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Science

Human clones priced at $50,000 440

A private consortium of scientists plans to clone a human being within the next two years. They claim they will develop ethical guidelines to determine when to clone and not to clone. This assumes the scientists that develop a technology are able to limit society's use of that technology. It also assumes scientists are the best judges as to whether society is sufficiently mature to use a given technology sanely. Both questions seem debatable to me. What do you think?
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Human clones priced at $50,000

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  • by FattMattP ( 86246 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @05:04PM (#468425) Homepage
    First, they ignore you.
    Then they laugh at you.
    Then they fight you.
    Then you win.
    - Mahatma Ghandi

    The world's human cloning community is approacing the third part.
  • for a clone of me? Couldn't I just get someone else (Natalie Portman comes to mind).
    Since your Natalie Portman clone would be your child, this would qualify as incestual child molestation and you would go where you deserve to go -- prison. Enjoy your new daily rape by Dragon and Big D.
  • by jafac ( 1449 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @04:13PM (#468429) Homepage
    I think I finally figured out the Catholic church's REAL problem with cloning;

    A person who is cloned, when they find out their origin, how easily will they buy-into the thought that God made them? Right now, scientifically-minded religious people can rationalize it by saying, "Nature made me, nature is God's tool." But not if they were cloned. God made the original. But the clone is different.

    How will clones think of themselves? Will they have a harder time accepting spiritual notions? Could they develop a psychological complex over the issue? What if the genetic donor was a terrible person? Will the clone feel predisposed towards that? What if the genetic donor has pictures posted of themself on the internet doing it with a goat? Can they sue the donor for posting what are for all intents and purposes, pictures of THEM?

    There are just a lot of issues we "natural born" humans seem to be taking for granted here, that might just cause some emotional distress for the clone.
  • but i have to wonder about all the health issues "dolly" the sheep suffered. premature aging, etc.

    if a clone has major health/lifespan issues, can they sue the researcher who created them for malpractice?

    after all, they cannot possibly have signed a waiver or agreement prior to the dd...

    small_dick@clone.factory bash> dd if=/dev/britney_spears of=/tmp/playtoy_001 count=1 &
    small_dick@clone.factory bash> mpg123 /usr/mp3s/britney/oops_i_did_it_again.mp3 &
    small_dick@clone.factory bash>


  • What with over 6 billion people in the world, and roughly 30% of them below poverty level (if I remember UN stats right), making people live longer will only make more people starve to death. That warrants some thought, at least.

    My existence does not cause others to starve. In fact, because I'm gainfully employed, I make things that help others to eat. If one person can create a surplus, two people can create twice the surplus. A productive person that lives twice as long will contribute twice as much.

    Destructive and lawless behavior makes people starve.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Every child requires a father. You're a human, not some kind of mold.

    And now, for $50K, she can become a mold.

    Sadly, we men are obsolete. If we're ever to be needed again, they can just take some old genetic samples out of the freezer.

  • What's to stop some company from hiring a staff of surrogate mothers to birth clones in some impoverished third world country to mass-produce kidneys and hearts for transplant?
    The same thing that stops some company from kidnapping kids off the streets and slaughtering them for spare parts.

    The thing that terrifies me about all the hype about cloning is that it reinforces the belief that clones are "manufactured" human beings, and do not have the same rights as "real" people. In the real world, clones don't melt into a puddle of green slime when they're killed... they are, by definition, as human as the donor from whose DNA they were fertilized.
  • Andrea Dworkin describes such a utopian future future of the "androgynous community" where the perceived "deviance" of sexualities disappear and we're all free to become what we already feel we are but repress.

    Hooray! Now we can get rid of sex forever!

    Thank you Andrea Dworkin!

    -konstant
    Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
  • by drudd ( 43032 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @05:12PM (#468450)
    Too bad it's still cheaper to do what Hitler did, which is make brothels for your SS troops.

    Steps in cloning:
    1) isolate a cell from the donor
    2) remove the nucleus/genetic material from the cell
    3) prepare a host egg by removing it's genetic material
    4) insert the material from the first cell into the second
    5) artificially inseminate the egg into a host mother or keep alive in a test tube
    6) wait 9 months

    The "old fashioned" method
    1) find two members of the "superior" race of opposite
    2) allow them to have some fun
    3) while not pregnant goto 2
    4) wait 9 months

    It's certainly easier to obtain a new "genetically" superior human via the second method. Besides, either method requires that you wait at least 12-15 years before the new human is at all useful. You cannot out-populate other races using cloning... fools with these sorts of delusions will unfortunately turn to the methods which you were so kind to point out: genocide.

    Doug
  • by FFFish ( 7567 )
    I think it's bogus.

    There's a cult that's been promising to do this. I can't tell by the article whether Zavos is one of the culties.

    If not, then it's certainly a promotional stunt.

    --
  • As I recall one of the largest problems with cloning is that the age of genetic material which you use as a source remains in the formed clone. I.e. If you take cells or other material from a fifty year old man and make a baby with them then the baby is genetically fifty years old when created and likely to die at an early age.

    It isn't as simple as it first appears.
    --

  • by Unknown Poltroon ( 31628 ) <unknown_poltroon1sp@myahoo.com> on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:00PM (#468461)
    Advanced Biolab: $25,000
    Tissue samples: $10,000
    Lobbying congress to make it legal:$100,000

    An endless supply of fresh CmdrTacos: Priceless
  • cloned humans will be used for slavery (sexual, physical, mental), body parts and experimentation

    Ummm.... Cloning = $50K + cost of having a baby. Why not just head to some third world country, deposit $100 and a bit of sperm, pay the normal cost of having a kid, and skip the $50K? More fun, eh? Or, just zip over to some such country and purchase/kidnap/etc. a "body" ready to use?

    Luckily, I can't say it happens all the time, but if one were inclined towards slavery and such, there are much easier and cheaper ways to go about it. Heck, there are a lot of people here in the states that will do almost any kind of experiment for a six-pack, carton of cigs, and $20.

