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Harvard to Clone Human Embryos?
Lifix writes ""Harvard University scientists have asked the university's ethical review board for permission to produce cloned human embryos for disease research, potentially becoming the first researchers in the nation to wade into a divisive area of study that has become a presidential campaign issue."
I for one welcome our cloned human embryo overlords...
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
...they just can't use federal money to fund it.
...this is the beginning of a Brave New World
If you've read the article, you'd have seen this -
None of the proposed experiments involves attempts to produce a cloned person.
So, no. They're not going to have clones, atleat not yet.
Goodluck on your search, though.
Human cloning is scary stuff. What happens when we start to clone the "perfect" human for soldiers? Or when we clone too much that it leaves too little genetic diversity? Or worse, combining genetic manipulation with cloning, creating "super-humans", so-to-speak?
Personally I think those are questions best left to speculation, and not ones that should ever have their answers truly known by anyone.
"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
"We must allow this research, I mean some day this could allow Chris Reeve to.. oh.."
"Michael J Fox, you know him right? Well someday.."
I believe they should talk to people about the issues and the benefits instead of the constant name dropping of a few celebrities stem cells and cloning could *magically* heal. And since when is scientific research in line with religious dogma or morality? Science is the terrier that tugs at the great curtain. As we legislate based on dogma, many other countries are passing us by in science and technology.
It will be stem cell research. Then again, with overcrowding in the world, I don't even know if that's the best good idea. It's going to be a long century, and at the moment, this kind of thing isn't safe either privatized or government regulated.
can't they just pray to have our Lord who ar't in Heaven deliver the knowledge unto them?
Maybe if some of us took a few days off from praying for the President, and his children, and their peace of mind, and Iraq, we could pray for the researchers to happen upon a divine epiphany, and if they were good, God fearing servents of our Lord, he'd just write it on up and send it on down via an Angel.
I bet we could get that on the 700 Club!!! Think of how much money would be saved by not wasting any of it or the time on science, and better yet with the donation to the 700 Club we could feed poor kids in Africa, or by the Church a Holy 120' Conversion Vessel of The Lord, with day spa!
Here're the Yahoo! blurb and the NZ Herald stories.
When asked why he has chosen himself as the seed of all future Harvard clones, Professor Dershowitz responded, "Cloning is evil. Someone must stop others from cloning themselves and the answer is a worldwide army of Alan Dershowitz's working together to stop this scourge in its tracks."
A greatful world thanks Professor Dershowitz for choosing himself to shoulder this heavy burden, as only he can.
Seastead this.
Wasn't there an article on New Scientist awhile ago that some private firm in South Korea had already cloned human embryos for research?
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My point is that as long as we keep the clones somewhat small - say less than 1024 cells, I have no moral problem with disposing them - that I'm not killing anything. Yes this has a HUGE grey area, but I think that a reasonable compromise can be reached.
Let the flame/holy wars begin...
..........FULL STOP.
The question here isn't "Can we do this?" but rather "Should we do this?", and I just don't think we know enough to answer the 2nd question yet. After all, what are we (as a culture, people, race, as well as individuals)going to think if further research reveals that Life begins at conception? Will posterety record us a a generation that created an entire class of people for the sole purpose of scientific experimentation? And philosophical considerations aside, with all the cloning errors with Dolly (dozens of attempts, one "success") and other issues (genetic diseases present in Dolly that weren't present in her "mother") is any research we perform on a human clone going to have any medical validity?
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
Since the religious people began opposing science as it over turned their superstitions and required them to actually examine the nature of their faith only to find out it was a weak substitute for habbit.
If it's going to be a high school popularity contest, they might not be able to find anyone more popular than Jesus, but they've got to find someone who is popular enough that those asembled will at least consider paying attention so reason stands a chance.
This is the harvest of a reduced investment in education.
For those of us born without evil twins, cloning is the best way to protect ourself against conviction based on DNA evidence. It musta been my clone.....
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I'm guessing that their goal is to cull stem cells from the cloned embryos, and use those for disease research, as a team in South Korea did in February.
If they're allowed it could free up stem cell research in general by providing "victimless" stem cells.
With all the talk of "super cures", it's about time somebody got the ball moving.
Isn't cloning currently illegal (or in the process of becoming illegal)? This would get Harvard into a world of trouble if they agreed to do this.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Cannibals need tasty breakfast food too---
JIMMY DEAN BREAKFAST EMBRYOS!
What crap.
:)
There is enough and more space in the world. It's just our cities which are crowded. Next time, take a drive around to the wilderness and outlands a few miles off your city and you'd notice how much free space is out there.
The only thing of worry is the crunch it may have on our natural resources, but I'm sure we'll find a way around it. Afterall, our species has shown the most resilience only when pushed to our limits.
It's going to be a long century, and at the moment, this kind of thing isn't safe either privatized or government regulated.
Yes, that's why they have bureas of ethical issues regulating this stuff. They have not even approved this, and it is not known if they will - this is merely an application seeking permission for _research_.
And read this (emphasis mine) -
Jennings said Harvard had raised "substantial" funds for the experiment from private philanthropies, but declined to name them. "There are a lot of people who have the resources and who are very keen to see this sort of work go ahead," he said in a telephone interview. "This is not commercial research."
It's just research for science's sake. I do not see anything evil in their intent, except for the fact that it may help several people with disabilities lead a normal life.
And besides, the reason I replied to your question - stem cell research is _not_ just to increase your longetivity. It can also help people with severe neurological disabilities. I've a cousin who has not gotten out of her bed ever since she has been of 4 years of age, for the past 18 years. I would do anything to see her walk, so would her parents.
For that reason alone, I would like to see this work progress. Go science!
As we legislate based on dogma, many other countries are passing us by in science and technology.
Hence the folly of having a government run by Christians, in a country founded (and somewhat populated) by puritans.
I believe they should talk to people about the issues and the benefits instead of the constant name dropping of a few celebrities stem cells and cloning could *magically* heal.
I hate to say it, but name dropping and magical thinking is the right path to go if one is trying to influence public opinion. Most people don't like thinking for themselves, but do like the people on their tv screens.
"And since when is scientific research in line with religious dogma or morality?"
Not being in line with "religious dogma" I could understand...Not being in line with morality is another thing entirely. I hope you don't see the two as synonymous.
However, I agree about the celebrity name-dropping...
Thats what they always say... Havent you seen the Sixth Day . Before you know it there will be two Swarzeneggers walking around. :)
Why is it that cloning so controversial?
Because of what might happen? Because we've seen some crazy science fiction movies?
It's ridiculous that people who least understand the research hold the strongest opinions about it and try to stop it from happening.
Now why exactly is any research involving embryos controversial? People aren't lining up at abortion clinics to make an easy 50 bucks by donating their unborn babies to research. Is it better to put the embryos in a landfill than to make use out of them?
Politics should not dictate research. It certainly should never prevent research.
The flip side is that people use superman as a political tool on the opposite side. "Let us do research. We'll make superman walk again!" I guess that won't be happening. If only he could have held out 'till election day...
It's quite amazing the hysterical reaction people have to clones when natural clones - also known under the technical term "same-egg twins" - are neither freaky nor the harbingers of a brave new world.
Anyone who is against cloning has to come up with better arguments than "it's unnatural".
Personally, I feel the discussion about cloning is largely provoked by people with political agendas, as are many divisive arguments around the world. People who have true feelings about the value of human life should better try to help the victims of war and famine, man-made disasters that kill millions.
But, I guess one clone is more of a danger to our claims of moral superiority than a million dead Sudanese or Congolese.
Call me a cynic but this debate is full of shit.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
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They want to clone embryos for stem cell research. From my layman's understanding theraputic cloning is the key to any stem cell therapies.
The Evangelicals do. And if you don't speak and belive in magic like they, this fact is not something to take lightly.
For millions people a mistake that's strikingly similar to Dan Rather's that cost 1,000 Americans, and counting, their lives can be forgiven because he says he prays. That's enough for them. A request to whatever that inhabits the sky for a magic delivery, not even a request, the demand since the eventual delivery is expected. Think about what that really means. He's not sorry, he won't try to do better, he's not obligated to re-examine his mistakes, he's put in a request for magic, and that's plenty. They're letting him abdicate any responsability for a long series of colossal mistakes. And they are tens of millions strong.
Don't underestimate them. Kerry will likely lose because he doesn't put on the same pomp and circumstance and might well have a very different, more personal, experience of his faith. They've a lot of views they think we should share to save us from ourselves, not the least of which is blow jobs are evil. Which would be funny, except for their commitment to making a world without bjs a reality. Many of their stated goals reduce to, "Get rid of the joy in life" and people are commiting felonies to make it happen. That is bat-shit insane!!!
Hence the folly of having a government run by Christians, in a country founded (and somewhat populated) by puritans.
The Puritans were Christians. They wanted to "purify" the Anglican Church.
America is so great, let them all live, and torture them their whole lives to the great profit of the already filthy rich.
Maybe I should go into this line of research, drive a van around late at night, kidnapping babies from good christian homes to steal away to underground univeristy laboratories, we could implant the 666 chip into the parents while they're asleep. It's a tough job but someone has to drag the USA into the next century, even if it's kicking and screaming
It's quite astounding the hysterical reaction readers have to duplicates when natural duplicates - also known under the technical term "editor blunders" - are neither freaky nor the harbingers of a new useful information.
Anyone who is against duplicates has to come up with better arguments than "it's unnatural".
Personally, I feel the discussion about Slashdot duplicates is largely provoked by posters with distro agendas, as are many divisive arguments around the Internet. People who have true feelings about the value of IT should better try to help the victims of Microsoft and Apple, man-made disasters that afflict millions.
But, I guess one duplicate is more of a danger to our claims of intellectual superiority than a million brain dead Windows or Apple users.
Call me a zealot but this debate is full of shit.
he wants your girlfriend back.
