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First Human Clone Born?
slantyyz writes "A religious cult, the Raelians, has claimed that the birth of first human clone is one of theirs. While this hasn't been corroborated yet, it's making headlines in Canada, where the cult is based. There's supposed to be a press conference on Friday in Hollywood. This story just may have legs."
Er, I'd believe that they would sit by and not do it because they're afraid.
They're afraid that the technology isn't mature enough. Even the cattle cloning industry has a disturbingly high failure rate.
They're afraid of public backlash costing them their jobs, or perhaps shutting down the company they work for.
They're afraid of loosing their friends.
They're afraid of screwing up, and ending up with a...thing. At that point they'll have to decide if they're going to put it out of it's misery or not.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Most cloning experiments done to date have resulted in abnormalities that manifested themselves later in the cloned animals life. Well, an animal can be put down pretty quickly, and the ethics behind doing so are mostly cut and dried. Not so with a human life, cloned or otherwise. If there is a life threatening condition down the road, the cloned person may have to endure a lot of pain and suffering that would have been avoided had they been a normal conception and birth. Bottom line, there is too much we don't know about cloning to rush to create a cloned human for the purposes of prestige only. This is not responsible or ethical science.
the first human clone has probably already been walking around for a while
And you base this on what? Your abundant lack of knowledge about cloning technology and basic biology?
The first adult mammal cloned was Dolly the sheep. She has some rather serious defects as a result of that cloning, such as rapid aging. It took 277 attempts to produce a viable clone.
A cow was cloned in 1998 without the aging problems, and it took a "mere" 104 attempts.
China cloned their first cow in October of this year. Brazil attempted to clone a cow and wound up with a bull instead.
Cloning isn't easy. It's not like you can just go to the corner drug store and buy a clone'o'matic. It requires a great deal of lab resources, time, and lots of money.
And while you may very well find scientists who would try to clone a human, you also have to find 50-100 women willing to be implanted with a cloned embryo, given that 90%+ of them will miscarry (the human body is pretty good at detecting and aborting non-viable fetuses -- and I apologize right now to anyone who has had to deal with a miscarraige in their family, I know they are deeply traumatizing). This immediately increases the number of potential leaks.
Right now is about the earliest it would have been possible to clone a human... after all, no matter what you try to do, it's going to take 9 months from implantation until birth.
It has nothing to do with fear, at least not for me. I think the ethics are questionable at best, primarily due to the large number of failures in current cloning methods. For the record, I'm pro-choice, but that doesn't mean that I would want dozens of women subjected to the trauma of a miscarraige (or worse), or that I think playing with human life this way is a good thing.
Cult: A religion with no supreme being. Read your dictionary.
What dictionary are you reading? Did you even look it up yourself before posting? The absence of a supreme being is not the litmus test for cult status, although it is a common characteristic of cults.
More properly, it is simply the unorthodox nature of its religious system that determines its "cult" status. Of course, orthodoxy is in the eye of the beholder. For example, the term is often used in Christian circles to refer to highly unorthodox forms of Christianity such as the one practiced by David Koresh and his followers. Some refer to the LDS (Mormon) church or the Jehovah's Witness faith as cults for the same reason. An atheist, on the other hand, might refer to any belief of a supreme being as cultic.
Not that it's the final authority or anything, but here's what Merriam-Webster has to say. Note that the absence of a supreme being appears nowhere in this list. Definitions #2 and #3 are the relevant ones here.
1 : formal religious veneration : WORSHIP
2 : a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also : its body of adherents
3 : a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also : its body of adherents
4 : a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator
5 a : great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as a film or book); especially : such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad b : a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion
This is very shallow reasoning, but unfortunately very common. When the line between animals and humans is blurred, treating humans as animals becomes ethically justifiable. If the notion that humans are little more than advanced animals is allowed to lodge in the collective political mindshare, then abuses far worse than what the Nazis did will become commonplace.
The battle over cloning is not a battle to prevent the advance of technology. The problem is one of ethics - if cloning becomes widespread, humans may very well become disposable - subject to arbitrary termination when their "useful" lives are over. The primary problem of the human condition has never been the cure of disease, but rather the lack of respect that various groups show each other. All of the major atrocities in history start with the devaluation of the human: the Nazis devalued the lives of Jews; Stalin devalued the lives of his opponents; Pol Pot, the lives of his people; the American South, the lives of Blacks. Once the notion that certain classes of people were somehow inferior to others arose, it followed logically that the inferior were not worthy of the respect of the superior (whoever they claimed to be...) Cloning represents the separation of humans into two classes, cloned and uncloned. Once this distinction is made, and once obtaining an "ideal" (read: obedient, hard-working, easily exploitable) human becomes a matter of technology, people in general will become commodified and exploited in ways far worse than they have been in the past. There will be little need to treat a person with dignity and respect once obtaining a "replacement" becomes a simple matter of gathering a few hairs and calling a cloning agency.
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