of whether a cloned embryo has special rights as a unique person-- it is after all, the donor's DNA, which has been activated and made to divide.
does noone remember 'Parts: The Clonus Horror'???
But really, I think this is great, and I pity the legislators that can't tell the difference between bad (sometimes TERRIBLE) Hollywood visions of horror and evil, and real-life scientific purposes and benefits. I guess that happens to people raised in an environment of blind, unquestioning religious faith, trained to believe in fairy tails and some sca-a-a-ary man in the clouds that loves you but makes it hard not to get sent to some land pain and (literally) hellfire. I just find most near-sighted, child-like religions have 'moralities' that are anything but moral.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I'd like to see either a total ban or a complete lack of restriction. The hypocritical prunes in public office don't deserve to extend their lives beyond the public they ostensibly serve, not a single one. Except maybe Tom Campbell, but he's not in public office anymore and certainly isn't hypocritical.
Are you red-baiting? The only things wrong with Russia is that it's cold and has gangs. It's indistinguishable from Chicago except the media hegemony doesn't control what software you can write.-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
You're citing old, old data. Much has come forth since Dolly.
1. Children created through IVF turn out plenty normal. You're confusing embryos *created* in vivo with those *brought to term* in vivo. There's still no substitute for a human womb---these artificial embryos would need to be implanted into a regular ol' uterus to become children.
2. You have genes from both of your parents. The genome in the embryo is the same as the genome you had *as* an embryo. The only difference is, the first step---that of recombination---has already been done.
3. Wasn't the telomere question still up in the air? I thought most clones animals had normal lifespans, and it wasn't even shown conclusively that Dolly was aging prematurely.
Please try to keep up-to-date. These questions were all answered months ago.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This seems like a technicality too me. Any cell is 'life' too me. However a human != a cell IMHO. So I have no problem with manipulating embryo cells.
The trouble is defining when an embryo becomes human life. From a scientific point of view this is a non debate since life is not a scientific term. You could differentiate between organic and non organic matter, perhaps even distinguish between things that contain DNA or don't contain DNA. Or even go as far as defining life as a cell. However is a computer simulated cell life (impossible, I know, but hyphotetically?)? What about aritificial intelligence?
Consequently, you have hardline religious people taking the extreme point of view that any embryo of any size is human life and should be protected. Whereas scientists will point out that especially in the early stage embryo's have very little characteristics that you could call human. It has no brain (hence no conscience), no internal organs, no way of sensing the world. It is just a blob of cells with no personality, will or anything else worth protecting.
I tend to position myself on the scientific side and consider stepping on a bug a greater crime than killing an embryo since unlike the embryo the bug has a little brain, perhaps even a personality and is definately interacting with its world in some meaningful way.
I'm against legislation against cloning because I am in favour of separation of state and church. Any legislation would be based on non scientific (most likely religious) arguments and hence interfere with this highly valued principle. Any legislation would interfere with scientific research. The earth is not flat, we can go to the moon and we will be able to clone humans. That's fine with me.
Jilles
So many of the comments on the thread come from two discrete sides: those who feel that cloning is awful, approaching the topic from a long-term ethical standpoint, and those who feel that we must not stand in the way of scientific research and progress.
It seems to me that those who are in favor of this stem-cell research and so forth should really take a look at the long term effects of what could happen. Not necessarily a zombie race or something, but what major changes in our society will result from these new scientific/medical methods. Now I don't think it's unsafe to say that an embryonic stem cell is going to do you any harm, but furthering research in this area will certainly advance research in other related fields, and it's asinine for anyone to deny that human cloning will not be furthered by further research into stem cells.
We know exactly what will happen, the scientists in a few years will run out of things to research in stem cells, and focus energy on the challenge of cloning humans and things.
One must recognize the linkage between these objects, and notice that any changes in one will most certainly effect change in the other. Furthermore, we must scrutinize any new work that we do that involves these issues since they have the ability to vastly change the future, and we must decide if it is for better or for worse. I also don't think that we can ignore the feelings of religious groups or incite bigotry as a few others have, since as fellow humans, their beliefs are just as valid as ours, and it is their world, too. Certainly there are questiosn that a religion can answer only with faith, but there are just as many that one might pose to an unbeliever and yet he could not answer them at all.
We're talking the dark age of genetics here, Lucas. Scientists playing God. Desperate to get into the genetic soldier business.
Dr Wendy Smith
SeaQuest DSV
Is it scientists playing God that's so dangerous? or why they are playing God in the first place?
50% of the time the survive, of that few actually are normal, high numbers have problems. This is why those who have done the research with Dolly and other cloned animals urge caution.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If we ban cloning does that mean monocellular life will be against the law? Cloning is something readily done in nature, your entire body is constructed of cloned cells. They've all got your DNA and act just like the other versions of themselves.
What cloning won't do:
1. Allow you to make a clone of someone and replace them in society with an exact replica. A clone of me made tomorrow would still take a normal amount of time to grow up and may or may not be anything like me. Genetically we'd be identical but unless he traveled back in time to live my life for me he probably wouldn't end up anything like me.
2. Allow me to create an army of super clone warriors to take over the world. Said soldiers would have to be gestated and raised like a normal army of soldiers.
What cloning embryos WOULD allow:
1. Do gene mapping and stem cell research with a very large subject base with little genetic discrepency. Every wonder why fruit flies and a few simple plants have been used for the past whatever years for biological experimentation? There's little genetic diversity and they're plentiful.
2. Figure out how to regenerate cells by cloning them so you can repair almost any part of the body damaged by just about anything. There's not a whole lot of a chance for rejection when you're your own oragan donor.
Cloning research doesn't require an embryo to be gestated. Then of course there are those holding to the notion that life begins as an embryo and all that jazz. That is just picking at straws because you don't have enough understanding of the process to make a logical argument against it. If you want to save a baby stop jacking off and ovulating but don't harrass somebody trying to make you and your kids have a better life.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I don't inherently oppose reproductive cloning, though I'd be pretty suspicious of the reason for doing it. The first principle (as in Gregory Benford's article in Reason) is that a cloned human being is entirely human, every bit as much as an identical twin. (Or anyone else.) If the reason for doing the cloning is compatible with that first principle, then fine.
But what I vehemently oppose is producing 50 or 100 deformed babies for every healthy clone, or even for the first healthy clone.
Before it is proper to even consider any arguments about why a particular cloning should be done, those doing the clones must:
1) Demonstrate that they can clone orangutangs with a rate of birth defects comparable to natural births, and show that those orangutangs live out a normal life span without significantly more health problems than normally produced orangutangs.
2) Having done this, demonstrate that they can take their results with organgutangs and, on the first attempt, achieve the same results with chimpanzees and gorillas.
Then, and only then, is it appropriate to attempt reproductive cloning of human beings.