  • The whole anti-abortion campaign is built on the fata morgana that life begins at fertilization. Guess what: clones don't need to be fertilized. The religious right will have a very hard time trying to argue against aborting clones. After all, where exactly is the difference between a clone and one of my blood cells I cultivated in a biochem lab?

    --

  • 1. On requiring government approval and study of every new frontier of science prior to proceeding with commercial exploitation.

    - Like I said, in an ideal world, we could do this, but we have lots of wackos in office, so things could be fought, fillibustered, and pork-barrelled to death. But it's still a good idea, rather than proceeding outside of the rule of law.

    2. Women giving birth "the old fashioned way".

    - not necessarily; for instance, something that could get a LOT of people's dander up, two gay men approach a woman to be a surrogate mother to twin clones of the gay men. . . I know that surrogate motherhood can be very complicated wrt emotional entanglements and such, but scenarios can arise where the birthing mother's role is trivial, and roughly equivalent to the "brewing vats" we know and love from Sci Fi B movies.

    3. On corporations "owning" clones.

    - you tell me to not be ridiculous; tell Amazon.com to not be ridiculous about 1-click shopping. I'm totally serious because they're totally ridiculous. This is why I firmly believe that we need a rock-solid legal foundation to build on before we go start cloning people willy-nilly.

    4. On the past success of animal trials.

    - the way I understand it, the animal trials do NOT indicate that there are no problems with this. 2% success rate isn't very convincing. Surely we'll overcome many of these problems, but as problems are overcome, new ones will arise (as it is with programming, once you get the GUI running, you can test the functionality of the engine, and as you fix GUI bugs, you discover previously hidden engine bugs), and who will be the guinea pigs when some fat pharmaceutical company bribes their way into government acceptance? The poor clonees. And when a clone gets sick, how will they be able to tell if they just acquired a "normal" illness, or if it is one caused by their unique origin - and who knows if the company that invented the process will have that information but keep it secret because it's proprietary? (and would expose them to legal action).

    I'm not saying it should never be attempted, never be done. I'm just saying that maybe we have to think about this a WHOLE lot more than we have. Stupid Arnold Schwartzenegger movies don't help much.
  • by Michael Woodhams ( 112247 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @07:00PM (#468483) Journal
    Here's a couple of reasons to be very wary of human cloning:

    It is physically hazardous, and the risk is bourn by the clone, not by the person who decided to have a clone. Risks include many pre-birth failures to mature, deformity, possibly abnormal aging.

    A child should be free to discover their own talents and weaknesses. This is much harder when someone else has taken your genes along the same path 40 years before. It is bad enough trying to live up to an illustrious parent without having identical genes. Imagine the angst of achieving little with the same genes as your famous clone parent. Note that this is different from identical twins, as they are the same age.

    Why should any such risks be taken by the clone for the benefit (ego or whatever) of another person? What valid reasons can there be to inflict such risks, when a normal conception can always be done more safely and easily?

    (One possibly valid reason could be if the individual has no viable germ cells - but still then only if the clone would be expected to be reproductively normal.)

    (I'm not some unreasoning technophobe, but there were no highly moderated comments giving the anti-cloning viewpoint, so I am posting to increase balance.)

  • I think it's a little late to cry about trying to stop the cloning of humans. The problem is that it's always too late to stop advantageous technology because once it's been developed, it will be used! I believe that in all of human history, there has been only one instance of a new, revolutionary technology being successfully supressed for the good of society (feudal Japan didn't like the idea of farmers with firearms being able take down samurai). The day we first saw that it was possible to clone a frog, human cloning became unavoidable.

    I also don't think that we should try to stop it; we will never know the true long-term consequences of this technology until we get there, and even though there are guaranteed to be some misteps, society will adapt and learn to live with human cloning as an accepted part of life. Society is not going to do something stupid and self-destructive simply because new technology gets involved. We learned to live with the Bomb, and with cable-TV, and we're still here.

    One thing I don't understand is the wacked out predictions that people have made about this. A clone is every bit a person as its donor- slavery and "organ factories" should be non-issues because we already have the technology to create them, yet it isn't being done. After all, someone could use in-vitro fertilization to make an embryo, remove the to-be brain cells, then implant it and use the resulting human body, sans brain, for organs. We don't see it happening, though. Then there are the people who say that humanity will stop reproducing sexually because we can clone ourselves. Right... who really thinks that people will stop doing something that's highly pleasurable because they don't have to?

    I think human cloning will only become commonplace if it provides a significant social advantage. If it does, questionable cloning practices will remain on the fringe, with all the other ethically questionable things.

  • This makes perfect sense as a business proposition! It could be hugely profitable - do you have any idea how long the waiting lists for organs are? High-demand=high margins, = high profits.

    The clones could be made using the transplant recipient's DNA, or possibly with the proper technological advances, the DNA could be altered ahead of time to produce tissue that's a close match. Whether this is legally considered murder (compared to shanghaiing someone in an alley and cutting out their kidney), depends on the laws of our theoretical impoverished third-world country. If we're talking about a freaked out religious fundamentalist government, they may be pretty easy to convince that a clone is not a human (the Taliban are already convinced that women aren't human).
  • Mod me down accordingly...

    Clones (We're All)
    I'm a clone
    I know it and I'm fine
    I'm one and more are on the way
    I'm two, doctor
    Three's on the line
    He'll take incubation another day

    I'm all alone, so are we all
    We're all clones
    All are one and one are all
    All are one and one are all

    We destroyed the government
    We're destroying time
    No more problems on the way

    I'm through doctor
    We don't need your kind
    The other ones
    Ugly ones
    Stupid boys
    Wrong ones

    I'm all alone, so are we all
    We're all clones
    All are one and one are all
    All are one and one are all

    Six is having problems
    Adjusting to his clone status
    Have to put him on a shelf
    All day long we hear him crying so loud
    I just wanna be myself
    I just wanna be myself
    I just wanna be myself
    Be myself
    Be myself

    I'm all alone, so are we all
    We destroyed the government
    We're destroyed time
    No more problems on the way

    I'm through doctor
    We don't need your kind
    The other ones
    Ugly ones
    Stupid boys
    Wrong ones

    I'm all alone, so are we all
    We're all clones
    All are one and one are all
    All are one and one are all
    I'm all alone, so are we all
    We're all clones
    All are one and one are all
    All are one and one are all

  • From my experience, scientists and those associated with such things tend to be the most 'morally recessive' members of society. All of my friends that are science majors and the like tend to be athiests. While they have morals, they don't see anything sacred about human life, and don't really see humans as being any different than any other animal. If something betters society as whole, it's what's best. It may be immoral by most people's standards, but they see it as being perfectly fine, since it's the loss of a few for the good of the many. It's a general steriotype that scientific people are often overly logical, and less emotionally in touch than, say, an art major or religion major. (All, of course, coming from a colegate's perspective - but then, colegates will be the scientists of the future, so this is pertinent.)