The Puritans were Christians. They wanted to "purify" the Anglican Church.
The distinction was intentional.... Many modern Christians seem to act like anything but.
Remember, the goal of this is not to clone entire humans (although, someday, who knows what will happen) but instead to perfect genetic engineering.
People will likely look back one day on the movie Gattaca as amazingly prophetic. For those unfamiliar with the film, it did an amazing job portraying what society may be like when genetic engineering becomes perfected. Coming, sooner than many think, are the days when we can engineer the child of two parents; not to be a perfect child, but instead to be the "best" of those parents. The child is more intelligent, stronger, etc. than the average child produced by those parents would be, and will have a much lower likelihood of diseases and other problems. This will be a fantastic thing, but those children born the old-fashioned way are likely going to be disadvantaged. Because we'll be able to weed them out just by plucking a hair and checking their DNA.
Should we forbid someone from taking a certain job based on their genetic makeup? And how long can we breed the "best" children before the best become so far ahead of the worst, that the worst no longer have any "value" to society at all? Those will be the real ethical dilemmas. The so-called ethical dilemmas we're faced with today are just temporary hurdles created by people who are frightened of progress and/or don't understand what the goals are.
AND those societies can reap the 'rewards'. We are not being passed by in science or technology... nearly all of the same techniques used to derive benefits from such experimentation will be practiced, regardless of policy. They will do so using approved areas of study... confirming technique so that future studies will be more efficient.
Give it time... give it wisdom... allow the people, the world, the scientific community to mature and understand what is at stake. Reasonable policy will follow revelation from science.. do not doubt it. However... brash action based on 2-3 year old research can not be given free reign just because it is exciting.
World-wide health problems have and will be major issues today, yesterday and tomorrow... we can't solve them all at once... give it time. Yes some people will suffer needlessly perhaps but it is chance pure chance that there is even a remote possibility for any sort of cure or treatment today. Policy is not made on chance... and it's not reasonable to do so.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
you might as well chastise Intel every time they bring out a more powerful CPU. I mean I've seen terminator and consider myself an expert, it'll all end in man's subservience to our new electronic overlords. Also I'd like to take this opportunity to express my disgust at these new spinning jennys which will cost us all our jobs.
No what else the Nazi's were good at? Propaganda.
Do you actually have a grasp on the subject? They're not cloning humans to create a new master-race of perfect beings (it'd be far cheaper just to educate the ones we do have - but I digress). They wish to create stem cells - that's all. Just cells. You then completely muddy the water with your final point, either deliberately, or because you couldn't be bothered reading/understanding the original article - THEY'RE NOT TRYING TO CREATE CLONED PEOPLE (you got that now?) Secondly, just because something fails doesn't mean we should stop trying. Are you under the impression that all the great advances in the history of mankind just sortof worked first time? NASA just decided to shoot Neil into space on a whim one day and it came off?
Is it, since when did an embryo become a baby?
Most places it's 24 weeks, before that, it's a womens period (menstrual cycles), with the same rights, and in most cases the same viability, without serious medical intervention, and even with that, a low chance of anything resembling a normal worthwhile life.
Before you go moving the 24 week target, have a look at what happens if you go too early, you become the Catholic Church, and then every sperm IS sacred.
I guess what you have to ask yourself, is this.
If doing research on 200 stem cell clones resulted in the cure to aids, which would cure 20 million, would the research be worth it?
Most people would say yes.
If doing research on 200 stem cell clones resulted in the cure to aids, which would cure 2 million, would the research be worth it?
Again, yes.
It's when we get down to
If doing research on 200 stem cell clones resulted in the cure to a disease, which would cure 201 people, would the research be worth it?
Then it's a more difficult question.
In my view, it's still a yes.
However, I'd also want some research done into pain, reaction and the like, of the stem cells, to indeed see if there was any capacity for suffering or any suffering going on.
Other than that, they are just organic matter, same as a menstrual cycles, or sperm, livers, kidneys and hearts.
I'm still amazed that the people arguing against this aren't arguing against heart/liver/kidney transplants as being traumatic to hearts/livers/kidneys.
Just curious, how can you compare clones to same-egg twins, and then be surprised that people object to wholesale killing of them? Or are you somehow arguing that same-egg twins have no right to live?
If you mean that abortion is acceptable, that's a fair enough point, but you can hardly be surprised that some people will disagree. Like it or not many people see this kind of research as mass produced abortion.
So, it's "between a woman and her doctor" if she wants to kill her child and the government shouldn't get involved, but it's perfectly fine to legislate the source of a child that she wants to give birth to?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Hmmm, would the clone then be a native born citizen capable of running for president? Interesting indeed...
forgive me for being dense - but I'm guessing the two was intentional (i.e. two people, not people too)
I hear jesus 2.0 is gonna fix alot of the problems, instead of dying for our sins again he's gonna tell us all to stfu and stop sinning.
He's gonna be a martian though, so again the jews will get all pissy and throw stones.
some people have absofuckinglutely no sense of humor. It's meant to be a joke....laugh, it keeps you young.
Mod me down, and I'll pray to my merciless God to make you age faster.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Ummm, well now we could try *cloning* him...
I'll tell you what happens!
We will engineer super intelligent beings that have giant heads and perfect vision in all light spectrums. The human race will eventually evolve (die out) into this new race only to find out that genetic mutations will kill off their existence! So they develop means to travel back in time and kidnap goatse.cx guy so they can anal probe him!
The reasoning for the anal probe is obvious: It's so the future big-headed, grey-skinned, lanky humans can figure out how not to die. Don't feel sorry for goatse.cx guy either, not only has he secured the existence of the future human race; he became famous from his after-probing disorder.
It's so obvious
pfft
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
Ethics removed, human cloning does more good than bad, IMHO.
Since the religious people began opposing science as it over turned their superstitions and required them to actually examine the nature of their faith only to find out it was a weak substitute for habbit.
To be fair, originally it was the scientists who started it all by opposing the church.
"What do you mean, round? Have you been smoking your tea again, Galilea?"
All interpreted languages are abstractions over Lisp
Would the world really be better of if we stopped progressing,stopped inventing? Just because these new inventions can be abused by nasty-bad evil people, should we stop advancing?
Maybe we should have stopped when we "invented" fire way back when, because it can be used for detructive purposes, but seriously, what kind of life and society would we have today if we had?
Lets try to learn a lessons from the dark middleages and maybe not fear knowledge, science and progress so much.
I thought that science had left the yoke of religious dogma back in the 16th century..it amazes me that basic scientific medical progress is still being controlled by religous dogma that assumes that scientists are trying to make copies of people. What scientists are really trying to do is understand how stem cells function so as to develop knowledge of how to treat all the current medical afflictions we all suffer from. It would be great if you could repair or grow back a limb or repair/replace a failing organ. Who knows, with the basic information derived from the research into stem cells and with future biotech/nanotech tools, we could eventually learn how to custom-manufacture stem cells from scratch and use nanotech to repair and replace any body part or organ that is damaged or diseased. Our current medical technology will seem very crude with all these breakthroughs comming, but this progress will be delayed by all the Bushes in the world today. Stem cells used in research are a small cluster of cells that have not yet formed into anything, that's why they are usefull, because they can become any type of cell with the proper coaxing. Just like a small pile of bricks cannot become a house, a small collection of cells is not a baby. Now-a-days, the US is not the only country working on stem cells, lots of other countries are taking up the slack in this field very quickly.
Dawkins hinted at a way to increase average life-span... (and doing population control) is by progressively increasing `allowed' reproductive age.
ie: don't let anyone under 30 have any kids . Then after a few generations, raise that by some number of years. You slowly but surely can get to people living for a few hundred years without any major health problems. (while at the same time without overpopulating the earth). Although I'd imagine it would never happen in the real world...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
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Good arguments you have. Oh sorry, there weren't any.
The facts were biased against them then, too.
the real difference between one human and the next nowadays is intellectual
i mean look at stephen hawking: he can't run, who knows how healthy his immune system is, but he's still an extremely valuable member of society
and people know this
and clearly, some people are gifted intellectually, and some are not
but when you go into intelligence and try to quantify it, there's not much we can quantify and measure about "intelligence" as it is: it's an intangible
sure there are iq tests, but this is useless: so somebody has better spatial memory: big fucking deal. when is the last time a good understanding of topology helped you land a job? (maybe slashdot is a bad forum to ask a question like this, but you get my drift)
most skillsets of intelligence that determine intellectual value and usefulness and economic success are social skillsets, which is largely behaviorial and nurture, not nature
there are plenty of asocial, poorly paid high iq people
and there are plenty of stinking rich hard working socially gifted individuals who contribute major ideas to society and profit from them... and don't even know the very basics of calculus
so sure, some people may try to breed a perfect human, but then you will wind up with nothing but future world wrestling federation members... too much of what really makes a human worthy to society and useful are intangibles, and most people are perfectly aware of this: you don't give the average joe enough credit
now i'm not saying that we might be able to quantify these intangibles of intelligence some day in the future, and connect them to genes
but i am saying: nurture is still a huge factor
your average person has a much better bullshit meter than you give them credit for
and also, come on, look at how people freak out about genetically modified foods, which your average slashdotter knows is perfectly harmless: people just don't trust genetic tinkering with genes on a fundamental level- they may not know what dominant and recessive is, but they have an instinctual taboo about fucking with basic genetics, like an instinct against incest... look at mary shelly's frankenstein story: fucking with our basic makeup is something even the uneducated villagers in that story distrusted and fought... an instinct bad for the future and promise of genetic food, but an instinct that will serve people very well about distrust of genetically modified people
so don't believe the hype, we are dealing with too many intangibles about what really matters to talk about this kind of sci fi, that doesn't even take into account basic human nature's attitude towards the science of messing with human genes
give people some more credit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Your argument is a non sequiter.
and surely the machines will then form an alliance with the super-humans to enable us to fight off the invasion of the acid-blooded aliens. Sometimes I just don't think things through properly.
