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?

[lederhosen]

>...but I think with the current
>knowledge of this subject...

How can we gain knowledge if we don't do research?

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?

[Datasage]

How do we know if a thoery is valid if we are not allowed to test it? Expirments are a part of the scientifc process, without them, all your theories are just hypothesis.

Re:Is this a good idea AT THIS TIME?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

ethical standards about what we want to achieve and how far we are willing to go

It is ethical to engage in research which may heal people suffering from horrible diseases. It is unethical to throw up roadblocks to such research based on vague fears about Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

Any questions?

Re:Is this a good idea AT THIS TIME?

[lederhosen]

I have big problem with people fiddle around with genetics. But you do have to think about what is good and what is bad. I have *no* problem whatsoever with
cloning though I have serious problem with modifying genes that are inherited.

Go ahead and clone cells for cancer treatment, and deseases, but wait with messing with genes that will
be left for all comming generations (at least untill we really know what we are doing.

Sadly, it seams to be the other way around, mix genes of fish with potatoes, modify corn etc, things that *may* cause severe problems in the
future people seams to accept. But when you
*clone* something, everyone screams, think about our children, when it is realy totaly harmless

Re:Is this a good idea AT THIS TIME?

[tgibbs]

Ever heard of "theoretical" research?

Strangely, astronomy is a science, though we've never created a supernova of ourselves, or travelled for a lightyear to get a feel for the distance.

I think there is a lot that can simply be learnt by studying and observing and THEN we can start thinking about how to change things.

We've been studying and observing for decades. The research is really at a point where it is impossible to carry it appreciably further without experimental results to test the theories, which we finally have the technology to do. There's really no reason to imagine that at some future time we'd be in a better position to decide how to do these experiments. At some point, you just have to try it and see if it works.

Re:Is this a good idea AT THIS TIME?

[tgibbs]

But first you have to decide the ethical standards for doing the tests, which seems to have been long overlooked.

I disagree. People have been thinking about the ethical standards for a long time. All relevant issues have been extensively debated. I haven't heard anybody with anything new to say on the topic for many years. Since there are no plans for creating organisms with a functioning nervous system capable of suffering, the experiments clearly meet established standards of scientific ethics. And the basic manipulations of human embryos in vitro have long been carried out for in vitro fertilization, so we have already decided as a society that this sort of manipulation is ethically acceptable.

Of course there are some people with religious objections to this, just as there are some people with religious objections to eating beef or pork. They will at some point have to decide whether their personal ethics permit them to take advantage of the benefits of this research.

Re:Is this a good idea AT THIS TIME?

[Gauchito]

vague fears about Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

That's not the reason people object to this kind of research. The main question in this whole argument is the one that neither side can agree on: at what point do we start being a living human being, and the killing of that human being becomes murder? At conception or some arbitrary point later (e.g., brain is fully formed, a neuron grows, all fingers are there, etc.)? Every other point in this discussion stems from that one question, for which there seems to be no objective answer, because we don't have a clear, unanimous idea of what it actually means to be human.

welcome

[kevinx]

I certainly welcome our new cloned human overlords..
as long as they all look like the olsen twins.

So.....

[Meostro]

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.

So who got the first one?

Re:So.....

[Dr Caleb]

So who got the first one?

Some guy who looks just like him.

Re:So.....

[jacob_jackson]

Last August, a team of scientists from Newcastle University in northern England was granted a license to clone human embryos to develop new treatments for diabetes and degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's (http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=hea lthNews&storyID=7569803&pageNumber=1)

Clone rights

[Spoonito]

Clones are people two.

10 print "clones are people" $d
20 let $d = pun
30 gosub hilarity

Re:Thank you Bush!

[TheMeuge]

As much as the parent can be considered a troll, he/she is right. The pressure of religious ethics of the right wing Christians, along with this administration's spite towards science, will result in rapid elimination of the slim lead that the US has been maintaining in medical and basic research.

Re:Not human cloning.

[Anonymous Coward]

so human embryos do not grow to become humans?

Are you living on this planet or another one?

copyright issues?

[de1orean]

the RIAA is watching these developments closely.

Re:Genetic material question

[InternationalCow]

The egg contains mitochondria, and, indeed, some motor neuron diseases are indirectly linked to mitochondrial dysfunction. If bad mitochondria cause the disease, problem solved, as the mitochondria are not from the person with MND. However, most motor neuron diseases that we know of and are connected to mitochondrial dysfunction are actually caused by problems in nuclear genes - case in point being amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (aka Lou Gehrig's disease), which is related to mutations in superoxide dismutase. The dysfunctioning of this protein in turn affects mitochondrial function leading to increased apoptosis, etc.. Apart from that, tackling degenerative disease using stem cells is probably not going to work in many cases - many of those diseases may not be caused by cell-autonomous processes, which means that whatever is killing the motor neurons is going to kill the stem cells as well. Stem cells may however be very useful for repopulating purposes, if we can get them to differentiate in the right way in the right place.

Re:Certainty

[jackelfish]

They are not creating embryos, they are attempting to create pluripotent cells, from skin cells, in an attempt to replace malfunctioning neurons. There is not an entire organism involved here as they are not using gametes (eggs or sperm) in these experiments. This is where the term "cloning" becomes confused, in that many people think it always refers to the duplication of a whole organism (such as Dolly) where it simply means to insert foreign DNA into a cell.

Not so fast Einstein

[KarmaBlackballed]

But when you *clone* something, everyone screams, think about our children, when it is really totally harmless

I don't have any answers, but feel compelled to point out that so far cloning is not known to be harmless. Specifically, as far as I know all cloned mammals have a cell age equivalent to that of the cell donor. The cell age is measured by the length of the cell telemers. (When the telemers become too short, the cell dies. Telemers get shorter with every cell division.)