    In the light of that, I'd say that theologians, philosophers, and religous authorities would be best off deciding such things.

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • News Wire, August 7, 2239

    G.W. Bush v8 has announced his candidacy for President of the United States. The current president, G.W. Bush v7, has repeatedly called his opponent "nothing more than a feeble attempt at mimicing my stand on the key issues."

    But seriously, $50,000 is a helluva lot of money to 99.99% of the world's population. So the rich now not only dominate in one life, but they get to perpetuate themselves infinitely?

    If you think the Kennedys are a powerful political clan now, think about what they could be like with cloning at their disposal. Imagine the hiring policies of corporations who develop techniques to determine which particular clone donors make the best cloned workers. Think about the power not of death, but of life, misapplied.

  • What's to stop some company from hiring a staff of surrogate mothers to birth clones in some impoverished third world country to mass-produce kidneys and hearts for transplant?

    This makes no sense as a business proposition. The advantage of using clones as organ donors is that, if a person had a clone made, that clone would be a perfect match to its progenitor.

    Such is not the case for general-purpose clones, which are no better than anyone else as organ donors for the public.

    If some company just wanted to mass produce organ donors, they would find it vastly easier to just find a bunch of mothers in third world countries and pay them to get pregnant a lot. Or even easier than that, just go kill people as needed for organs. Why make babies when you can go murder fully grown humans for their parts?

    These crazy anti-cloning ideas never have any real basis in logic. The real argument against cloning is just that it's a very spotty procedure that barely works in animals -- until techniques are much improved, it would likely be pretty ineffective in humans. If you get 30 stillbirths and nonviable fetuses per success (and countless more attempts that simply failed in the test tube) it's just going to be an unnecessary risk to the mother.

  • There's an enzyme called telomeraese that adds telomeres onto the end of chromosomes. It's normally active in germ-line cells (the cells that produce sperm), cancer cells, and stem cells, I think.

    Even if this is a problem, there's a way around it.
  • The fact that you CAN do something may not mean it SHOULD be done, but it certainly does mean it WILL be done. The wisdom or lack of wisdom of scientists doesn't matter. The decision makers are business people, who are probably speculating right now on what form the cloning industry will take. Some thoughts...

    Reproduction: My guess is that some people with the vanity and bucks may have themselves cloned in lieu of having randomly variant children. Then consider all the yuppies who would pay top dollar for the cells of the bright and beautiful. Gifted child, hah! We got Linus Pauling here. Most of us will stick with the old fashioned way.

    Organ replacement: Growing an extra human body for spare parts will be far too expensive for the masses. Once the cloning scientists work out the mechanics, I believe they and the genome scientists will shoot for mass-produceable plug-and-play body parts and really good anti-rejection drugs. The organs will probably be grown in pigs, or some new animal engineered for the purpose. Like any other industry it will trend toward standardization, low cost, simplicity and maximum market. Do you want fries with those McKidneys?

    Food: Speaking of fries, let's face it, somebody somewhere is gonna grow big juicy chunks of cholesterol-free, ozone-layer-friendly filet mignon in a tank. At first it will probably be popular in high-class restaurants in Japan, where it will enjoy daily massages before being harvested. When the price drops to cruising altitude we'll all be eating it and loving it. I'm buying stock in Soylent Corp. as soon as they IPO.

    Wake up and smell the gravy!

  • According to Star Trek's timeline, I think the Eugenics wars headed by good 'ol Khan was started by this. If Ricardo Montalban gives up the dough, look out!
  • An *ideal* clone is just another copy of a human being. But we can't make those clones yet. The clones we know how to make have a one or two percent success rate -- meaning dozens of embryos are wasted before one goes to term. Many clones die early. And the ones that live, like Dolly the sheep, show some signs of premature aging as a result of shortened telomeres inherited from the original creature.

    Right now, to get a human clone, you're going to put the surrogate mother through an average of 50 miscarriages, with a high possibility of infant death, only to create a human being who may suffer progeria and die before they're a teenager. We are not ready to start cloning human beings.

    Once those technical problems are worked out, *then* we can talk about the psychological problems that the clone will go through, the sinister possibilities of cloning (like human organ banks), and the incredibly dangerous class inequity that will result when only the rich are able to clone themselves. But those worries, at least, are still a few years away.

  • Unless the clones egg comes from your own mother, it's going to have different mitochondrial DNA than you, and certainly be LESS like you than an identical twin would be.
  • Thank you for making my point perfectly. The normal way of obtaining new human beings is infinitely easier, cheaper, and generally more pleasant.

    Doug
  • I feel that it is my sworn duty as a charter member of the male (and sometimes geek) society to voice my ultimate and undying opinion for the good of all (man|geek)kind.... Can we clone Natalie Portman first? :^)

    --

  • I see what you're after, but let me reduce your last statement to its logical conclusion.

    Tonight, I could be making babies. Lots of 'em. Therefore, every woman I come into contact with and do not impregnate is as much murder as is abortion (of course leaving aside for purposes of this argument whether or not abortion is murder).

    Hmm..."I'm sorry. I have to sleep with you or else it'll be like I'm killing our unborn child!" would be an interesting pickup line to employ.

