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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
 Posted - 11/12/2007 : 19:35:19 [Permalink]
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Since the clone (as of yet) will grow up like a fairly normal child (ie not with sci-fi-like preprogrammed mind) the clone would genetically be like a twin, but since it is an offspring the person that is cloned must have the responsibilites of a biological parent.
As opposed to therapeutic cloning where tissue is grown to be implanted into the host.
Of course, you may have to grow a child in order to harvest something that needs more development like a liver, kidney or a lung. Something that could be transplanted from the child to the parent without killing it.
However, such transplanting should in my opinion be outlawed. It would be an invasive procedure that would affect the quality of life of the child once it's grown up.
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 11/12/2007 : 19:39:23 [Permalink]
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half said:
It clearly could be handy, and even a life-saver, for each of us to own a clone of ourselves for possible spare parts as needed. These could probably be raised most efficiently on stock farms. No parental nurturing, language skills or education required, just common innoculations, veterinary care, and feedings of monkey chow.
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That is the plot from a bad sci-fi movie. It is also what pops into people's heads when they hear "clone" (that or an army of stormtroopers).
The idea of theraputic cloning can extend far beyong the realm of potentially repairing nerve damage or a therapy for parkinsons disease.
For example: The University of Michigan artificial heart lab. They are working on making a heart, from live tissue, to be available for emergency transplants. The next logical step in that process will be to build you a custom heart, made from your own genetic material, to replace yours when the time comes. Eliminate the death sentence of tissue rejection and the crippling expense of rejection meds (the least expensive rejection meds are ~$50k/year).
If they can construct a heart, then kidney, liver, lung, and pancreas will follow.
So you don't need a whole live clone of yourself to have parts on hand to replace yours when they wear out! If it is an emergency situation, the doctor just calls the supply department and has them warm up a in-stock heart, transplants it, take a tissue sample from you and sends it off to the lab to grow you a brand new heart that is all your own. You come back when its ready and have it installed. You now have a brand new heart that requires no lifelong use of rejection meds.
Then you can look at the application of theraputic cloning from a regenerative medicine pov.
This is what is going to be lost in the meaningless "debate" with those who irrationally reject all "cloning". As the OP article suggests, the current liberal mindset on the topic can be summarized:
| "A legally-binding global ban on work to create a human clone, coupled with freedom for nations to permit strictly controlled therapeutic research, has the greatest political viability of options available," |
People just need to step back and take a breath. How is creating an invitro clone of yourself, and then having it carried to term by a surrogate mother, really any different than a surrogate mother carrying a different couple's baby to term, or different from the nutcases who "adopt" frozen embryos? If your intent is reproduction, isn't the end result still a life?
And yes Half, no one (outside of some sci-fi writers and serious nutcases) envisions a future where we grow whole people to harvest them for parts.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 11/12/2007 : 19:46:38 [Permalink]
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chaloobi said:
| This is the first rational argument so far against cloning. However, do you oppose using a cloned embryo of yourself for stem cell seed stock so you can grow a new liver to replace the one you've pickled from too much Jack Daniels and Coke? Or is it just raising clones to a certain age to be used as necessary that you get the heebie jeebies over? I don't ever see people raising clones as spare parts but if someone wanted to do something that nasty, it won't matter if the procedure is illegal - where there's a will, there's a way. |
I disagree that it is a rational argument against what any credible scientist means when they use the word "clone" or "cloning". In that context it is a strawman.
If anyone were ever to seriously propose such a scenario, it would be rejected by almost eveyone. Including people, like myself, who have no objection to cloning for reproduction if a person so desires.
Of course, the whole reproductive cloning thing will mean that we all will have to copyright our personal genome.
(edited to add: I think half was just excercising sarcasm, not creating a strawman. I answered with this post mainly because I have seen to many people who think the scenario is not only plausible, but likely.)
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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| Edited by - Dude on 11/12/2007 20:14:20 |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 11/12/2007 : 22:04:53 [Permalink]
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chaloobi asked: | However, do you oppose using a cloned embryo of yourself for stem cell seed stock so you can grow a new liver to replace the one you've pickled from too much Jack Daniels and Coke? Or is it just raising clones to a certain age to be used as necessary that you get the heebie jeebies over? |
No, I just pointed out an extreme example that I would find unethical, as a way of grounding the argument.
