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First Human Clone Eight Weeks Along
Vegeta99 writes "An Italian researcher is claiming ground-breaking progress, and has successfully cloned a human, and the mother is now 8 weeks pregnant, according to this article. Now how long until I can buy my own clone?" It's worth noting that the Roman medical associations bioethicists denied Dr. Antinori permission to proceed with these experiments last month. So doing the math, Rome was a little late... If the pregnancy continues without miscarriage, the tyke may share a birthday with Marie Curie
It's a lil more involved than that.. This Old BBC interview gives a layman's explanation of what's involved.
The point is, this experiment is being done knowing that the child produced could suffer physically in a similiar manner to the other clone experiments. Think about this from a personal standpoint. Picture being an 8 year old child who has a 80 year old body. Yes, there is a genetic condition which causes rapid aging of the cells, but in your case, it was not an acident of nature. You are just a test. They knew there were things they did not understand that were still going wrong when they made you. Rather than doing more tests to determine what were the causes of the failures, they just decided to roll the dice, make a mutant, become famous, and hope that you had the grace to die quickly, quietly, and with only a little pain.
I think the scientist should be executed the same day as the experiment dies because of "unforseen" defects. Yes, the human birth experience is a roll of the dice, but in this case, the scientist rolling the dice is doing it with the knowledge that there is next to no chance that things will turn out just fine. It would be another issue if we understood and corrected the problems with the other clones.
I personally have nothing against the idea of cloning. I do have a problem when science willfully ignores the individual upon which it inflicts suffering.
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
Eh, no.
Each ovum has an X chromosome. Each spermatozoa has an X xor Y chromosome. The only determiner of sex in baby mammals (and in birds afaik, as well) is which, of set (X,Y) chromosome the fertilizing spermatozoa carries. XX = female, XY = male (okay, this occasionally breaks, creating humans with XXY, XYY, etc combinations. If you want to know more, I highly recommend google.
For a clone, the *only* determiner of sex is the sex of the original cell, which will *always* be the same sex as the original donor.
There is evidence that temperature (as well as the amount of time between coitus and ovulation, and a few other things) affects the likelihood that a particular ovum will be fertilized by X-bearing or Y-bearing sperm in humans, and I suppose a similar thing could happen with chickens, but while I know of many lower animals (amphibians are, I believe, the highest order animals that do this) change sex in response to environmental change, I know of no birds or mammals that do so.
So two people with the same DNA will obvious not be reproducing in the usual way.
There have been experimental techniques involving fusing the genetic material in two ovum, and if this was used to produce offspring that had the same genetic-mother (or genetic-father, if a similar technique could be used for sperm, but that problem is more complex) then what would happen would depend largely on the genetic specifics of the person(s) involved. But the same thing could be done with two ova from a (non cloned) woman, so...
All Mammal clones possible so far are FEMALE!
You will never see this fact cited ever in a non-journal article.
You will never see this "fact" because it really isn't a fact.
See this article from way back in 1999 about the first male mouse clone.
You keep mentioning the religeous people as the opposition to this...believe it or not, there are more than a few non-religeous people who have a problem with it too.
Don't oversimplify the problem for the sake of reinforcing your biases.
When a human is created "the old fashioned way," the re is no DNA involved. RNA from the mother combines with RNA from the father to create DNA for the offspring. By this method, the sections of each RNA strand that have been affected by ageing are not likely to overlap, thereby reducing the chance that the offspring will get "bad genes."
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
There is a kind of cloning, parthenogenesis, which only clones females. Dandelions and some amphibians do this as a matter of course, and it has been observed to naturally occur in mammals (rarely).
Somatic cell nuclear transfer is what most people are talking about when they talk about "cloning", and it can produce a clone of either males or females. However, with the current technology these clones have health problems throughout their (short) life. It is downright evil to use the technology to produce humans right now, since you're condemning the progeny to a short and unpleasant life. I have no ethical problems with cloning per se, just with any technology that makes people who will have a crappy quality of life.