    I argue that intention is not relevant. If I "meant" to make a human and instead I made a dead body, that's not murder. To my mind, murder is defined as depriving a sentient being (or proto- or post-sentient being) of its sentience. (that means war is mass murder...not that I necessarily agree that it's always a crime...blah blah getting complicated...).

    Hmm. There's a cogent argument in there somewhere.
  • of course, that's assuming I could do as good a job of child-raising as her equally delightful parents ... And there you hit the nail on the head. Children are as much a product of their upbringing as their genetic makeup (IANAParent, but I have looked after other people's children).
    If you clone a child to replace a child lost to illness or accident, and try to raise that child to *be* a replacement for the dead child, you are going to end up with a very very disturbed child very quickly.
    Plus the whole idea of raising a child in a dead child's shoes creeps me out a bit.
    I'm sorry to hear about your wife. Perhaps the cloning techniques would be much more useful if they could "naturally gene-splice" your DNA with your wife's (mimicking the chromosomal interchange in convention fertilisation)?
    The previous line reads a bit cold-blooded, but is not meant in that way.
  • That's silly. You're characterizing all religious people as ignorant morons. That doesn't really speak so well of you, unfortunately. Try to keep an open mind.

    How do you think the Church explains children created with the help of fertility drugs? In vitro fertilization? Duh. Your post, although moderated up, shows only a lack of understanding and respect for others, rather than anything thoughtful.
  • ...in CYTEEN, is that so soon as a private consortium of scientists develops the ability to clone a human, they'll attempt to clone one of their own. Bring a dead genius back to life.

    I'm not sure if that's how it will play out in real life, but in Cherryh's hands, it makes a damn good story.

    hyacinthus.
  • If I piss everyone off and nobody wants to hang out with me, why the hell would I want to hang out with myself?

    : )
  • by TrevorB ( 57780 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @04:43PM (#468539) Homepage
    I believe one of the big controversies in the field of cloning at the moment is not the fact that exact genetic duplicates are being made, but rather that the science of cloning at the moment isn't exact. There have been a few reported incidents were clones died shortly after birth. As well, dolly the sheep had tolemeres [york.ac.uk] (DNA counters that specifiy how many times more a cell can devide) as short as her mother, which may imply that if you were to have a clone, the two of you would expect to die about the same year (your clones life expectancy would be shortened by your current life span.) There are several other aspects of the science as yet undetermined.

    Would it be ethical for a 50 year old woman to clone herself, only to find out 10 years later that her daughter had a life expectancy of 30?
  • by Cyclopatra ( 230231 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @11:12PM (#468540)
    I don't know what the 'health' concerns of a human clone will be.

    And we don't know what the health concerns of a human using the latest flu medication will be, either, but there comes a time when you have to stop testing it on mice and move to the human trials. "We don't know" is, to me, not a reason not to do something - how will we ever find out, if we don't try it?

    If most of the Christian Churches of the world find the issue spiritually troubling, I think it would be fair to acknowledge that others might find the issue a little less trivial than you do.

    I didn't say it was trivial (although I do think it is). But spirituality is one of those things that are so personal and individualized, that you know what? we don't make laws about it. At least, not in the US, where the original poster and I, at least, live (well, half the time I live there). So discussing whether cloning should be allowed "for spiritual reasons" is spurious.

    And you find the government studying the science before clearing it repugnant?

    No, I find the idea of sitting around, waiting for the gov't to say "OK" repugnant. I find the thought of the government getting into the bioethics business equally repugnant. It is not up to the government to make moral/ethical decisions for us. They're not good at it, and it's not what we put them there for.

    And no, since you keep alluding to it, I am not in any way connected to cloning research (I'm pretty sure there isn't an "industry" yet).

    Cyclopatra
    "We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore

  • There's an even chance it would produce a democrat as well.
  • Messing with geneitc diversity is not at all adviseable. You are setting yourself up for a massive die-off when any one "bug" gets into the population, from hosting on the same genetic stock again, and again, and again, and again, and again...... until it mutates to the point that it adapts to you so well, that you're all toast. Choose wisely, and choose different to avoid catastrophe. Besides, the universe will become bored of football if everyone chose a child with the Joe Monatana genes, and they ALL would. Nerds and all those different would be sexy in the land of Barbie and Ken. Go see GATTACA.
  • Many people seem to classify human cloning as the ultimate excess of science, worse than nuclear power, worse still than the Internet! I just don't see what the big deal is.

    I happen to agree with you that the opposition to cloning is grossly overblown. However, there are a few issues to consider which are legitimate which are at least cause for pause:

    • Building a "super"-race of humans - I don't want to invoke Godwin's law, but certain nefarious people would have loved to use cloning for evil means. What better way to wipe out "inferior" races than by overpopulating the earth with your own.
    • Spare parts - Somebody is bound to want to start cloning people for spare parts. If you clone yourself, you will have a full array of spare parts lying around that are a perfect match for you and which your body wouldn't reject. Leave the brain out of your clone so that it never develops consciousness and suddenly this becomes a very sticky ethical issue. You could end up with people owning other people (their clones) depending on how you look at it.

    I wonder what legitimate purpose anybody would have for cloning themselves. The "spare parts" concept is the only good reason I can think of, and even that seems creepy. People who would want to clone themselves for fun (and who have the means to do so) would scare me even more.

    Then again, traditional breeding merits equally great consideration (it is unfortunate that it rarely gets it).

  • absolutely!

    genetically manipulating ourselves is the next step in human evolution. its our turn to evolve ourselves! As a first step i would like to take my genes and clone myself a beard. but not just any beard... a beard made from my very own dna beard. a perfectly groomed and intelligent beard with legs. i would name him louis and he would follow me everywhere i go. we would take long walks in the park, me and my beard and we would go swimming and drink large frothy dark beers out of tall frosted glasses.

    my new best friend.

  • by spoonboy42 ( 146048 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @05:45PM (#468552)
    The scientific community as a whole has an excellent ethics record when it comes to biotechnology (IP notwithstanding). During the 1970's, when the first genetic engineering experiments were taking place, scientists discovered means of introducing genes for antibiotic resistance into live bacteria. These experiments were carried out in "bio-reactors" with triple air locks and negative pressure seals. Even then, the scientific community realized that they were dealing with potentially epidemic-inducing technology, and they completely stopped all further recombitant DNA research for a period of 6 months.