It's because our current technology can't ensure that the artificially cloned human will be healthy. Would you want to be the scientist responsible for bringing a defective (excuse the term) human being into the world? If that person had to spend their life with terrible illnesses, premature death, or some bizarre mutation? Once our cloning technology has progressed to the point where we will be confident the cloned person will be perfectly unharmed by the procedure, then maybe there will be a case for human reproductive cloning. Until then, it should only be used for creating stem cells, or perhaps even organs or body parts. It would be unconscionable to actually allow a human clone to progress to the point of viability in the near future.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
ENOUGH WITH KARMA WHORING COCK!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Reason: Don't use so many Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.caReason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.ps. It's like YELLING.
Ok, what happens when Microsoft starts to clone there loyal MCSE followers, you know the ones on Slashdot that always explain to us Linux geeks that Linux needs to be rebooted everytime it's patched just like Windows.... or the ones who defend MS even when another 10 security vulnerabilities are released....
Soon microsoft will be jumping on board and sponsoring these projects, it'll be the ONLY way they can keep Bugsoft on the shelves...
Be afraid be VERY afraid.......
-=Linsys=-
http://www.intrusionsec.com
I think cloning like anything else is all in how we use it. If it became cheap and easy, would we see armies etc like this? Yes we probably would. However once we get past a fear of manipulating flesh, it would probably usher in an age where the physical body is nothing more than a malleable shell for consciousness. I wouldn't think of it as something to be feared and hated and stomped out. More just as a transition period. We've had them before, they're rough, but in the end this would be something amazing for everyone. I doubt that with increased genetic sciences we'd ever have a problem of a stagnant gene base. Do you really think that the generation which would weild the technology would create nothing but conformist bodies? I think the genetic base of humanity would spiral into new and undreampt of depths due to our creativity. Just think of what your average art freak or goth kid would do to their physical form if given even half a chance. That's not to say that there wouldn't be an army of barbie so to speak, but just that not everyone would choose to take an off the shelf model.
Like it or not many people see this kind of research as mass produced abortion.
And I think these people are fucking morons. They have the right to speak, but not the right to be heard. Hopefully those of us who aren't idiots steeped in religious claptrap will be the ones to decide the issue.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Insightful?
Informative might be a stretch, but I can take it.
But insightful that the mods do not have a sense of humour?
Nothing is funnier than someone cursing the mods to an early death by praying to God in an article on stem-cell research to prolong life.
Hmmm, I'm at a loss for words.
Amazing. Just amazing.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Human cloning is simply sick and wrong. There are lines not to cross in the search for knowledge, and this is one of them.
And if the majority of us decide that you're sadly mistaken and we aren't going to pay attention to what you think about the matter? What're you going to do about it?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
now I understand your point a bit more. The very idea a small ball of a few cells should even be considered human had honestly not even entered my head. Being an average European I'm always slightly bewildered by this debate seeing as we don't have it.
The human copy-constructor.. Neat!
Seriously, the only reasons against cloning are based in religion, so I guess the first order of business would be to rid ourselves of all such manner of superstitions.
And it would be about time too!
One of the things that worry me most about cloning humans is, considering the corporate situation, it is very likely that companies will be able to PATENT human beings. This is the US patent office we're talking about it. If you asked for a patent for the wheel or blowing your nose, they'd probably give it to you if you can dress it up in enough technical sounding language. The ensuing haboo would be "Not their problem because insteading of actually doing our jobs we'll just accept all of them and let the courts sort it out".
One reason that I distrust this sort of thing... I just don't trust people. Dictatorship is bad because it is a centralization of power. Look at Maoism, Communism or Fascism. Their most prominent unifying characteristic is centralization of power and the denial of individual rights.
There have been a lot of people who tried to acheive utopia by allowing one type of centralization of power or another, but eventually each of these power structures became corrupt.
Those sciences which have helped to displace orthodoxy and free individuals have been helpful. But even somthing as simple as controling the birth gender of children will help to hardwire cultural assumptions about gender relations (since most couples want a boy first and a girl second, and birthorder influences psychology)
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
1st things 1st, they need to genetically modify women so that they don't have any teeth and come with a handle-bar on the top of their head.
De Bono advocates the use of the Red Thinking Hat. This is where you stop thinking logically for a moment and stop being cool and sophisticated and say how you really feel: "This freaks me out". Or somehting like: "If I had an abortion I wouldn't mind them using the cells but I get a really unpleasant feeling in my chest at the idea of some part of what might have been my baby, living on, growing on..."
Yes, it's illogical, but that's hardly the point. Ask any mathematician if logic can provide all the answers. Well as a maths student (undergrad 2nd year) I'm well informed that it can't.
Even the most utilitarian morality cannot be formulated on logical principles because it requires judgements to be made to put a level on suffering or utility, and this is subjective.
There's very little to be learnt from making bad copies of people, and if I had money to invest in humanity, I'd give it to some other scientist. In philosophy of science we learnt about how it's impossible to tell the difference between an accurate theory and an "empirically adequate" one. Well, scientists keep pushing the envelope and it's not necessarily always the best idea. If science is supposed to be for the benefit of humanity then why do we push it so far we keep losing humanity?
Tests like the LD50 are sadly well out of date, yet we keep pumping animals full of drugs to see how much it takes to make them die.
And now this lot wants to make bad copies of people when they were just embryos to learn what they're made of. So that people like superman can walk again.
You know, I have this dilemma every time I take a drug. I think of all the rats and mice that died so I could take the drug. Then I think of the monkeys that died so I could take the drug. And I think of how they suffered before they died. Then I think "well, they're doing the best they know how and later I'll do my best to find better solutions." Although humanity suffers from this kind of research, it also gains years. A net gain for humanity, and a who knows what for the world. Maybe some kind of break-even.
If I meet a clone I have to be friendly -- clones are people too, poor copies though they be. Clones aren't monsters any more than frankenstein's monster was a monster. If you read the book, he was a vegetarian and just wanted to find a way to be happy. A nice guy who wouldn't hurt a cow.
But there's an obvious line here (do we clone people or not?) and I don't know where the next obvious line is at all (cloning up to a certain age, for example is not a line. It's a fuzzy blob that will be moved). A lot of people have a lot of emotion tied up in this, and you can't deny it, argue though you may.
Enlightenment values can bring us to a certain stage and then we have to decide what we value about our humanity and how we are going to behave. And for me... I'm not convinced that human cloning has any benefits that can't be found from a concentrated effort elsewhere. I don't like the idea of starting down that road. And it gives me the creeps.
Thanks for your patience.
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
"Every sperm is sacred" You know, it used to be Catholic dogma that the life began at quickening, hence the name. For me that would be about 12 weeks. They're moving around in there, thinking, listening... Just think about that, and see where it leads you.
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
and that too in thousnands...
Good luck.
Human cloning is simply sick and wrong.
Why is it sick and wrong? Do you even know what is involved? Get the facts first before you just say something is wrong! We're talking about something that happens naturally in the case of identical twins, why is it sick when it's done in a lab? Next time, before you form an opinion about something you know nothing about, try and find out more about it so you can contribute constructively to the debate.
Check out that link, Bush is sharing his "wise" perception with us:0 010809-2.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/08/2
"I also believe human life is a sacred gift from our Creator. I worry about a culture that devalues life, and believe as your President I have an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world. And while we're all hopeful about the potential of this research, no one can be certain that the science will live up to the hope it has generated."
Removed From Article but posted here for SlashDot readers ONLY
: "Unless that life resides in Iraq or another country inside the Axsis of Evil, because MY God said those people don't matter, nor do their children or elderly. "
I love how the people who are the most loyal to "God" are also the ones who create the most pain in this world, actually their loyality has nothing to do with God and everything to do with their "religion" and let me tell you there is a major difference between being loyal to God and to a religion...
-=Linsys=-
http://www.intrusionsec.com
In my opinion, cloning embryos is a trivialization of the creation of human life. And I see that a lack of value for human life has preceded many historic tragedies. That is, lives and their loss are being made to represent something other than and in precedence to its value as people: in war, life and its loss is made a military tool to an end; in genocide, it is abstracted as some negative impact or social obstacle that needs overcoming. Okay, so the comparisons aren't perfect because they deal with life rather than the creation of life. But what I fear is that they all constitute the use of life and the destruction of it for a secondary purpose. And it's a crucial similarity - you can't maximize for two variables, so to speak. When life is used effectively (in a way that involves its destruction) for another end, ethics and the gain compete in importance. In the case of Harvard, corporately-funded research will choose its pragmatic interests (gain and profit) over ethical concerns anytime, and so we shouldn't mix ethical dilemmas with the free market if we expect to have a well-considered outcome.
(To avoid 5, Funny posts: Yes, it's extraordinarily naive to say that conception is considered sacred. It's certainly not. But it's never been commercialized before (as opposed to what, er, precedes it, which obviously has been commercialized - i.e. pr0n.))
This isn't the same argument as the one over abortion, which is the termination of a life (whose status is disputed) for personal reasons. And IVF uses embryos to create life. What we should fear are industries made out of the use of the creation of human life as a tool to another end. Stem cells may not have any profitable purpose yet, but as soon as they do, and if we depend on cloning embryos to create our stem cells, there will be NO turning back. This is an argument to have now. Does this trivialize the creation of life? And does a trivialization of the creation of life lessen the value we place in life in general? What are the consequences of that? Think about the ultimate point to which the decision here leads, not just its immediate results.
Don't poke them with a stick, they're libel to get a gun and put up a website that crosses out the images of Harvard researchers that get murdered.
Pander to them like promise to take up the issue, challenge it in court, run it around for a few years, and then kill it off. Oops we tried, and now things are so far along, well, what's the point, genie out of the bottle, then add another QVC channel.