It's good to think of the extremes, even when nobody advocates them. It helps to define the actual area of debate. I did not mean it as a set-up for some slippery-slope argument. I have no problem with vat-growing of cloned replacement organs, though I think people who've blown out their organs through deliberate abuse ought to get at the back of the line.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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Ghost_Skeptic
SFN Regular
Canada
510 Posts |
Posted - 11/12/2007 : 23:45:57 [Permalink]
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I heard the guy who cloned the first large mammal (Dolly the sheep) come out strongly against cloning actual humans (as opposed to stem cells etc) since the long term health of cloned animals is often poor (Dolly was euthanzed well short of the normal sheep life expectancy because of athritis that was related to her being a clone). As I understand it clones have shorter telomeres at the ends of there chromosomes than do regular animals and start running into replication errors much sooner as result.
If this is the case then reproductive cloning is wrong because it creates a human being with a decreased qualtiy of life for no reason other than vanity. |
"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. / You can send a kid to college but you can't make him think." - B.B. King
History is made by stupid people - The Arrogant Worms
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism." - William Osler
"Religion is the natural home of the psychopath" - Pat Condell
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" - Thomas Jefferson |
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On fire for Christ
SFN Regular
Norway
1273 Posts |
Posted - 11/13/2007 : 00:28:20 [Permalink]
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| congratulations missing my point, clearly it is not a natural process by any stretch of the imagination. Yes I am aware IV fertilization and aspirin are also unnatural (although aspirin is derived from a natural pain killer in birch bark), and not at any point did I equate 'unnatural' to 'wrong' or 'evil', nor did I say I was against anything unnatural (I was under the impression the question was about why there was/will be a ban, not my own personal opinions, but whatever), and I also tried to explain that as it is new, and more unnatural than things people have already been conditioned to, it is bound to have the public up in arms. If any reaction can be depended upon, it's fear of the unknown and the unnatural. oh and if this explanation is not rational enough, then welcome to the real world. Public opinion does not have to be driven by rational arguments, if you are asking why should there be a ban, the last thing you should expect is a logical reason. |
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| Edited by - On fire for Christ on 11/13/2007 00:35:34 |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 11/13/2007 : 00:53:52 [Permalink]
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OFFC said:
| congratulations missing my point, clearly it is not a natural process by any stretch of the imagination. |
You are clearly not using the same definition of natural as others here are. Human beings are a part of nature, so I'm not sure how you can classify anything we do as "unnatural".
Irrational fear is a bad thing, don't let it get the best of you.
I heard the guy who cloned the first large mammal (Dolly the sheep) come out strongly against cloning actual humans (as opposed to stem cells etc) since the long term health of cloned animals is often poor (Dolly was euthanzed well short of the normal sheep life expectancy because of athritis that was related to her being a clone). As I understand it clones have shorter telomeres at the ends of there chromosomes than do regular animals and start running into replication errors much sooner as result.
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Source?
Because Dolly the sheep was sick with ovine pulminary adenocarcinoma. A chronic and contagious disease in sheep and goats that is caused by a retrovirus (JSRV). Just plug "dolly the sheep" into wiki.
Also, I have not heard any such story about any of the scientists on the team that cloned Dolly. It would be interesting if you could provide some documentation.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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On fire for Christ
SFN Regular
Norway
1273 Posts |
Posted - 11/13/2007 : 01:02:38 [Permalink]
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Right so cloning is a natural way for humans to procreate, I guess this is the 'humans are part of nature so everything we do is natural' definition? great then nothing in the universe is unnatural and the word loses all usefulness.
I don't think I'm the one with irrational fears here, you can't even admit it when something isn't natural, as if 'unnatural' is a swear word or something.
