Slashdot Mirror
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."
Hopefully the clone will have legs too!
the first human clone has probably already been walking around for a while. I have a hard time believing that the experts would sit by not doing it because people are afraid. As many people as are looking at cloning, surely someone had already done it before this.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
Let's assume this is just PR by a cult sect. But still, it is worrying - that here we have people who are willing to perform what amounts to human experimentation *despite* the defects shown in many of the cloned animals. Doing this to a human being is in my eyes not any better than the medical experiments conducted by the Nazis.
We need to regulate this type of research and deal with rogue 'scientists' and 'doctors' who are willing to do such acts. Please note that I think an outright ban on human cloning is not a good idea, there is too much promise in the technology - just, we need to be very, very careful what we're doing with it.
I wouldn't put too much weight on what they Raelians say, this is a publicity stunt and I wouldn't be surprised if the Scientologists were saying the same. There definition of a cloned human probably follows their guidelines too and not scientifically sound.
In my neighorhood for quite some time the Raelians have been trying to recruit ppl. They drive around in this van with sparkling stickers - kind of like a moving target. I got one of their fliers one day and had quite chuckle. I don't think they are too far off Scientologists either. There is some info on the Raelians here.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Just what we need, a bunch of cloned Canadiens... Why didn't they choose to clone some Swedish chicks?
"I've missed a period" - girl ... are you sure?" - cult leader ... this could be bad. Uh... I know! We'll send you away for a while!" - cult leader
"Shit!
"Well, yes, dammit. I told you to use protection! What do you care, you've gotten half the women in this cult pregnant." - girl
"Yeah, but they're not 15
"What about the kid? What do we do when he comes back?" - girl
"We'll put out a press release saying he's really a clone, we'll even post it on slashdot! I'm sure everyone will believe us!" - cult leader
A woman gives birth to an exact clone of herself. A couple years down the road, the child learns to speak and its first word is a cuss word. It turns out that the child is an EXACT replica of the mother except for the fact that it can only speak swear words. This drives the mother crazy and eventually she drives to a large canyon and pushes the child in. When she returns home, the police arrest her...
For making obscene clone falls! Ba dum ching!
I'd heard that a disproportionate number of Ralians come from the exotic-dance community.
Hey, we want these people to clone themselves!
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
To put it simply(and maybe inaccurately) Telomeres are strands of "junk" DNA that show the age of an organism. It is also thought that the length of the telomeres act as an aging trigger. As you age your telomere strands get shorter and shorter. During normal reproduction the telomeres are regenerated to full length. Dolly's shorten telomeres have been documented. Now, you could conceivable get around this problem if your donor cell was from a child.
As far as other defects are concerned, you must remember that you are moving delicate strands of DNA from one place and putting it somewhere else. There is no guarantee that the DNA you pinched is viable to begin with, though it may function well enough for that differentiated cell to work properly.
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.
From the articles that I have read on this very suspect claim it hints that they used the same method as was used with Dolly. I did my Senior Thesis on Geron, the company that purchased the rights to the methode that cloned Dolly; therefore, I have a fare understanding of what is involved with Nuclear Transfer. Although I am not an expert and have never attempted the process in a lab, I have read enough to know that it is a terrible idea to try this on humans at this point.
There is a easy to understand FAQ on the Roslin Institute web site written by the people that actually cloned Dolly. Here are some interesting highlights:
Are clone embryos like IVF and normal pregnancies?
Not so far. The scientists at the Roslin Institute, who pioneered this work, have repeatedly found that the clone foetuses grow much larger than normal ones, and there is a much higher chance of the pregnancy failing, of stillbirth, or of forced Caesarean sections. Dolly was the one successful pregnancy of more than 277 embryos.
What do the experts think? "I think you are always going to run the risk of having aging DNA," says Professor Lord Robert Winston, an IVF pioneer. "I would hate to think of a child of mine being cloned because I think it would be very likely he would have an accelerated aging process." Dr Jamie Grifo, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology at New York University, says: "Cloning is no better than any of the other treatments that are out there. A biological child is the husband's sperm, the wife's egg. A clone is not a biological child." Dr David Stevens, of the Christian Medical and Dental Society, asks: "Are we really willing to sacrifice hundreds of embryos - developing human beings - to make one baby who may suffer monstrous consequences?"
So, there are two very important points that must be stressed. The first is that there is a high percentage probability of genetic defect supported by further experiments. Think of the threat of genetic abnormalities in a fetus that managed to survive as much higher than if you had children with immediate family members.
The second is that each cell has an "age" that is determined by the number of times that a cell has divided. If you use DNA from adult cells that have divided many times, than all of the cells cloned from that DNA will be older. A cell can only dived around 50 times before it dies at which point you reach the Hayflick Limit. Although there are ways to prolong the life of cell lines similar to the way cancer spreads through a body, I doubt that this group of individuals thought of adding telomeres back to the end of the chromosomes that would be used to clone a human baby.
1) Their leader is French.
2) He calls himself "Rael," moved to Canada, and started a cult.
3) This cult believes that aliens created humans from DNA they brought to Earth.
4) The cult's headquarters is called "UFO Land."
5) They claim to have cloned a human.
Now, why the hell should I believe 5 if 1-4 serve to discredit any idea that intelligence and legitimacy may be present here?
Natural parthenogenesis in mammalian species is considerably more common than most people think, and is considered normal in certain breeds of mice, cattle, and camels, occuring as a result of defective egg cells. In the vast majority of cases, mammalian parthenogenesis fails to produce offspring and results in noncancerous ovarian tumors.
However, such parthenogenic ova can produce clones of their mother when (A) they are simultaniously ovulated into a receptive womb, e.g., shortly after an ordinary egg which became fertilized, and (B) contain a diploid nucleus. Although ova are supposed to be haploid some human haploid cells are naturally diploid. Presumably this is an ordinary kind of haploid mutation.
Although it is difficult to estimate the rate of occurance of natural human parthenogenic offspring, it is probably more common than one in a billion over the course of a modern human female lifespan, meaning that there are probably already a handful of clones on the planet. ["Wow, you really do look like your mother."]
As seen on a /. sig...
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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