One side of it is that yes, they are natural. But the argument is not about simply splitting the single fertilized ovum and creating two people out of one, each to be given the full rights of personhood. That's a red herring. The argument is about splitting the cell (or splitting two cells apart) and using one or both halves for experimentation.
See above. Human life is not ours with which to experiment. That is one stone in civilization's foundation, that we agree with our fellow man to respect his life if he respects ours and those of others.
It's not a political agenda, it's informed revulsion. Yes, there is evil in the world. Do you use the presence of one wrong thing to justify additional, unrelated wrong things? Two wrongs don't right one another.
"There's lots of death in the world" is no justification for more killing. If you want to argue that it's not killing, then that's one thing, but you equated these lives with those snuffed out by genocide:
Uh, are we killing millions of Africans? We can't stop people in other nations from killing one another. We can't even stop people from killing one another in our own country.
But we don't make it legal.
Argue that X kills, and we can go off on that tangent about just and unjust X, who gets to decide the fate of its innocent victims and its "deserving" ones. Whatever X you pick, it still doesn't justify experimenting with human life.
Shifting the argument to researching theoretically curable diseases means you want to roll the dice and see what happens. You're betting with chips that aren't yours on odds you can't know.
You may be cynical, but that's not so bad. A cynic merely distrusts motives, which is usually wise in small doses.
But I think you distrust your own.
sigs, as if you care.
Science isn't based on morality, it's our actions with our knowledge of the science that causes morality to come into play. The universe is structured exactly the way it is, there's no mysterious evil force behind certain aspects of science that make some more evil than others. Every scientific achievement can be used for benevolence or malevolence. It's up to the scientist doing the research how to proceed, and the people funding the scientist based on their own morality.
Sure, there's the potential for really fucked up shit to happen with cloning. We could start cloning super-humans and use them as slave labor, then everybody could live happily. We could also breed super-humans and get them to have the superior life style, or we could use this technology to find a way to clone stem cells and save a few million lives.
Learn something new.
Okay, see another post on this topic.
sigs, as if you care.
Rgarding stem cell research people should really wake up about the language keen researchers are using. Considering an instance of human life to be "superfluous" is very dangerous and reminds me (being German and thus carrying special responsibility in this matter) of the Nazi's language, who declared handicapped people and Jews "unworthy" life in order to create a pretext to extinguish them. It is wrong to re-define what a human is in order to be able to destroy it. I don't want to equate stem cell research with the darkest chapter of German history here, but as a linguist the striking similarity of the euphemisms used in both cases in the media is just appaling to me, just check for yourself.
The problem, of course, is ABSTRACTION: lay people who read these papers only hear "blabla ... cure illness ... blabla stem cell ... blabla... " and get to think "oh, sounds useful" rather than trying to imagine that a little embryo could basically have been _them_, just at a very early age! You don't want to BE that embryo that isn't needed by researchers and gets 'discarded'.
Moving on from ethics (what you should do) to a more scientific note (what you can do, instead), there seem to be alternative proposals around that are equally promosing as stem cell research, but do not require that embyos get created that are not raised:
Dr Charli Kruse and his team at the Institute for Medical Molecular Biology at the University of Lübeck has been successful in developing a new process which has enabled him to isolate cells from various animal and human tissues which have the properties of pluripotent adult stem cells. (just Google for the guy to get more info)
AFAIK, they have even patented their method by now.
So, please, dear researchers in Harvard, reconsider!
[Greetings from Edinburgh, where Dolly was cloned, and where _sadly_ stem cell research is not illegal at the moment.]
What will I do? I'll keep talking. Get used to it.
The majority is not always right. In fact, the tyranny of the majority is one thing we should be consider when talking about experiments such as this. What happens when the majority decide that you are needed in some experiment?
"Sorry pal, we need your kidneys. Carry this filter -- you'll be fine."
sigs, as if you care.
Here's the URL of the research group: http://www.molbio.mu-luebeck.de/research.htm
First, let me start saying I believe life begins at the moment of conception, so i don't take *embryonic* stem cell research lightly. What bothers me is that people talk as if there's only one way to produce stem cells, through embryos that develop from eggs that have been fertilized in vitro.
Why other ways of producing stem cells are not beeing actively pursued, researched and advocated?
For instance, there is other kind of stem cells: adult stem cells. These are "found among differentiated cells in a tissue or organ" Of course adult stem cells are rare and embryonic stem cells are a lot easier to grow in culture than adult stem cells since "methods for expanding their numbers in cell culture have not yet been worked out", but both have advantages and disadvantages worth considering.
Harvard is clearly trying to identify the '1600' gene to create an army of superundergrads.
Both are humans, I think that's what we agree on (as it doesn't depend on time). Now the question is: do we grant every human the right to life?
Before you go moving the 24 week target, have a look at what happens if you go too early, you become the Catholic Church, and then every sperm IS sacred.
No, because sperm cells and eggs are not human beings. They are simply cells. Things change dramatically once you bring them together. From that moment, a NEW human life starts. Diploid chomosome set, new set of genes due to potential chross-overs/mutations, and if you don't work against it (and modulo naturally ocurring deaths) it will get born and surf the Web, read slashdot and stuff. Union of egg and sperm is everybody's canonical $t_0$, so to speak.
If doing research on 200 stem cell clones resulted in the cure to aids, which would cure 20 million, would the research be worth it?
That's a very important argument, however, this type of argument has been studied in philosophy extensively under the name of Utilitarianism: do just what maximises good to most people. The drawback of such a philosophy is that it lends itself to sacrificing minorities for the benefit of the rest. So I argue that human rights must never become object of a utilitarian argument.
I'd also want some research done into pain, reaction and the like, of the stem cells, to indeed see if there was any capacity for suffering or any suffering going on.
I think the stem cells themselves are not problematic (as they don't contain all the elements of a human being anymore). So they aren't humans. However the process of getting there is unethical. It's the killing of spurious embryos that is the problem.
Other than that, they are just organic matter, same as a menstrual cycles, or sperm, livers, kidneys and hearts.
Yes, just organic matter.
I'm still amazed that the people arguing against this aren't arguing against heart/liver/kidney transplants as being traumatic to hearts/livers/kidneys.
Yeah, that is pseudo-science, so no comment.
All of your arguments are based on the false premise that an embryo is a human being, which invalidates all of your ill-informed irrational ranting.
>false premise that an embryo is a human being
I guess we just disagree.
People say that life begins at birth, or life begins at conception. I think they're both wrong.
Life continues *through* conception.
A sperm cell can either be alive or dead. An egg can either be alive or dead. They come together before they die, and the new entity is still alive. The cell splits, and on it goes.
Where do you draw the line? I draw it at conception. You draw it at birth, I assume.
Ok.
I think it's illogical to say that an embryo, or an older fetus, or a premature baby is, or is not, a human being based on its location.
sigs, as if you care.
Clay shows properties that can be summed up as being alive. Should we revere clay, stop eating it or something the like?
I have a daughter, her stem-cells are crio-frozen. If at one time they're flushed through the toilet (god forbid), will that constitute murder?
I've read the problem is we abstract things and lose sight of the ethics. I think the problem is the reverse. Moral idiots claim 35 cells possess a soul and state doing something useful is against gods wishes.
Show me your hotline to God.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I heard a "think of the children" woman on a radio discussion programme warning against the dangers of cloning technology because "what if Osama Bin Laden got hold of it"?
There's no arguing with logic like that.
Surely you need to have the capacity to feel pain and fear before you can be tortured?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
"Mom, your endowment's bigger than Harvard's!"
"I think the award for best off-the-cuff remark goes to Lisa."
"Actually, I saw them in the hallway, and I've been working on it."
Um, of course life begins at conception. Unless you are implying that women carry around zombie babies for 9 months.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I believe they should talk to people about the issues and the benefits instead of the constant name dropping of a few celebrities stem cells and cloning could *magically* heal.
Definitely. However, Christopher Reeve himself spent a lot of time "talking to people about the issues and the benefits", which is why his name is mentioned so often.
What if we make clones, and they attack? I don't think any of us want to see another Attack of the Clones.
are more closely related
If you look at how human beings are born in the (western) world, it might be that genetic engeneering might become a necesity. All effort is directed at letting babies live, even if they are unhealthy, born early etc.
After that, live. It doesn't matter if you have bad eyes, limp, have half a brain and various diseases. This society will let you reproduce anyway. If you look at the statistics here in the Netherlands, having half a brain is actually an advantage for having offspring (people with low IQ tend to have more children than those with a high IQ).
For now, that's fine. But in the (very) long run, it means that evolution as a means of selection has ended for the human race. This will also mean that (genetic) degradation of the human kind is a very big possibility. Genetic engeneering and selection *before* birth may once be a real necesity.
I know that there are quite some rather scary thoughts displayed above. But if you look at it rationally, then what's wrong with the above? If you think you know, please reply to this. Note that this is just a brain-wave and may not represent my personal view on the matter.
"Every sperm is sacred..." Monty Python song.
I love how the people who are the most loyal to "God" are also the ones who create the most pain in this world, actually their loyality has nothing to do with God and everything to do with their "religion" and let me tell you there is a major difference between being loyal to God and to a religion...
That's the passe, popular, pop culture opinion, yes. How rebellious and daring of you to restate it.
So, you think nothing should be done when we are attacked. Because of your deep faith (which comes through so clearly in your comment) and turning the other cheek, of course.
And you think that the weakest, most vulnerable humans should not be protected, apparently.
Well, people take up more space than just where they live. There's all the land you need to feed them, for one. With current technology, you'd need about four or five Earths to let the current six billion people all live like Americans.