If you want to try and drag me into another endless semantic debate I'm not interested, instead just substitute the word 'unnatural' with 'not how human beings would reproduce in the wild' or something similar, and please actually take into account the rest of my post instead of singling out one minor point and ignoring the rest. |
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| Edited by - On fire for Christ on 11/13/2007 01:03:25 |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 11/13/2007 : 01:45:02 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by On fire for Christ
Right so cloning is a natural way for humans to procreate, I guess this is the 'humans are part of nature so everything we do is natural' definition? great then nothing in the universe is unnatural and the word loses all usefulness.
I don't think I'm the one with irrational fears here, you can't even admit it when something isn't natural, as if 'unnatural' is a swear word or something.
If you want to try and drag me into another endless semantic debate I'm not interested, instead just substitute the word 'unnatural' with 'not how human beings would reproduce in the wild' or something similar, and please actually take into account the rest of my post instead of singling out one minor point and ignoring the rest.
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Uh, you launched the semantic debate thing, with the use of "unnatural"as though it actually and obviously meant something.
That's one of the most abused and totally subjective words in our lexicon. And your use of it is one of the worst: "Unnatural" seems to simply mean anything you don't like. Instead of yourself doing the semantic dance, why not simply say what kind of cloning you like or don't like, and why (without using the "unnatural" non-argument)?
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 11/13/2007 01:45:39 |
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On fire for Christ
SFN Regular
Norway
1273 Posts |
Posted - 11/13/2007 : 01:59:50 [Permalink]
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once again what has this got to do with my personal opinion? Would me stating what type of cloning I like answer the topic in question? No.
And how does using a word start a semantic debate? I guess by this logic every word I use starts a new semantic debate. Since I use all my words as if they obviously mean something. Once again, if the word 'unnatural' is for some reason tabboo to you just insert something else...like hmmm... I guess 'normal' is a dirty word too huh? ok so if I cant say 'normal' or 'natural' method of procreation, I'm assuming there's no debate over what 'fucking' is, I'll just say that from now on.
In case I haven't been 100% clear, let me spell it out. I am not against cloning. Some people may consider cloning to be evil/wrong.
I do NOT.
HOWEVER, the topic asked WHY should cloning be banned, I was TRYING to explain that people are cautious and fearful of 'unnatural', new things. this may not seem like a good reason to ban something. If you were running for president, you may have a different view.
Not at any point did I voice these views or opinions as my own. I WAS MERELY ANSWERING THE QUESTION.
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| Edited by - On fire for Christ on 11/13/2007 02:11:14 |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 11/13/2007 : 02:26:22 [Permalink]
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OFFC said:
| .... I guess this is the 'humans are part of nature so everything we do is natural' definition? great then nothing in the universe is unnatural and the word loses all usefulness. |
Pretty much.
| If you want to try and drag me into another endless semantic debate I'm not interested |
A point I have repeatedly tried to make on these forums recently; definitions are what give language it's communicative power. Without them we'd just be making noise, and we certainly can't have a discussion (especially in a forum of this "nature") unless we agree to use the same definition of the words key to our debate.
| instead just substitute the word 'unnatural' with 'not how human beings would reproduce in the wild' or something similar, |
Or you could use that more precise terminology in the first place to make your point. Obviously humans don't clone for reproduction "in the wild". But your intent seemed to be, by calling cloning unnatural, is to imply that it is somehow also inherently wrong.
I'd definitely be interested in a rational explanation of why cloning for reproduction should be viewed that way. I'm probably in a minority with my view on this issue, but I see the "unnatural" reaction to human cloning to be nothing more than a kneejerk response to something new. How is reproductive cloning different in any meaningful way from invitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood beyond the obvious (that you are making a twin of yourself)? How would this be different (except for the timing) than regularly conceived identical twins or triplets?
Now I agree that there needs to be a lot more animal work done before anyone should consider a human attempt, to work out the procedures and to gauge if there are really any detrimental effects to the clone. At this time I'd agree with you that we shouldn't do it, but I do not agree that it is, in principle, wrong (or unnatural, to use your word).