    During that freeze period, guidelines for safe DNA research were established, and special "research strains" of common bacteria were developed (E. Coli strains MM294 and GH5 being two prominent examples). These strains were disabled in half a dozen ways, including the removal of the slime layer that protects bacteria from digestive juices, as well as making the bacteria lycine-dependant (so that they are unable to synthesize proteins outside of the lab). Now, I use those very same strains in my high school Recombitant DNA class. I firmly believe that if the same sort of precaution and careful planning are taken with regards to cloning, we have nothing to fear.
  • by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @07:40PM (#468553) Journal
    5) A body with no head has no sentience.

    What about guy's that think with their crotch?!

  • Just use CPRM on the cloning instructions and nobody will be able to clone unless you consider it ethical and let them. Of course, this will all be legal becaue you'd be the first to clone a human so you can patent it, right? It doesn't matter if everyone knows how to do it, you own the patent anyway... Then you can sue anyone who clones without your permission by breaking the coding!

    The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...

  • Ethical committees worldwide will argue against this, then those that do think its a good idea passing it will have enemies in the long run. Money talks as we all know and for those who are familiar or remember Pablo Escobar, the billionaire drug kingpin, as a scientist what would you say when he flashes a cold hard million bucks to have a clone of himself. If any remember he had paid millions to someone just to have plastic surgery to look like him.

    Anyways aside from that I think you would have to have a big fscking ego to want a clone of yourself.

    Think of the downfalls involved:
    1) Your wife/girlfriend/ or husband/boyfriend will probably screw them to spite you afterwhich a court of law will decide [WHAT] in order to determine payment?
    2) Your clone robs a bank while your a college grad and kills everyone in the bank. (your face, likely your prints)

    Then the upsides:
    1) Train your clone to be your slave. Work for you, go to school for you, etc., while you partay
    2) Screw his girlfriend since you have the right, after all he is your clone.

    Pimping ain't easy! [antioffline.com]
  • This is just another example of how society fears new things. Every time a new groundbreaking technology has been developed there have been double digit IQ types who have been afraid of it. Why? Because they don't understand it and it isn't something they have been exposed to.

    Imagine if someone offered you a way of heating your home, cooking your food, and running your hot water heater. This method was cheap and easy to use however it had the nasty side effect of being based upon a highly explosive gas. Most people if asked this question would say "no way!" The problem is many of them are already using it, its called natural gas. You don't hear people complaining about it even though it is quite dangerous potentially. Why? Because they've grown up in a world that already uses natural gas and has learned to handle the risks involved.

    Cloning, genetic engineering, gene therapy, etc, etc are new technologies. Their ultimate impact upon our world is not yet known. But this is true of any technology. Most of the people who are so scared of them are simply fearful for lack of knowing and lack of brain power, not because they posess some insight into what these technologies will mean to the world.

    Human knowledge and human technology is increasing at an exponential rate. Genetic engineering provides us with a means to ensure that human intelligence can keep pace. This world is chock full of idiots. Anything we can do to raise the average IQ is a good thing. Of course these technologies can be misused, or used unwisely. That is the danger but it is a threat which must be faced because the potential gains are too great to ignore. If this technology can be used to make us all smarter then it seems to me that the potential misuse problem will be a self-correcting issue.

    Lee Reynolds
  • by Wraithlyn ( 133796 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @04:45PM (#468562)
    Finally we will have a real way of testing the whole "nature vs. nurture" debate.. make two clones (will Kodak cloning offer free duplicates?) and then measure how each is affected by their environment as they grow up.

    For example.. growing up in a caring, stimulating environment will likely form a strong, creative, and well rounded person.

    Conversely, growing up in a dark, sewage laden pit where passing primates hurl feces at you will produce a Slashdot troll, $cr|p+ k|dd|3, or possibly even a Republican.

  • A child should be free to discover their own talents and weaknesses. This is much harder when someone else has taken your genes along the same path 40 years before. It is bad enough trying to live up to an illustrious parent without having identical genes. Imagine the angst of achieving little with the same genes as your famous clone parent. Note that this is different from identical twins, as they are the same age.

    Oh puhleeze! It's exactly the same as when two identical twins are born, and one becomes really good at something, or really famous at something, and the other one SUCKS! (to put it bluntly)

    How is it any different? You got the same genes as your twin, and they are successful where you are not. No difference.
  • by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:02PM (#468566) Journal
    Some assumptions and conclusions:

    1) It seems to me that creating an object with no 'soul' is not unethical.

    2) All sentience is isolated to the brain.

    3) Sentience is equivalent to a 'soul'.

    4) It is not impossible to manipulate genes to produce a desired cellular mass.

    5) A body with no head has no sentience.

    6) It is possible to create a human body with no head.

    7) These bodies will likely be derogatorily called 'organ factories'.

    8) Organ factories are *not* unethical.

    Therefore we should start creating organ factories in order to increase our human lifespans.

    Dancin Santa
  • As Long as they don't clone Rosanne Barr, Jon Katz (sorry jon) or Barbera Striesand(sp?), they can Clone away!!!

    Kids, you better be good, or your parents will have a replacement cloned... No one would ever be the wiser...
  • by Proteus ( 1926 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @04:50PM (#468568) Homepage Journal
    While I agree that the many sociological gender distinctions present within our so-called 'civilization' are arbitrary and harmful, removing the physical gender barrier is not the solution.

    Our society as a whole revolves around prejudice -- even we Geeks tend to prejudice ourselves, say, against Windows users if you're a Linux zealot. If you remove a *source* of prejudice (i.e. gender) without removing the societal programming that causes the behavior, new sources of prejudice will develop. We may, perhaps, become even more shallow, aligning ourselves on physical differences like hair or skin color -- something we are still struggling with.

    I think our time is better spent working for gender equity than throwing away the biological division in gender.