Now, I do want long long life. But I see no reason to restrict our population to just the surface of the Earth...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I would agree that perhaps a majority of people eventually cite divine law as authority for their position, but I would argue that often said divine law also has a logical moral background behind it similar to Kantianism where it is found that the law makes sense from the perspective that it is necessary for a functioning society and that one is never exploiting humanity as a means for gain. In the end, quoting scripture is little different from quoting legal code, simply a shorthand to show that others have carefully considered the issue and that you understand at least enough of their reasoning to follow it.
Personally, I oppose human cloning on the level of religion such as the sanctity of life and the creation of souled beings to study then destroy them. I also oppose it on the level that its practice demeans the value of human life, saying that in some instances, it's Ok to take a human life to further scientific progress. (And believe me, it would be so tempting to quote examples that would invoke Godwin's law here...) It's a slippery slope and I would prefer to fight the good cause now rather than leaving it to my children to deal with it when human eugenics might be more pervasive.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
...and unfortunately they're about to elect George W. for a second term. :-(
Do you have a moral objection to the contraceptive pill or coil birth control methods? What about the "morning after" pill? All of these methods effectivly stop a fertilised egg from implanting itself in the womb, eventually causing it to be discarded during the normal menstrual cycle.
With all respect, I think you missed his point. (I used italics because I'm speculating, too.)
He's poking fun at the now-blurry line between church and state in this (U.S.A.) country.
Too, he seems to understand just how intolerant the thumpers can be. "Dang it, the earth is flat. Go make a confession 'else I'll burn you at the stake."
Abortion is legalised because the negative impact from an absolute ban on women who inadvertently become pregnant outweighs the negative impact to the undeveloped human.
I don't see any such equivalent person who's rights could possibly override the rights of these manufactured embryos. Who is being victimized by not allowing them to be treated in this way?
You may claim medical and research benefits, but nobody has the right to deny someone else life for such flimsy reasons.
On what basis can you say that it's not immoral to manufacture humans for the purpose of harvesting them? The only argument I can see that could possibly be legitimate is that "they are not human", which the grandparent post had ruled out by equating them with regular twins. Hence my question.
The only other alternative, which I don't really consider legitimate is "I don't care that they are human", though maybe that's ok your hammer carrying God in your signature.
As for religious claptrap, I'm an atheist.
(These considerations are void if you're talking about a pair of clones, raised in the same way, as opposed to my assumption of a clone created from an already-living person.)
He's called "RealProgrammer." He probably still thinks that FORTRAN-77 is a Good Thing. :-) He is scared to "cross the line."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Human sperm is a haploid cell line gotten by meiosis with our own body tissue. I fail to see how that is a unique human being. In fact logically it only has the potential to become half of one. Once fertilized and implanted I think we have a responsibility to protect the interests of the individual. Especially when artificial wombs are on the horizon and they have succesfully implanted goat zygotes that had already begun growing in them and brought them to term. The more I know about embryology and human life sciences in general the more pro-life I am. I firmly believe that all human rights should be based on expanding the definition of human past what society is prejudiced against. I cannot see anything more worthy than unique human individuals who have had their growth stopped and their decisions made for them. A baby cannot make decisions about it's future either is it all right to use it for research if we remove it's brain before it is born like a late-term abortion?
History will judge us.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
This is ridiculous. Such a new jerk reaction.
You need cloned stem cells for the whole stem cell 'curing disease' thing to work. Let's say I have a bad heart, and some doctor / scientist types take some stems cells and grow me a new heart. Chances are that my body will reject said heart because it has a different repertoire of antibodies. However, if I had a line of stem cells specificially cloned from genetic makeup. They could grow a new heart for me, which look to the body just like the old heart.
To everyone who feels like freaking out and telling me off, let me save you all some time and lay out my actual positions on this stuff, so you don't waste time calling me a religious maniac or whatnot:
1. Stem cell research: good.
2. Cultivating stem cells acquired from IVF sources: good.
3. As I've heard suggested in the media, cultivating stem cells acquired from aborted embryos, fetuses, whatever: good. DISCLAIMER: DO NOT PANIC. I AM NOT ACCUSING ANYONE OF DOING THIS. IT IS JUST HYPOTHETICAL FOR CHRIST'S SAKE. Sheesh, People around here are too high strung.
4. Cloning stem cells: good.
5. Cloning entire embryos: touchy ground. I think it's different from using already cast-off tissue that would have died anyway. And, the phrase "cloning embryos" is too damn unspecific anyway. Are you talking about actual cloning, or just culturing cells? If cloning, I think it's a bad idea. Which is what this whole stupid argument thread is about.
I see an embryo, and of course a fetus, as an entire unit, a potential person. Therefore, if that potential person is already dead, as with castoff IVF material, or the clinic idea I've heard mentioned in the media, I don't see any harm in it. On the other hand, if you've just created a viable embryo just to disassemble it for the stem cells, that seems kind of ugly. And I do think it would be only a few steps from some much more serious nastiness down the road. I don't trust scientists as far as I can throw them, sorry. I've read too much about what they've done in the past. Like the guy who invented the lobotomy and then proceeded to inflict it on thousands of patients because he thought he was "helping" them.
6. I am not particularly religious, I have no desire to outlaw abortion, IVF, or any other such thing, I'm not an ignorant, evil redneck, and this is all just my opinion anyway.
Slashdot, people, is an OPINION SITE. Not necessarily the news.
Now, THIS is my WHOLE opinion on the subject, everybody relax.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
No, because sperm cells and eggs are not human beings. They are simply cells. Things change dramatically once you bring them together. From that moment, a NEW human life starts. Diploid chomosome set, new set of genes due to potential chross-overs/mutations, and if you don't work against it (and modulo naturally ocurring deaths) it will get born and surf the Web, read slashdot and stuff.
Embyros are simply cells too. If we're allowed to consider what will happen, then we can say what will happen to sperm and ova if you don't work against it - should contraception be considered murder?
It's not clear that having a new set of genes is an important difference. If someone gave birth to a clone (either by technology, or in some hypothetical universe where such a thing was possible), I don't think we would say that the clone child wasn't a new life - we would still say that a new person had appeared somewhere along the way. Also, IIRC sperm and ova do not have the same set of genes as the rest of my cells (they only have half of them, or something like that).
Mods you are really on crack. I'm not Christian, but this parent post is not funny at all. It's a pretty blantant flamebait. Designed to be mocking and offensive. Come ON!
Wow it isn't like the ethical concerns of stem cell research or cloning individually are tough enough. Harvard researchers are combinign the ethical difficulties. Who knows? Maybe if they can come up with a good process to clone stem cells it can shut both ethics debates down. They can just grow all the stem cells they want negating the need for medical cloning or the need for getting embryos involved.
You should spend an hour caring for a person with a spinal cord injury. Better, why do you not move in with such a person and live with them for a week or so. How many of you will handle it?
I am not taking this out of my ass; I have actually been around people who cannot move and have no hope of improvement because of their conditions. My best friend has a mild-form of CP; the guy has been suffering all his life because his fucking legs are crooked and there is nothing he can do about it! Do me a favor, look into his eyes and then tell him that you are against stem cell research. Tell him that it sucks to be him because he was born different. Then visit a nursing home and try to take care of patients with Alzheimer's....
I still do not realize why this issue is an issue for our presidential candidates... This is a no brainer that should not be discussed in a country where religion is separate from the state. Then again, just like Kerry I am a liberal guy from Massachusetts :)
the intent of the research is to clone human embryos in order to extract the stem cells from them.
This isn't about 'brave new world' or 'dr. mengeles,' it's about stem cell research.
''This is exactly the kind of work that we envisioned for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute," said Harvard biologist Douglas Melton, the senior researcher on one of the teams. ''We want new ways to study and hopefully cure diseases."
boston globe 13 oct article by Garth Cook, "Harvard Teams Want OK to Clone"
jeez
It's quite amazing the hysterical reaction people have to clones when natural clones - also known under the technical term "same-egg twins" - are neither freaky nor the harbingers of a brave new world.
The difference isn't the twin/clone as a result of an event per-se, but rather the manufacturing process of cloning humans. i.e. Taking the gift of life and essentially making a Henry Ford assembly line like process out of it.
Sexual reproduction as a method of survival (considering evolution) has in my opinion become obsolete. Weak individuals are allowed to survice and by helping them we are seriously hindering evolution and making things worse. So I disagree, technology is definitely needed to help evolution since we are currently hindering the natural process.
To be perfectly selfless some people should also consider NOT TO REPRODUCE or atleast not to reproduce naturally in order to strengten the next generation. Some carry dangerous genes that might lead to extinction of human race if allowed to pass over to the next generation.
I believe science can help. You might consider it next level of evolution.
Professor Melton, the person asking Harvard's permission to make embryonic stem cells, is not trying to clone humans. His research is focused on curing juvenile diabetes.
Previous research in his lab has demonstrated conclusively that there are no adult (by which I mean post-embryonic) stem cells in the pancreas which can be used to make replacement beta cells (the cells in the pancreas which produce insulin). Therefore the notion of using the approved stem cell lines to cure juvenile diabetes is a non-starter. During a talk during this year's Whitehead Symposium Melton suggested the Bush administration's policy on stem cell research would have him work using stem cells that do not exist.
Because Melton is a HHMI Investigator, he is able to do some embryonic stem cell research using entirely private funds in a lab separate from Harvard, if I remember correctly. I assume that this recent request is an attempt to expand this existing research.
Lest anyone question Melton's motives in this research, he has at least one child with juvenile diabetes, which is the reason he switched his lab's focus from straight embyonic development research to finding specific cures for juvenile diabetes.
He told you to shut the hell up.
If you really look into this whole issue of cloning or stem cell research, you obviously see two arguments at work here. The technical and (I believe) moral (non-religious) one that shows the benefits of such research on saving peoples' lives and/or giving them better quality of life as apposed to the non-technical (religious) one in which some book created thousands of years ago can somehow know the future and is able to dictate the decisions in our lives for the present day.
