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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."
Hopefully the clone will have legs too!
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?
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.
"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
Mammalian cloning is not a trivial thing to do -- there are only a handful of labs in the world that can make it work. It requires specialized equipment and cell lines, an excellent tissue culture setup and a tremendous degree of technical skill.
It's not like making beer, where you buy a bunch of things and mix them together in your basement. A Dr. Evil-like figure with tremendous money and resources could pull it off, but it would be prohibitive for some random loon.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yes, we call it "having sex". It's an amazing cloning technique that nature gave us that allows one to combine traits and create "clones". If you really want purity, incest might be in order: Some sisterly love and you'll have a virtually perfect family clone.
No.
Clones are, by definition, genetic doubles. The whole point is that clones aren't a combination of genes through the fertilization of an egg by sperm. Rather, a clone contains *exactly* the same gene material as its original. Thus, even the offspring of a brother and sister would not be a clone, since it would not have identical DNA to either its mother or father.
Simply by the fact that one pair must have XX (yeah, I'm going to ignore the relatively rare XXY and XXX) genes and the other XY genes in order to mate, it is impossible for the two parents to have identical genese, let alone their offspring.
Even if a pair of male twins were to mate with two female twins, it's more likely than not that their offspring would not have identical genes.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
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.
As a side note, alot of research has been put into why cloned animals have shorter lifespans. What has been found is that there are specific bits of DNA that change over time and act as a kind of life clock... Since the DNA used is from an adult animal, the DNA has already counted upwards from it's start position... (they should have set that variable to zero!)
Learning how to set these markers to their original settings may be the fountain of youth, or not... (that moral quandry is left for the reader to decide...) However, I think that if someone were to try to greatly extend their life, they'd have to start early (mid 20's maybe) though personally, I don't feel 80 years is long enough for me to learn all that I want to learn...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
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.
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.
As a biologist I find it easy to believe that there are no clones among us. It is not that the technique is morally controversial so much as current techniques still need more work. Scientists are ethically obligated to provide as much data as possible from a living creature for research (hmmm.... a clone for example) while having the minimum required amount of disturbance. These are the rules for normal mammals (dogs, cats etc...) the rules for Chimps are MUCH more strict as they are humanlike. (I would quote them but I am unfamiliar with them) the rules for a human would be IMMENSELY more strict. Scientists do not risk lives lightly, that is the job of the politician.
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.
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.
This is Slashdot, mind you. Most of us are closer to being able to clone ourselves with ordinary household items then we are to having sex with another person.
I've been trying to clone myself for years. I guess jacking off into a paper towel just wasn't the proper medium to propogate life, eh?
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
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."]
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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