When we are talking about therapeutic cloning, the response is not only irrational but irresponsible. Allowing fear of the new to override objective analysis of the potential benefits can prove to be harmful for us all. There are nearly 99,000 people on a waiting list for an organ transplant in the US(fewer than 20k will get their transplant), there are 14.6 million people in the US diagnosed with diabetes(and an estimated 6.2million who are unaware they are diabetic), there are approx 250K people in the US living with spinal cord injuries(with 11K added every year), and so on (I could keep this list going for at least another paragraph). Not many of them have hope of being cured. A real therapeutic cloning/regenerative medicine research initiative is needed.
Are we really going to continue to let irrational fear of new things rule over our objectivity in the face of fighting injury, disease, and the suffering that accompanies them? HESC research and therapeutic cloning need to receive the full benefit of our federal research grant systems. Anything less would, imo, be criminal.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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| Edited by - Dude on 11/13/2007 02:28:43 |
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 11/13/2007 : 03:53:52 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dude
I disagree that it is a rational argument against what any credible scientist means when they use the word "clone" or "cloning". In that context it is a strawman.
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Ok, contrast this argument - the concern that a second class of humans might be cloned strictly for spare parts - with arguments like: "cloning is unnatural." Which even approaches rational?
Now consider this:
A. Imagine a service where you can pay to have your child cloned at his/her birth and the embryo cultured to a certain extent and then the stem cells frozen for future use. You pay for the initial process and a small fee for the ongoing storage. I can see that easily.
B. Imagine the process is taken a little further, a whole set of transplantable organs is cloned and kept in some kind of long-term storage.
C. Imagine that B doesn't work because you can't freeze a whole organ and make it viable upon thaw. So instead, the whole set of vital organs of a human body is grown - just your torso area - no head, no arms or legs - so that the long-term storage is partially the body's own physiology. This partial body is kept in some kind of facility where it's given nutrition and maintained in other ways....
D. Next logical step - add the arms and legs and head, keep the body in a coma for long term storage.
People will begin to have a problem with this at C, even though C is functionally equivalent to A. D is obviously not acceptable, though if the body is intentially made brain dead while still in its artificial womb or is never brought out of a coma, it is functionally equivalent to A and C.... |
-Chaloobi
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| Edited by - chaloobi on 11/13/2007 04:01:10 |
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 11/13/2007 : 03:57:08 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by On fire for Christ
congratulations missing my point, <snip> the last thing you should expect is a logical reason.
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Just a suggestion, drop the 'unnatural' and stick with 'new and unknown.' You can even add in the 'freak-out factor.' But 'unnatural' weakens your position I think. |
-Chaloobi
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 11/13/2007 : 04:50:39 [Permalink]
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chaloobi said:
A. Imagine a service where you can pay to have your child cloned at his/her birth and the embryo cultured to a certain extent and then the stem cells frozen for future use. You pay for the initial process and a small fee for the ongoing storage. I can see that easily.
B. Imagine the process is taken a little further, a whole set of transplantable organs is cloned and kept in some kind of long-term storage.
C. Imagine that B doesn't work because you can't freeze a whole organ and make it viable upon thaw. So instead, the whole set of vital organs of a human body is grown - just your torso area - no head, no arms or legs - so that the long-term storage is partially the body's own physiology. This partial body is kept in some kind of facility where it's given nutrition and maintained in other ways....
D. Next logical step - add the arms and legs and head, keep the body in a coma for long term storage.
People will begin to have a problem with this at C, even though C is functionally equivalent to A. D is obviously not acceptable, though if the body is intentially made brain dead while still in its artificial womb or is never brought out of a coma, it is functionally equivalent to A and C.... |
I already answered this, or so I thought.
Long term storage of organs is probably going to present a significant techical challenge, I don't disagree.
But here is the thing. You won't need to store them long term.
The U-M artificial heart team, for example, wants to have generic organs available to transplant in emergencies. You get them to the point they are relatively inexpensive to make and can be grown quickly, and it doesn't really matter how long they can be stored. That is when this will be a viable option.
At the time of the emergency use, you take a culture and clone the needed organ that will be patient specific.