Of course we know that this book makes no mention of stem cells or cloning embryos because it can't. However, sadly enough, certain people use this piece of material as a means to scare and manipulate others into thinking this sort of science somehow equates to the work of the "devil" or some other "fictional" evil character that punishes those who disobey (what essentially is) another man's law.
Now, this line of thinking may have seemed legitimate thousands or even hundreds of years ago where people really believed Chris Columbus and his ships would fall of the edge of the Earth, but today, in a world where we have the capability to send robots 50 million miles away and land on other planets I think it's time that we put all this imaginary, spooky stuff to bed. We're just to intelligent for this.
This is progress folks and we need to move on. At times it seems scary, but that has never stopped us before. Put it this way, when was the last time one scientist beheaded another scientist for disproving his theories? When was the last time a group of engineers at one university jailed and then publicly hanged one of their fellow engineers for spreading an "evil" belief that Linux is a sucky operating system? Think about it and then you may laugh.
Would you be happier...
What if some hobo goes through the trash cans at the back of the hospital looking for food and ends up eating the thawed embryonic stem cells?
What if the hobo shit them out and you stepped in it? Would that suit you better than saving Michael J Foxes life?
Well, it's obvious then that twins are the unholy spawn of satan. Probably witches or something. Safest to just burn them at the stake.
If you're just opposed to abortion and stem cell / cloning research, you're just not doing all you can to impose your dogma on society. And that means you're going to hell.
I believe that a fertilized egg is a human being. Generally, a human being shouldn't be harmed, whether it's 1 day old or 10 years old.
Whether that extends to refusing to feed it by letting it attach to the uterine wall or by refusing to let it make a sandwich when it's 10 I will leave as an exercise for the reader. I do see those two situations as equivalent, however.
sigs, as if you care.
It can also help people with severe neurological disabilities. I've a cousin who has not gotten out of her bed ever since she has been of 4 years of age, for the past 18 years. I would do anything to see her walk, so would her parents.
:)
:)
For that reason alone, I would like to see this work progress. Go science!
It can also help with diabetes. I've a son with juvenile diabetes. He has to live with the constant threat of death. He can live a long, normal life, but only with the constant pressure of regular testing and injections. He has to constantly combat depression and the understanding that his life will very possibly be shortened if he's not unrealistically careful, and will probably die a painful death.
For that reason alone, I would like to see this work progress. Go science!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"Bags of several dozen cells [...] aren't life" Of course they're life. There's a good chance we evolved from bags of several dozen cells. Therein lies the tricky issue - at what point in an embryo do you say it's your so called "life"? Clearly since conception the embryo is alive - it fulfills the conditions one would expect a live organism to do. It is life, just not what we might consider "concious" life...
This is a flawed analogy, at best. The cells you mentioned would never have become a human being in the first place. While human, they possessed neither the purpose nor capability to produce a new human life.
The major opposition to embrionic stem cell research, as opposed to adult stem cell research, is that the former kills a human being. Unlike other tissue types, the primary purpose of an embryo is to produce human life; destroying it prevents that life from forming in the first place. We can not rightly claim to be seeking the greater good when we intentionally kill (or "prevent") some humans in the uncertain hopes of curing others.
It is not, as our critics proclaim, that we are opposed to science; many of us believe that science will provide us with genuine material progress. But, as other countries have recognized, embrionic stem cell research is akin to killing toddlers to find a cure for juvenile diabetes. Calling something science does not make it right or noble; witness the manner in which the Nazis conducted "science" experiments on Jewish children - their aims may have been noble, but not the means. Our objection has nothing to do with stifling human knowledge and everything to do with recognizing the fundamental dignity and value of human life.
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> The majority is not always right. In fact, the tyranny of the majority is one thing we should be consider when talking about experiments such as this. What happens when the majority decide that you are needed in some experiment?
The majority is not always right, but usually it is very probable that they are right (as scientific community) and individuals are wrong (statistically). Anyway, what does this matter, mistakes are allowed and will always be made and eventually things will be learned. That's the way it works.
When majority decides that I'm needed for some experiment then they will obviously experiment with me (regardless of what I think about it). That might be justified and ok on the greater scale.
I accept that individuals sometimes need to be sacrified in order to save large number of people. I might scream in pain, but hopefully that won't be in vain.
Although I think this has nothing to do with the original topic. I neither consider embryos nor stem cells conscious in any comparable way to full grown humans.
I believe that's also the opinion of the respected science community and there no reason to think othervice. Any rational desition is anyway based on available facts and since there are no other facts available I see no reason to make any irrational desitions (such as not to proceed with the experiments).
What a WASPy little thing to say. I notice you don't say "in America". No, it's "in the world". Because everyone knows there's too many [insert non-WASP group] in the world. There's no such thing as overcrowding and almost every famine in the world is a political famine forced on the people by either their own government or by neighbouring countries.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Anyone who thought they were people probably wouldn't be working in the field.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
This is the narrow view of natural selection that gets people into trouble, in much the same way as when we introduce new species into ecosystems and then realize 10 yrs later the new species has dramatically altered the place and has not given us the results we wanted.
Genetics and natural selection are COMPLEX. No, not like long division or network configuration or even tensor calculus. The DNA in your body is being effected by not only the DNA in my body, but also the DNA in the trees outside your window, the salmon in Norway, and those bacteria that live in the clouds.
Claiming to know that some gene is more likely to lead to the extinction of the human race is beyond ridiculous. The whole point is that it's all one big interconnected system, and changes in one species ripple out to all the others, then those ripples reflect back, get stretched, squeezed, inverted, etc etc. In our small, personal perspectives, it's easy to say that asthma or diabetes are detrimental to our species. But did you know that sickle cell anemia, so prevalent in Africa, actually helps combat malaria? It is naive and arrogant to think that just because some genetic feature makes you unhappy, that necessarily makes it something we should change.
I am all for genetics, biotechnology, etc, but to take such a short sighted view of things as to think that getting rid of some diseases will overall strengthen the species is beyond me. The prospects of those technologies is incredibly exciting. At the same time, the attitudes we take when approaching the technology must be very carefully examined.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
It appears that there are alot of moral problems associated with this research. Is it that crazy to not have the federal goverment involved with funding this research?
love is just extroverted narcissism
If you are looking for an ethical or metaphysical meaning to take from this, it's that small bundles of cells just aren't important; it is much more important to make sure that babies, children and adults are healthy than to obsess over the welfare of a sub-microgram blastocyst.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
It is unnatural, and its also completely unsafe.
Everyone points to Dollie as a great example of cloning, except that she had tumors, arthritis and had the health deficiencies of a sheep twice as old. And to get to her, they had to disgard many, many embryos.
Yes, this makes perfect sense... once we believe that human life isn't important and is basically throwaway.
No, morality is superior to scientific reasoning in this case. The only use for cloned embryos (btw, these are humans) is in harvesting embryonic stem cells. Great, except that embryonic stem cells are inherently unstable and unsafe. All stem cell progress has been made with adult stem cells.
The only reason companies are so gung ho about embryonic stem cells is that embryos are (wrongfully) considered non-life... and thus can be patented. This is all about money, not scientific research.
If scientists were truly interested in making progress, they wouldn't waste limited resources on cell lines that were not working out. They would concentrate on the lines where proven progress has been made.
Your understanding of evolution is flawed. Evolution is a description of changes over generations. We are a part of the natural process. We cannot hinder natural selection. Whatever happens is natural selection.
It is not that we are weakening the genetic pool when some people survive who would not have lived in the past. Evolution is based on survival. The survival of such people reflects a basic concept of evolution. The world and its selective pressures are in flux. From an evolutionary standpoint, having the ability to do something is worthless if it does not lead to increased reproductive success. If a particular condition no longer hinders reproduction because some technological advance has overcome it, that condition is no longer subject to much evolutionary pressure. We evolve based on the real world with real evolutionary pressures, not some imaginary world based on ideas of strength and weakness.
What are these dangerous genes? Do you know anything about population genetics? Look up Hardy-Weinburg. Although it is just a simple mathematical model, it provides a good argument against the rapid spread of a particular gene outside exceptional circumstances such as a genetic bottleneck.
The ball of cells has a lot more in common with the brain-dead than it does with a toddler, and you have not even tried to make a case for treating it as a human being. I'll bet my signature for a week that you are basing your position on nothing more than the unsupported opinions of your peers, parents or preacher and your gut reaction to the mental images this creates. It would be good if you would reason your way to a properly-supported position, and by that I mean more than just rearranging your prejudices.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
And if you only had to murder 6 million Jews to advance medical science for a few thousand Germans... would you?
BTW, the Nazis in World War II committed lots of atrocities in the "progress of science". And scientists around the world decided not to use that research on the basis of the unmoralistic approach to how that information was obtained.
The ends DID NOT justify the means.
Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Everyone has heard the arguments about how those little embryos are not really little people but just 'embryos.' I'm sure the Romans had really great arguments about why it was fine to kill slaves in their Coliseum in Rome because the slaves were not really people but just 'slaves.' And those many civilizations which practiced human sacrifice in the name of spiritual good for the whole were certainly convinced that they were doing no wrong. But try as we might to obscure the issue, those little embryos of a handful of cells are just as much a human life to be protected as the person sitting next to you...and deep down we all know that. Killing embryos to obtain their stem cells to improve our health is no different than killing prisoners to extract their organs so that others might have better health. It is immoral to improve our own health at the expense of other lives. Stem cells may have therapeutic value but they need to be obtained from methods other than breeding people to obtain them.
I'm not suggesting we know or understand the natural selection NOW. I'm just suggesting that we CAN understand and our current fears shoudn't prevent us from studying alltogether.
The point was that if we understood the nature we could perhaps increase the speed of evolution to our liking and help the prosess as part of evolution itself as I discussed elsewhere.
You spoke of a trouble, but perhaps that risk was acceptable then and although mistakes were made we gained important knowledge.