    --
  • You don't see what the big deal is, I don't see what the big deal is, but I bet there's about 5 billion people who DO think it's a huge deal... I am sure they are trying to be as ethically cautious as possible initially, if only to get the world used to the idea. Once it is a proven technology, I am sure its applications will gradually become less restrictive.
  • ...gholas?

    [From the article]
    > injecting genetic material from the father
    > into the mother's egg, which would then be
    > implanted in her womb.

    So does that make her an axlotl tank?

    -Chris
    ...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
  • It's not as though we're struggling to populate this planet. We're still having a lot of problems coping with regular reproduction -- the last thing we need is a new way to make people. Once we're good at controlling our sex urges, then maybe we can be trusted to control our scientific urges.

    We can't even agree on what people make good parents -- who is going to parent young clones? Do we vote on it, and mysteriously elect George Bush? Do we use ebay? Or sell the clones to an American set of parents, kidnap them, and resell them to a higher bidder in the UK? Some parents don't seem to mind killing their regularly-conceived children if supporting them is too much work -- I imagine that it will be more difficult to invest your life in a clone.

    -Paul Komarek
  • And I don't understand why other people do. Whenever we use IVF on an infertile woman, the doctor will throw away, typically, 6 to 15 embryo's. That is 6 to 15 Human Lives, according to some interpretations. This seems to me to be much worse, ethically speaking, than cloning. If we look at what we are doing now with medical science, it is obvious that we are doing things a lot more dubious than cloning.

    Cloning doesn't harm anyone, and it does not destroy any life. It creates life. So whats the problem? There would likely be very low demand anyway.

    You know exactly what to do-
    Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-

  • If I have myself cloned, do I get to own my clone or is it licensed to me? Perhaps I should copyright my genes...

    MyopicProwls

  • What in the world does "ethical" and "moral" mean?

    It's just a self-serving philosophy that protects and serves the interests of human beings, and only human beings. It's a way for people to get along together in a civilized manner.

    Being ethical/moral doesn't mean it's "right". There is no such thing as being "right". We kill animals for food and for fun, is that "ethical"?

    So, is cloning un-ethical? Yes, it is not advantageous to current human survival. Why? Because it aims to perfect Homo Sapiens in many fantastic ways... Heath, height, ability, looks, strength, EVERYTHING! It has the potential to evolve us into a new species, which means today's "Homo Sapien" might not exist in 500 years from now.

    But, evolution is about the survival of the fittest. All it takes is 1 successful breeding to get the ball rolling. And then... how are we to stop it? Who doesn't want to have better looking, smarter, taller, stronger, faster, healthier children?

  • Anything that seem cutting edge or ethically touchy like the subject of cloning was probably done 10 years ago in some US military lab. We shouldn't be surpsired that this is coming to the surface now. However, I think society as a whole needs to determine the restrictions to something like this BEFORE we let scientists race ahead and make potentially dangerous mistake. Scientists working for the Manhatten project thought there was a small chance that the nuclear explosion they were about to create might start a chain reaction and burn off most of the earth's atmosphere but they went ahead and did it anyways!!!
  • > 2) Your clone robs a bank while your a college
    > grad and kills everyone in the bank. (your face, > likely your prints)

    Actually, identical twins (the natural equivalent of clones) don't have the same fingerprints. There appears to be a large random, non-genetic component to fingerprint formation, so it's doubtful that clones would share fingerprints.

    If, on the other hand, the police are looking for DNA evidence, you're hosed. It might be wise to insert some unique sequence markers into your clone's genome so that your attorney can prove (by PCR) that the DNA on the bloody glove isn't yours.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:05PM (#468600)
    A scientist is going to be highly objective in deciding whether it's ethical to collect your $50,000, and take a shot at finding out if his/her techniques work, and becoming famous as the first to pull off cloning a human.

    Sounds like a perfect recipe for lots of fuzzy "ethical/moral" rationalization to me...

  • Scientists are usually better judges that governments.

    -jfedor

  • How about learing something about the immunology? Viruses mutate
    much, much faster then humans evolve -- in terms of months of
    years. Human response to viruses is mostly immunological: you
    start getting it literally with your mothers milk and continue to
    do so all your life, and all your life it adapts to the current
    situation in the viruses gene pool. The thing you are describing can happen with rabbits infected by Australian scientists with a lethal virus -- 99% of the population dies, the resistent 1% survives and reproduces. I don't know whether you have noticed, but there are not many viruses that cause a 99% mortality of a human population -- not even Black Plague or Ebola. Not even HIV. Human evolution, even if it has not stopped, then it slowed down to the minimum -- at least in populations where the prereproductive mortality is less then 90%.

    Speaking of immunology -- some food for thought to you. It is known, that viruses coming from other species can more easily infect humans with immunodeficiency, then adapt to the host organism and that way be more proficient in infecting healthy people. So, how about killing all people with immunodeficiency? They present a threat to human population, don't you think so? They would die very quickly anyway in a non-pharmateucised society, wouldn't they?

    This example should warn you that talking about preserving human variability and returning to Nature's ways of dealing with things. Remember that "Nature's way" is killing 90% of your offspring and letting you live on average 30 years.

    On the other hand -- you have a point, though no clue (that is, you arrive at some reasonable point using wrong, dangerous arguments). It is dangerous to overuse antibiotica -- because the germs evolve faster than we are able to synthetise new antibiotics. But that problem is, AFAIK, very specific to the U.S.A., where, as I heard, doctors prescribe antibiotics by just any infection (even viral, though viruses are not affected by antibiotics) -- just in case the patient would die and his family would have sued him, and to prevent longer absence in the job (antibiotic therapy usually *is* quicker). In Europe, the doctors are much less apt to prescribe antibiotics; and I have taken them once or twice during my whole life.

    Best regards,

    j.

  • by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:05PM (#468608) Homepage Journal
    Many people seem to classify human cloning as the ultimate excess of science, worse than nuclear power, worse still than the Internet! I just don't see what the big deal is. A clone will be no more the same person as you than an indentical twin you never met. Since they are likely to grow up under completely different environmental conditions (eating different food, getting different amounts of exercise etc) it is likely that as they grow they will get less and less like you.

