Cloning License for Dolly's Doc

Rollie Hawk writes "Ian Wilmut, leader of Dolly the sheep's team and Professor at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, has been given the green light by the British government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to start further cloning research. As a matter of fact, he is now a licensed human cloner. The license has a duration of one year and is the second of its kind given by Britain, the first country to officially sanction human cloning research. Research will be focusing on motor neurone disease (MND). The team hopes to perform cell nuclear replacement on the skin cells of MND victims in order to create stem cells, the jack-of-all-trades of the cell family and the supposed magic bullets for ailments ranging from Alzheimer's to paralysis.

Comments

Is this a good idea AT THIS TIME?

[beh]

I am not sure, whether this is really such a grand idea -- yes, genetics
and cloning hold enormous potential, but I think with the current
knowledge of this subject there should be a moratorium on actual
experiments (especially on human cells) until we learn more of the
background of the whole thing - and especially, until we have some form
of agreement on ethical standards about what we want to achieve and how
far we are willing to go.

(Note: this is not the "we should leave this to god argument" -- simply
because I am agnostic. But somehow I think before we start "playing
god", we should at least get to know whatever we can on a theoretical
level, before we go about practical experiments on it and decide what
should be allowed and what should be off limits... )

Re:Is this a good idea AT THIS TIME?

[nuclear305]

" I am not sure, whether this is really such a grand idea -- yes, genetics
and cloning hold enormous potential, but I think with the current
knowledge of this subject there should be a moratorium on actual
experiments (especially on human cells) until we learn more of the
background of the whole thing - and especially, until we have some form
of agreement on ethical standards about what we want to achieve and how
far we are willing to go."

Ok, well the most obvious argument is "How do we learn without doing research?" We already know the "theoretical level" ...which is why people want to pursue research to begin with.

That aside, who decides on the ethical standards? Who decides when we've learned enough "background" to proceed with experiments? Historically speaking there is no way...there will always be people that disagree and there will always be those who think we should put something off until we have a better understanding.

Re:Is this a good idea AT THIS TIME?

[UWC]

Science is based on observation. With astronomy, there's a limit to our abilities to observe, and we stay at the edge of that, stretching it with probes, new telescopes, etc. With cloning research, there's an increased ability to observe certain processes in what some apparently consider acceptable ways. Do you deny that if we actually could travel interstellar distances, we would? These scientists feel that it's within their ethical limits to be doing the experiments they are doing. Whether that fits with some universal standard of ethics I don't know, but I don't think that most of them are doing this just because they can. They want to learn from it, like the astronomers using revolutionary equipment to gain more knowledge about their own field of study. This isn't an endorsement of the cloning stuff, and I don't know where I would draw the line, either, but I don't think the comparison to astronomy is particularly valid, as astronomy is limited by the means of observation.

Re:Is this a good idea AT THIS TIME?

[PakProtector]

The problem is not so simple as science vs. religion. The problem is science vs. certain religions.

The modern world is based on several thousand years of patriarchal society. Particularly with Christianity, where in the bible it specifically says that the Christian god, Yahweh (Iehovah) created man in his image, and then made man from woman, and then made woman subservient to man.

In religions where the chief diety is Male, the Male God is seen as the source of all life, and since God is a male, man must naturally be closer to perfection than woman. Man was believed to be the source of all life -- look at what the ancient greeks and romans and other societies thought about the roles of men and women in procreation -- consider how deeply ingrained into our society the metaphor of 'sowing wild oats' and similiar other seed metaphors are. In the Biblical Christian view of the world, man was solely responsible for the act of procreation: His 'seeds' were put in to the woman, who served as the 'soil' in which they grew. Woman was seen as providing nothing more than a good enviroment for the 'seed' to develop. Remember that the many of the first people to exampine male spermatozoa under microscope reported seeing homonculi -- minature, fully formed men. This view of the world, where men were sole creators of life, is what our modern world view is based in. The reason abortion is so abominable to so many Christians is not the fact that 'God' says it is wrong -- God says it is wrong because in a world view where man has sole creative power, something like abortion takes power away from the man, devaluing his role in the process of the creation of new life. Hell hath no fury like a man devalued.

Take as an example of this fact the 'Angry White Male,' who is Angry that men said to women, 'Sure, you can compete with us, but on our terms,' and lo and behold suddenly a good deal of those men are finding themselves displaced socially and economically by women. For the past several thousand years the male's role was as sole provider for the family. Our culture (atleast America -- the only culture I am able to give an opinion on, as it is the only one I know well enough to do so) is based upon several thousand years of the male role being defined as provider and protector, and now that role is being displaced because, when men forced women to compete on "men's" terms, it was suddenly foudn that women were not so helpless, stupid, or defenseless as had long been held.

These 'angry white males' are angry because their traditional societial safe-houses, first politics, then the 'masculine' job-force, and now the right to control reproduction, are slowly being chipped away at.

As society becomes closer to equality between the sexes, the men who are most insecure about their place in life will fight harder and harder. Many men find themselves asking, "What exactly is it that I do?" Men have no definate answer for this sort of question. Male identity is a precarious thing. It is almost impossible to shake the Female identity so throughly, because there is always a response to the question. "I can have children." Men have no definate roll, and they make up for their inability to do something by saying that women may not do something else.

Such as dress in a certain way. Or own things. Or have a job. Or have control over their own bodies.

And I forgot where I was going with this.

But mod me up, please?

Just a friendly reminder

[bluefoxlucid]

The poster is referring to embreyonic stem cells, which still haven't been proven to be any useful. I still say more adult stem cell research is needed, especially since I've heard things about experimental methods to cure Type1 diabetese using adult stem cells, and things about people pushing states (Mass. in particular) to fund embreyonic stem cell research to try and cure diabetese.

Point is, of course, that I'm bitterly opposed to embreyonic research for the pure and simple reason that it's going nowhere while adult stem cell research is over 100 diseases and thousands of successful treatments into its life cycle, and holds all the same potentials. Both flavors have been getting something like 300 million greenbacks per year from NIH.

Better questions at this time

[Doc Ruby]

It's happening. A better question, and actually germane to this story itself, is "will licensing cloning researchers help control abuses of the industry?". It's probably more effective than merely banning the abuses, or banning the practice altogether. It gives an outlet and encouragement to the very attractive cloning practices that are very clearly use of the technique, and not abuse. But I'd bet that Bill Gates has several clones growing somewhere - he knows they only get them right by version 3.0.