We were not extinct then and perhaps we will not be extinct now whatever the experts will deside.
Nature is complex, but nothing I believe is infinitely complex. We will eventually learn and hopefully it won't be too late (in one way or another).
We should always consider both sides of the coin. By not doing anything can also be as great a risk as doing something. The exact risks are to be evaluated by the experts to the best of their knowledge, but I guess that's the scientists that are working with the issues now who are most competent to do so. Perhaps they should also be the ones to make the desition, not the politicians.
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In America, the legal argument behind Roe v. Wade is based on privacy. Judging from your spelling, you probably are not American.
The problem is that United States law is not clear on privacy. The Fourteenth Amendment is cited, but it does not mention privacy. The Constitution lacks specific provisions regarding privacy outside a few topics such as search and seizure. It is, however, a living document that requires application to the issues of the times. Privacy, as best I can tell, is not an explicitly stated right under U.S. law. Court decisions based on privacy are, therefore, poorly footed.
I have heard better groundings for abortion discussed. A much better discussion, not that many people are interested in a bona fide discussion of abortion, should address support obligations. If one of my kidneys would keep my neighbor alive, am I legally obliged to give it to him? Currently, the courts and most people think not. If my uterus would allow a pregnancy to continue, am I required to provide it?
On the other hand, pregnancy has many important differences from the kidney example. In most cases, a pregnancy comes into being through the willing actions of a woman. Its dependency on her is completely predictable. The only two alternatives in early pregancy are continuation and termination. For a pregnancy conceived in the usual way, nobody else can provide a suitable uterus.
The kidney example still might provide some guidance. What if I intentionally caused my neighbor's kidneys to fail? Legally, I still am not obligated to give an kidney.
I am forced back to the other hand. If my neighbor dies because I forced his kidneys to fail, I am subject to legal prosecution with a high likelihood of conviction. Although I am not obligated to give him a kidney, I am responsible for his death if I caused him to need a kidney and he dies as a result. Are the obligations of a woman toward a pregnancy different because she created the state of dependency?
I have intentially used the term "pregnancy" instead of "fetus" or "baby." There is an important central issue in this consideration of support. Is a pregnancy different from a tumor? How much of a person is a fetus and when?
The other problems I wish the anti-abortion crowd would address are the health risks of illegal abortions and the punishments that abortions should receive if they were illegal. Many women died from sepsis caused by illegal abortions. Those deaths were terrible. If abortions were illegal, should women who attempt them and the people who assist be tried? What would be the charges? What would be the punishments? I never heard much from anti-abortion camps about how the legal system would act if abortions were illegal.
We don't need to clone the jackass (at least for the next few months...)... it's already called "incumbent", heheh
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
aren't those Harvard grads a bunch of clones already?
Then could we deep-fry it?
But, imagine if the cretin were cloned like Deep Space 9's "Weyoun". Weyoun was funny, for his being repeatedly cloned, and seeing his reaction whenever Gul Damar reminded him his number could be up.
Weyoun was funny because of some lines he spoke.
At least one of these traits applies to dubya.
Imagine, though, if nations took to cloning their premiers, princes, sultans, presidents, lords, and key diplomats. Anytime they got fragged by terrorists, they'd be "regenerated" or "pulled from the incubator."
Morally, I am no longer sure if it would be immoral to kill off clones of despicable nefarious, since there is a good deal of our destiny mapped genetically. Even if a clone is not allowed to run for presidency, it could still become an alcoholic, unless that predisposition were located and removed. It could be raised as a monk, and yet it still could impose religious values on a nation that is S'POSED to value the separation between church and state.
But, what I like about what happened to ONE of they Weyouns was what happend after Ezrii Dax and Worf were captured and imprisoned aboard a G'em H'dar ship. Weyoun #(#?) taunted the hell out of Worf, and Worf, feeling "f$%k this" leapt at Weyoun #?, grabbed him by the neck in the palm of his huge hands, and Klingon-snapped his damned neck.
Weyoun's collapsed like a rag doll. How Worf dispensed with him, how he fell, and how the camera recorded it was superb! That was worth a number of rewinds! It was more minutes than Weyoun clones before I could stop laughing. That few seconds of footage ALONE is worth the price of the DVD.
On a (more) serious, or, maybe serous, note, IMAGINE if governments decided to clone hardy humans, use them for dangerous or fatal industrial work, discarded them, and then kept the activity secret. Mean time, humans are being displaced or disposed of, in fatal corporeal fashion, only to be replaced with clones.
These clones are engineered to be non-reproduction-capable. They receive no individuality or freedom to read unauthorized material, receive minimal health care, and are discarded rather than "repaired".
Would you:
-- DESTROY such an apparatus and malevolently execute or decapitate ALL involved with authorizing, experimenting, funding, and protecting said program?
-- Look the other way and enjoy your clone-manufacture or ored goods?
-- Ameliorate the clones' situation by seeking civil, moral, and societal rights for them (and, wouldn't it be interesting if THEIR rights occurred faster than the minorities received civil rights?)?
-- Set them free (and educate them as to their condition)?
What you say here COULD be monitored by TOTAL SECURITY FASCISTS in power at this or any other time.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The stem-cell work right now appears to be concentrated on two fronts:
- Finding out what makes a stem cell, period; if we can create them from other cells, all the ethical complaints go away.
- Finding ways to use them to cure disease, build replacements for damaged organs and tissues, and so forth. This is why researchers built the framework of an ear under the skin of a mouse not long ago.
Projecting scary things like "genetic engineering" onto stem-cell research is irresponsible blather.Sustainability and energy independence essay
Actually, calling embryos merely a "ball of cells" is treating as equal things inherently unequal. I suppose we could justify killing by calling humans merely "highly-structured bundles of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen..." Technically, it is true, but it belies a lack of deeper understanding.
It is not the fact that this "ball of cells" is human, but rather that it is a fundamental part of a process, which will, if left uninterrupted, produce a human being. If we claim to value human life, we must certainly be bound to honor the process by which human life comes about.
Those in favor of embrionic stem cell research either blur this distinction, or dismiss it entirely; to them, there's no meaningful distinction between the types of cells which merely maintain an existing human body, and those that take part in the creation of a new one. They realize allowing this distinction would immediately introduce a moral question of the validity of their research. A scientist who values the pursuit of knowledge above the effect of his actions will certainly not object to blurring the lines here. However, a scientist genuinely working for the good of all people would recognize that we can't claim to have altruistic motives if we're willing to kill one class of humans for the sake of curing another. If we are really committed to helping humanity, we must settle the question of when life begins, because if left unanswered, we risk committing murder in the name of scientific research. And, as I've said before, calling it science doesn't make it right.
And given that humanity's best "scientific" thinkers believed the Earth to be the center of the Universe for nearly 2,000 years, I don't have much faith in science. The ultimate goal of science is the betterment of mankind, a goal it cannot achieve without considering the moral implications of the research it conducts. We cannot better mankind by creating ways of killing one class of humans to cure another. And unfortunately, this is exactly where embrionic stem cell research is headed. Once we have the capability to produce "cures" from embryos, fetuses, or even infants, it will be very difficult for someone with suffering relatives to see the moral problem in killing a nameless, faceless human being so their loved ones can be cured.
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"Both are humans, I think that's what we agree on (as it doesn't depend on time). Now the question is: do we grant every human the right to life?"
No? I'd add another classification, fully developed human, and not nearly developed human--in fact, about as far away as you could be.
I believe they should talk to people about the issues and the benefits instead of the constant name dropping of a few celebrities stem cells and cloning could *magically* heal.
Celebrities allow people to associate a human face with an illness that (if they are lucky) they've never had to face in themselves or a loved one. It's always easier to be compassionate toward a particular person than disease victims in the abstract.
Em.. source ??
Or more liberal fearmongering ?
The Eugenics Wars Begun
test, please disregard.
Is it? What's the big... nay, only difference? You said:
Let's follow this and see what conclusions are forced by this "logic":
Right there you've prohibited everything from in-vitro fertilization to masturbation, and perhaps made nocturnal emissions into a crime. Indeed, if everything that might become a human being has to be given the chance to go through the process, it would be wrong to allow any woman to have a menstrual cycle in which she does not try her best to become pregnant.
The conclusions which follow from your premise are absurd, and it is silly bordering on insane to hold to it.
Is sex a sacrament in your religion? If you really believe what you say, it ought to be. (Aside from Hindus and neopagans I don't know anyone who truly believes that.)
But if you really want to honor something, you should know it for what it is. In the case of human reproduction, the process is very lossy. Between 2/3 and 3/4 of all fertilized human ova fail to implant, spontaneously abort, or otherwise fail to result in a live birth. The process appears to have the purpose of weeding things out, not of nurturing everything for its own sake. "Honoring it" would appear to mean doing our own weeding where the process misses something, instead of mindless insistence that every instance have a result which is normally an outcome in only a minority of cases.
Of course, that misses something too. Mankind is the only material agent in the world which conducts conscious investigations into the nature of things, constructs and tests theories of how they work, and then acts based on the knowledge acquired. It's so phenomenally successful at improving our lives and reducing suffering that it seems almost sacreligious to claim that we ought not to apply it to everything, including ourselves. We should certainly honor that process and place it in high esteem.
You're opposed to heart transplants, then? The brain-dead are beyond feeling, thought and suffering but they are certainly human; by your postulates the activities in transplant units around the world are murder.
Ironically, it's the research into stem cells (all kinds) and human cloning which holds the promise of growing replacement tissues and organs without having to take them from a complete human body. You are standing in the way of the goal that your reasoning leads to.