    Just what is the great danger of human cloning?

    --

  • "They claim they will develop ethical guidelines to determine when to clone and not to clone. This assumes the scientists that develop a technology are able to limit society's use of that technology."

    It also assumes that these so-called scientists who are fueled by either 1) research grants from corporations; or 2) the prospect of making huge amounts of money; are actually ethical at all, or that their ethics jive with the rest of the world which would not be making money from their monopoly on a wholly unique new field in scientific excess.

    I would argue cloning for the sake of providing a child to a couple that can not have children: is not ethical at all -- If my opinion meant anything in the grand scheme of things. These so-called scientists should be arrested the day they succeed.

    ""The irony about it is that there are so many people that are attempting to do it, and they could be doing it even as we speak in their garages.
    ...
    It is time for us to develop the package in a responsible manner, and make the package available to the world. I think I have faith in the world that they will handle it properly.
    "

    What this guy is saying - 'People can't be trusted to be responsible [with cloning], so we are going to jump on the bandwagon and be responsible; but don't worry about anything, because we have faith that everyone is responsible'.

    If it sounds ludicrous the way I said it, then read his quotes again; he literally makes that exact catch-22 argument.
  • 1 your clone will be much younger than you
    2 your clone will develop its own personality
    3 your clone will have similar capabilities as you and might actually enslave you. So if you are not a nice person, chances are that your clone will have a bad character as well.
    4 as far as I know clones still need a mother to grow in. After the embryo has been implanted, development is exactly the same as with normal embryos. So there's absolutely no need to treat them any different than you would treat normal children.

    So don't worry.
  • 1) Better scientists judge than polticians.
    2) It's gonna happen ANYWAY, so deal with it.
    People have the right to create life.
  • Pandora's Box.

    it's all well and good to discuss the benefits and disadvantages of something like this...but we do not, and cannot, know the full implications of human cloning. I think it's ridiculous to believe sci-fi views on the matter. No one is going to clone an army of uber-villains. But it's also ridiculous to believe that this isn't going to have a substantial impact on our worlds' culture.

    Take everything you know about life and reconsider. Mom, how are babies made? What is life, really? Do clones have the same rights as any other human? Will this create a new sub-class of humans? Most likely. Can scientists fully control cloning? And there are a thousand more unanswered and highly debatable questions that we have yet to ask ourselves.

    I agree that this is going to happen whether we like it or not, but i can't agree that this is going to be a good thing. Scientists are notorious for the proliferation of evil based on a sort of relative amorality. It becomes easy to abdicate responsibility for such attrocities as nuclear weapons, the hydrogen bomb, the holocaust (you think Hitler knew the best way to gas jews?), the list goes on. "It wasn't me!" the scientists cry. "How was i to know that this was to be used in such and such a way?" In truth, we are all scientists in some way, and, conversly, scientists are all members of the human race. And i cannot see a reason to let anyone evade responsibility for happenings as a direct result of their own actions. "The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray"

    The answer to the question of "should we clone?" is most certainly no. We simply do not know enough about ourselves to do this. Petty squabbles over Michael Jordan sneakers, Wars over extremely small plots of land, murder, rape, discrimination, theivery. I cannot tell you whether cloning is morally wrong. Frankly, i do not know the answer to that question myself. But, if you ask me if this society is ready for it...if you ask me if we are far enough along, not technologically, but socially...the answer is no.


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • by pb ( 1020 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @06:08PM (#468617)
    Clones are people, two!
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • by borisonanovitch ( 311297 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:08PM (#468621)
    Yeah, I'd rather see politicians and lawyers taking care of this stuff. They're much more ethical and are always looking out for everyone's best interests.
  • by Cyclopatra ( 230231 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:08PM (#468622)
    This

    He said it would "develop guidelines with which the technology cannot be indiscriminately applied for anybody who wants to clone themselves".

    sticks in my craw.

    Why shouldn't anyone who wants to be able to clone themselves? What is everyone so afraid of with cloning? I'm not talking about grow-me-a-new-body cloning (ie, having a clone made for organ donation, etc), but about allowing cloning for anyone who wants to raise a clone of themselves, regardless of whether it's their only way to have children or not.

    What is everyone so afraid of when it comes to cloning? If I want to have a child and can't find a man I consider suitable to be a father, why should I have to trust that sperm donors are going to be any better?

    The closest thing to an argument against this that anyone has given me is whether parents can make the distinction between their clones and themselves. However, my mother certainly couldn't have had any more trouble recognising that I didn't exist to make up for her mistakes if I had been her clone. We don't place any restrictions on who can have children (regardless of whether we ought to; that's another argument entirely, and one I have a different opinion on depending on what day of the week it is). Why should we place restrictions on how someone can have them?

    -Cyclopatra
    "We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore

  • what is interesting about this to me is that when these scientists talk, its clear that there are differences between cloning and natural conception. This is because the DNA is modified in adults and certain genes are turned on which affect the growth of the animals. The cloned animals are bigger at birth and I think eventually they may get bigger than the original too. This is an unknown dimension of cloning - the experience of the clone will be different because there are genetic differences between the donor and the clone. If this happens I guess we'll hear about how this effects life. sheep monkeys and cows can't talk about that stuff.
  • by Fixer ( 35500 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:09PM (#468628) Homepage Journal
    I hate to say it, but both questions are based on false premises. First, the premise that society is a real thing and not an abstraction. We are not all one mass. Some of us are very intelligent, some are not.

    Second, the premise that there are certain problems that shouldn't be solved by certain people. If a couple are infertile, and it is possible to create a child via cloning, then by all means DO SO (providing you can afford the costs of the treatment).

    Besides, as the failed 'Drug War' has so completely and utterly demonstrated, where there is demand, there will be supply (if it exists).

