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

Comments

Disturbing

[Captain Large Face]

It is ever-so-slightly worrying that the doctor in question, Severino Antinori, admitted in a press conference that Dolly, the cloned sheep, was suffering from premature aging. His defence, that the experiments were not conducted well, and that sheep cloning is vastly different to human cloning, does not inspire confidence.

This child (presuming it survives) is nothing more than a guinea pig for Dr. Antinori's ego. Will this child be able to live a normal life? No. Look at Dolly -- how many tests do you think she goes through on a daily basis?

Whilst I am reluctant to encourage animal testing, would it not be better for those in the same field as Dr. Antinori to perfect cloning of non-humans before moving onto humans? It seems the doctor is in a hurry to stake his name in history. If he is not careful, he'll get his wish, but it will appear closer to Josef Mengele than Marie Curie.

Why this is good

[Ubi_NL]

First of all: I do not believe this is actually true. Antinori really isn't better at cloning then the Roslin Institute, and they usually have a few hundred miscarriages for every successful pregnancy. Presuming Antinori did not have a few hundred women standing by to be impregnated, he really is very lucky to have a 100% success rate.

But anyway: Let's just assume this is an actual clone. Evidence is now coming through showing that dolly isn't quite as healty as we first expected.
Apparently she ages a lot faster, and has a number of diseases. Now imagine that, when the baby is born ('prototype clone'), (s)he starts getting all types of horrible diseases, limbs missing and what have you. That is when Joe Schmoe will understand you just can't copy people like you can copy a CD. Too bad someone has to suffer for it.

Re:what's wrong with clones anyways?

[HiQ]

I think that there is a little more to it than that. As an other poster already pointed out, the close receives the same DNA as the parent. But DNA changes during the course of your life, due to copying errors (amongst others). One of the current theories is that ageing has got something to do with the 'wear and tear' of certain parts within the DNA (repeating 'nonsense' groups). So your clone will have all this at the moment of birth, and AFAIK that's not a good start.

Re:Stopping because of ethics

[jilles]

Hey the world survived not being flat, not being the centre of the universe, revolving around the sun instead of the other way around, Darwin, nuclear science, space travel, television, the internet, the turn of the millenium etc. All this despite hords of hysterical people proclaiming it would be the end of the world as we know it. Just because large groups of people all believe the same doesn't make it true.

Cloning is just another technology. What's hard to swallow for religious people is that it shouldn't be possible to do according to their beliefs and being proven wrong might have consequences for the validity of other things they belief (like having a soul, reincarnation, heaven, getting access to 70 virgins if you blow yourself up in a shopping centre, ..). Up until now they were able to hide behind the illusion that humans are somehow different from animals (which from a biological point of view is nonsense, it's just another mammal). Other mammals have been cloned succesfully so from a scientific point of view cloning a human being is not a significant step forward. Of course there are technological problems (most notably the large amount of cloning attempts needed to perform one successful clone) with the procedure but as scientists continue to do research these problems will be resolved eventually.

Technology by itself is not bad. However certain applications of it can certainly be evil. A box of matches can be used to light a candle and it can be used to set fire to a house full of people. Does that make the box of matches evil technology? Of course not! Similarly cloning has a lot of applications where it's use would be beneficial. I, for instance, would love to have a clone of my heart available when my own one needs replacement in a couple of decades (not entirely unlikely given the number of heart deseases in my family). Of course I wouldn't want to kill a full grown living and breading clone of me to obtain that heart but that may very well be unnecessary.

There are religious and ethical people who want to attach full human rights to arbitrarily small clusters of human cells (fertalized eggs, tiny embryo's, etc.). From a scientific point of view this is of course complete nonsense. Based on this they would consider it murder if such tiny clusters of cells are manipulated. However, often the same people eat meat (requires killing of much larger clusters of non human cells) and have no problems with getting rid of annoying insects, which is very inconsistent to say the least.

Re:Stopping because of ethics

[cat_jesus]

Once the technique is perfected, we'll have a supermarket of acceptable clone sources. Which person do you wish to clone? The smart one or the dumb one? The beautiful one or the plain one? The white one or the black one? And, given the choice, would you rather have a child the natural way, or a clone of someone with admirable genes?

I find it odd that roughly 99% of the population feels this way. Most people abhor the thought of cloning people yet somehow feel that if the technique is perfected, everyone will use it. Does this mean they secretly want to have clones for their own children?

It reminds me of a survey once down about drug use. People were asked, "if drugs became legal tomorrow, would you use them?" 90% said no. Then when asked, "If drugs became legal tomorrow, would your neighbor use them?" 70% said yes.

Why are people so eager to believe their fellow human is more likely to do somthing they wouldn't do? Why are people so afraid of the unknown?

Cat

Re:Relaxing moral views

[gowen]

Lets see:

Reference to Hitler? Check
Slippery slope fallacy? Check
Utterly unsupported reference to "logic"? Check

You sir, are a troll.