It seems obvious that you don't even know what's wrong with that statement, so I'll try to enlighten you against your will:
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I, personally, am very in favor of embryonic stem cell research. One of the biggest critiscisms I hear is that there are already stem cell lines out there that can be used. True, there are 23 (not 40) stem cell lines in existence for research. But, these cells were grown on mouse cells, so they could never be used in humans. If we (the US) continue on the policies that President Bush has established, we will never be able to do clinical trials of stem cell research. Other countries, including England and Singapore, have much more leniant policies towards stem cell research and spend way more than the US does on it. They will surpass the US in research if policies here don't change. (Not a bad thing, but I'd like to be able to do research without moving to another country).
When it's flushed down the drain as part of a natural cycle, it's just an embryo. When it is removed from this cycle, and stimulated to grow, it is no longer just an embryo, any more than you or I are embryos.
At the heart of the issue is the morality of using tissue intended to create human beings for matters of lesser dignity. In order not to trample on the rights of humans, we'd have to create something from an embryo which wasn't human. Think about that for a moment. How exactly would you draw the line between what constituted a human and what didn't? At what point of genetic alteration does human tissue, tissue with a purpose of reproduction, cease to be human? To be devoid of moral qualms, you would have to alter both the composition and the purpose of embryos - and this is not what researchers have in mind. Instead, they'd rather play with the genetic mechanisms that they may grow full humans in order that they may be "harvested" for their organs.
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Everything changed after we won the war on drugs. Now, when there are no drugs any more, there's only sex left, but don't worry, we're working on it.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I happen to agree that the killing of human life is quite wrong. One of the major issues that this boils down to is when does an organism become living. Well I quite happen to believe in a rather famous philisophical quote "I think therefore I am." Without thought we cannot concieve what human rights even are. I would say that makes them rather insignificant in the scope of things. Without the ability to think this makes the human zygote exactly as alive as its sperm and egg counterpart. There is no pain, there is no trauma and this could vastly help the human race in general. Do you not believe me... go ahead... hook up an EEG to the "head" of these cells... what's that... it hasn't developed... hmmm... guess it can't really know it's "suffing.
Now, on to quality. The human race in the past has had a rough time for their very survival. This has caused many ppl to believe that any manner in which a potential life is ended is wrong. In more primitive times that was exactly the case. Now we have the tecnology to harvest sperm and eggs (There are literally trillions of extras folks) that would have been otherwise unused and killed naturally. If instead they can better human life why should they not? I think it it very much nieve and wrong to believe that anything like using stem cells is killing when this organism never truly "is."
On to cloning... The best part of all of this is that we don't have to entirely deny that organism the right to life. We can use the same copy of an embryo over and over again. And if someone feels it's wrong that we do that to this hunk of geenes (at this point that all that exists) then we can give that organism the right to life still. I know I would be quite proud to know it was "me" that helped hundreds or thousands of ppl get over alsheimers or parkensons.
Anyway... I understand your desire to not in any way harm the sanctity of life, but when that will not be upheald naturally anyway, and the quality of life can thus be improved, I am very much for the latter.
That's the amazing thing about science... it actually helps you... you just have to let it.
The original generic sig.
Bush indeed wants the UN to outlaw all forms of human cloning worldwide, even though right now all forms are legal in the US: Position statement
The beauty of cloning is that it once and for all puts to rest the idiotic claim that "human life begins with conception". You can take a cell out of my ass, grow another Axel from it, and in the whole process no egg and sperm will join, no conception will take place whatsoever.
How about they clone John Kerry, and kill him off a few thousand times in experimentation. He's voting for it. Let him reap the reward.
I predicted:
You confirm that you're just a crypto-theocrat who wants everyone to follow YOUR idea of divine intent. Screw that. Mind your own business, follow your own religion, eschew the fruits of the research if it makes you feel virtuous, but if you can't justify your feelings with anything better than appeals to your religion you have no business trying to make rules for anyone else (and I mean anyone).Sustainability and energy independence essay
Is it, since when did an embryo become a baby?
Both are humans, I think that's what we agree on (as it doesn't depend on time). Now the question is: do we grant every human the right to life?
Well no, lets ignore the term human at the moment, as you could argue as soon as egg and sperm unite, that's a human. Lets use person, or even better viable person. Now at some point a collection of cells become a viable person. It's the rights we grant to that person, and what rights we deny before that are key
Before you go moving the 24 week target, have a look at what happens if you go too early, you become the Catholic Church, and then every sperm IS sacred.
No, because sperm cells and eggs are not human beings. They are simply cells. Things change dramatically once you bring them together. From that moment, a NEW human life starts. Diploid chomosome set, new set of genes due to potential chross-overs/mutations, and if you don't work against it (and modulo naturally ocurring deaths) it will get born and surf the Web, read slashdot and stuff. Union of egg and sperm is everybody's canonical $t_0$, so to speak.
Well they are both Potential BabiesIt's still about potential here. I guess it's very simple if we're looking at using stem cells, and clones of those cells. It would be a whole different ball game, if we started having babies/embryos/foetuses, just for their stem cells.
If doing research on 200 stem cell clones resulted in the cure to aids, which would cure 20 million, would the research be worth it?
That's a very important argument, however, this type of argument has been studied in philosophy extensively under the name of Utilitarianism: do just what maximises good to most people. The drawback of such a philosophy is that it lends itself to sacrificing minorities for the benefit of the rest. So I argue that human rights must never become object of a utilitarian argument.
What would you do with a plague carrier then? One person with ebola for example, in a light aircraft, heading towards New York or London. They are a minority, me, I'd shoot them down, but I'd be interested in seeing how your philosophy would deal with them.
I'd also want some research done into pain, reaction and the like, of the stem cells, to indeed see if there was any capacity for suffering or any suffering going on.
I think the stem cells themselves are not problematic (as they don't contain all the elements of a human being anymore). So they aren't humans. However the process of getting there is unethical. It's the killing of spurious embryos that is the problem.
Are they using spurios embryos? They're not farming these embroys are they, we're not talking matrix still fields here. Just body parts for scientific use.
Other than that, they are just organic matter, same as a menstrual cycles, or sperm, livers, kidneys and hearts.
Yes, just organic matter.
I'm still amazed that the people arguing against this aren't arguing against heart/liver/kidney transplants as being traumatic to hearts/livers/kidneys.
Yeah, that is pseudo-science, so no comment.
I guess the key here is the farming of embryos, or the cloning of stem cells. To my understanding the initial stem cells are coming from non viable humans, and then being cloned. I've yet to hear of anything to the contrary.
Simply stating that human embryos aren't life doesn't make them so. You need to demonstrate that they are not life. Most of human tradition would contend that they are. I contend they are. And I vote.
But if I need some extra cells, or an organ, is it ok if I just take yours? Thanks.
... before people's fears make it illegal. When nothing bad comes from human cloning, people will hopefully quit being so fearful.
A equals B so therefore C!
He is saying that cloning in and of itself is just a man-made version of a natural process.
There was no mention of killing twins.
This sort of logic reminds me of people against gay marriage because then it will be OK to marry a goat.
Of course, I don't hear goats complaining, so what's the harm? Eh?
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You make some good arguments. But we should argue the ethics, not the religion. Saying; Human life is not ours with which to experiment. This implies there is some edict from God.
Now would you argue that a new type of cast is an experiment on human life that God wouldn't want? I suppose not. But would you argue that a person having an operation to not overeat or change their sex is something God would or wouldn't want? Less clear.
Is it OK if I remove some skin from my body and throw it away? You and I would probably say yes.
Is it OK if a fertilized cell grows up to become a human. Yes again.
Is it OK if that cell I removed from my body, with new technology grows up to become a human? I would say yes, but you might disagree.
But the cloning they are talking about is making duplicate cells in an embryonic process.
I think that many Right-To-Life advocates are making the argument that abortion and embryo research are murder. How do they define life? Is it just humans cells... NO. It is special cells that become babies. So is it merely human genes... no, they don't want my finger growing into a person, it's an embryo. Is it then consciousness that defines human life. NO. Fetuses don't even have brain waves until after the second trimester, and yet, most consider a day old blastocist to be sacred.
See the problem. You have no definable ethics that clearly state what truly constitutes a human life. Though both sides need to better state the case. Genetics alone don't make a human. Embryo alone does not make a human, because for most of the process, you'd be hard-put to differentiate between a mouse, a monkey or a human.
I'm probably getting too deep for this discussion though. I'm not talking coldly of no regard for humanity. It's just that I'm thinking way ahead to a time where that won't be so easy to define. The arguments I hear today about life and value and what is Gods province are based on what we can do today, but are not necessarily right or wrong, just provincial.
The idea that a thing that can grow to BECOME a human life is the only vessel of genius that can carry a human soul is going to look a lot like superstition in a few hundred years. If my finger could be grown in a vat to become a person I could come to know, what then constituted the SOUL, or the Human-ness? It takes a brain to suffer, a body to live and DNA to have human potential. So far, the only arguments for a soul I've heard from the Church is the ability to put a check in a collection plate.
The argument against stem cell research and cell cloning research has little appreciation for what it means to be human. There is nothing but unrealized potential in a collection of cells. If God cared so much about this, why then does he allow 80% of embryos in women to be re-absorbed (aborted naturally). But then, who am I to presume God's will?
I see an urgent need to clone non-viable human parts, and cells while making sure none grow to consciousness. You see, once the genie is out of the bottle, the desire for many to have new arms and legs will be overwhelming (profitable), so if we bury our head in the sands and wash hands or the whole thing, the cheaper and unethical growing of full viable clones for the purpose of harvesting organs will happen. I think we can both agree that this would be horrible. But it is often the case that ethical practices take a bit more care and work. So it is important to spend the money and do the ethical research, so that there isn't too much profit in "doing the wrong thing".
Ethical dilemmas occur when you have the ABILITY to do something. We have to grow up and take responsibility for what we can do. If you are unable to save a person with a heart attack, you hold their hand and comfort them as they die. If you gain the technology to replace the heart, should you help the person now? Probably. If that person will continue as conscious and have a life they deem worthy of living, then definitely. The argument that
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