Here is the rub though, as is much more often the case, you will have time to get that culture and wait for your organ to be grown. Much of what we can do now, in terms of sustaining life, will play into this nicely. Bypass surgury to patch your busted heart up, dialysis to replace your renal function, and so on. Combine this with more comprehensive screening, early detection of impending organ failure, and we can entirely avoid your scenario.
And really... it is a much easier task to grow a single organ in a lab than it would be to implement your option C, which would be a thing many people would probably have a problem with anyway, say nothing of your D. Your D is not a "next logical step", its a sci-fi horror plot!
Again, the much more plausible (say nothing of acceptable) route this technology will take is to develope fast methods of growing a full organ from scratch and working on ways to store live tissue for longer periods of time.
I personally think the storage problem will be worked out right along with the challenges of growing an organ in the lab. It will likely be some extension of tissue culture technology, and have nothing to do with freezing or cold storage (or your C or D!). I envision a mini version of the heart/lung bypass machine pumping nutrients into the organs in question, keeping them alive and in a functional state before transplanting them. Hows that for some speculative thinking!
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 11/13/2007 : 06:19:28 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dude
chaloobi said:
A. Imagine a service where you can pay to have your child cloned at his/her birth and the embryo cultured to a certain extent and then the stem cells frozen for future use. You pay for the initial process and a small fee for the ongoing storage. I can see that easily.
B. Imagine the process is taken a little further, a whole set of transplantable organs is cloned and kept in some kind of long-term storage.
C. Imagine that B doesn't work because you can't freeze a whole organ and make it viable upon thaw. So instead, the whole set of vital organs of a human body is grown - just your torso area - no head, no arms or legs - so that the long-term storage is partially the body's own physiology. This partial body is kept in some kind of facility where it's given nutrition and maintained in other ways....
D. Next logical step - add the arms and legs and head, keep the body in a coma for long term storage.
People will begin to have a problem with this at C, even though C is functionally equivalent to A. D is obviously not acceptable, though if the body is intentially made brain dead while still in its artificial womb or is never brought out of a coma, it is functionally equivalent to A and C.... |
I already answered this, or so I thought.
Long term storage of organs is probably going to present a significant techical challenge, I don't disagree.
But here is the thing. You won't need to store them long term.
The U-M artificial heart team, for example, wants to have generic organs available to transplant in emergencies. You get them to the point they are relatively inexpensive to make and can be grown quickly, and it doesn't really matter how long they can be stored. That is when this will be a viable option.
At the time of the emergency use, you take a culture and clone the needed organ that will be patient specific.
Here is the rub though, as is much more often the case, you will have time to get that culture and wait for your organ to be grown. Much of what we can do now, in terms of sustaining life, will play into this nicely. Bypass surgury to patch your busted heart up, dialysis to replace your renal function, and so on. Combine this with more comprehensive screening, early detection of impending organ failure, and we can entirely avoid your scenario.
And really... it is a much easier task to grow a single organ in a lab than it would be to implement your option C, which would be a thing many people would probably have a problem with anyway, say nothing of your D. Your D is not a "next logical step", its a sci-fi horror plot!
Again, the much more plausible (say nothing of acceptable) route this technology will take is to develope fast methods of growing a full organ from scratch and working on ways to store live tissue for longer periods of time.
I personally think the storage problem will be worked out right along with the challenges of growing an organ in the lab. It will likely be some extension of tissue culture technology, and have nothing to do with freezing or cold storage (or your C or D!). I envision a mini version of the heart/lung bypass machine pumping nutrients into the organs in question, keeping them alive and in a functional state before transplanting them. Hows that for some speculative thinking!
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I wasn't really presenting these degrees of clone use as an advocate, but to illustrate the point of why I thought the argument above was a rational one. "Next logical step" was meant to describe the next degree in the progression outlined, not in an advocacy or viability sense.
In any case, A is analagous to saving your baby's umbilical blood which is apparently a growing practice these days. I could see people doing this, but more likely the stem cells would come from a different source, like the developing fetus itself, assuming the child wouldn't be harmed. There'd be no need for a clone in this scenario. Cloning would only be necessary if there were no stem cells "on file" when the transplant and/or other therapy was needed. |
-Chaloobi
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Cloning Ban?