  • Just to be the Devil's advocate: What exactly is the problem with cloning a human being? I mean, ethically, what's the big deal? "Playing God?" I think we've already gone well past that point (recombo DNA, GMO orgtanisms, synthetic polymers that can mimic DNA). Robert McKinnell, a fellow Minnesotan who I believe was the first to sucessfully clone a vertabrate (a frog) once commented that what you get if you clone a frog is a baby frog. What we got when we cloned a sheep was a lamb. And when a human is inevitably cloned, we will have a baby on our hands and the ethical issues of what we do with that person will be exactly the same as they are with any human being. What threat is it that to any of us beyond freaking us out? So Bill Gates could make ten million copies of himself. BFD. He'd be broke, someone would have to pay to deliver and raise 10 Million kids (remember, valid or not that $50K pricetag is just the beginning. Have you seen the way college costs are going?!), and it'd still be a drop in the bucket of the world population. Anyone have genuine (not ridiculously speculative or merely based on population - those arguments are just as valid against screwing as they are against cloning) why human cloning shouldn't be legal? (Bonus points if you can clone Robert McKinnell's objection to human cloning!)
  • Mind or brain? Philosophers still debate about whether or not there's a distinction. :)

    Just being a pain the arce.
    -Michael
  • Women have the right to mate or not mate with whomever they choose

    I'm sorry; is this a biological fact?????

  • Except that we have no idea how to speed up the growth process, so you're talking 10-15 years before your clone is ready.

    I think there are - or will be - easier ways to create replacement organs than by growing a whole body. More likely, specific tissue types would be cultured from stem cells, then grown on a organic, dissolving scaffold.

    Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

  • Now that we have cloning (or are about to, in any event), it's clear that we need to remove some redundancy from the human species by abolishing gender. No longer is it necessary to have two separate beings for the purposes of propagating the species, so it's safe to do away with the separation between the sexes.

    I don't advocate abolishing only men, and I don't advocate abolishing only women. We should abolish both, in one fell swoop.

    Andrea Dworkin [igc.org] describes such a utopian future future of the "androgynous community" where the perceived "deviance" of sexualities disappear and we're all free to become what we already feel we are but repress. So many of the problems our society faces are because of these artificial attributes we assign to gender (which itself is completely artificial), but it's always been hard to get rid of gender before; the presence of biological "sexes" always breathed life into the outmoded and pernicious fact of gender.

    Now that we can get rid of sexes altogether, we can finally slay the vile gender beast and realize Andrea Dworkin's vision. I'm tingling in anticipation.
  • Thank you, finally someone with some respect for life and the power of God and the inherent respect that ought to be due. Too often are people bombarded with "respect belief" and "respect others right to choose" (to murder) and such without considering what is right. And this isn't one of those well what's right for me isn't right for all debates, anyone who goes down the track of arguing for atheism is in deep deep trouble. If someone wants to deny the existence of God without considering the infinite complexity of the world we live in and the perfection with which it operates (with the exception of human perversions (see above)) and then consider the probability that such a world complete with so many diverse organisms and relationships evolved from nothing with no guiding hand but that of chance, that's their problem - don't go spreading ignorance. People like that have either never been educated in the sciences or arts in order to understand the complexity and beauty of our being or have never taken a Probability course to understand the likelihood of this world just happening. think how many monkeys it would take banging on keyboards to develop not Shakespeare but the world and all its intricacies. It'd take a lot more monkeys than there have ever been and a lot more time than there has ever been. So anyway, there is a God, we shouldn't mess with him or his creations and that includes murdering the child he created for our sake, murdering the person who has given up just for the sake of his piffle pain (imagine that: how much does it take before your life has no meaning? I'd say life has meaning not in a being's level of pain but in his conscience and consciousness) and last but not least creating a man in our own image for our own satisfaction. To manipulate what we know about the workings of life to our own ends. This is just plain wrong.
  • You drive a hard bargain, but I guess this cloning business is just natural evolution. Fine, I'll sell my little sister for $10,000. Come on, that's cheaper than a good set of lungs now a days, a real steal! ;-)


    Disclaimer: I'd never sell my little sister for her organs. But I'm sure we could arrange a time-share/rental agreement. ;-)
  • actually the episode of the Simpsons where they send the two space ships into space and Lisa and Marge (and the baby) are on one, and Homer and Bart go on the other one (to the Sun) reminds me of this.

    Paully Shore, Rosie, etc ;-)
  • OK - say that human cloning works. Now you have this person who is both unique (in that he or she is the first clone), and non-unique (in that his/her DNA is someone else's) in the most profound way.

    Here's a kid who's developing years will be completely transparent to everyone: science, the media, and so on - our very own "Truman Show". I just don't know what all that would do to someone's mental health - going through life knowing that they were a successful science experiment.

    I suppose one could make the comparison with the first test-tube baby --- whose name I can't recall, so I suppose that says something about the long-term impact of her situation in the media --- and hope that things turn out for the best. However, aside from the ethics of actually performing the cloning, there are the ethics of taking on the societal responsibilities after a clone has successfully been produced.

  • Cloning is really hard. Really really hard. This is an important thing to remember. There were hundreds of dolly-clones implanted and one ended up viable.

    We have no method for specifically preventing the differentiation of a specific type of cell. It is not likely that there is a chemical or drug-related solution. That means that you have to clone someone, and cut off it's head at some stage.

    If you do this in Utero, then you have big problems with bringing the quasi-child to term. Big problems. Chances are you couldn't prevent miscarriage. Even if you could, you would be stuck with a bunch of baby-sized organs in a rapidly mouldering corpse. This helps no one.

    One more thing: Statement 2 is flawed. There is no way to prove that all sentience is located in the brain. The body is full of nerve cells, and there is considerable evidence that some of the other ones do wierd things. Also, the immune system has a memory of sorts, so may be considered a type of extension to intelligence, all of this stuff is difficult to meter.

    Stop watching Star Trek. You can't make clones that start life at the age of twenty.

  • by drudd ( 43032 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:13PM (#468675)
    I think the real problem is that people associate cloning with genetic engineering, and have been watching too many movies where the evil scientist creates a race of super whatevers that wipe out all of us puny humans.

    I always find it hilarious when movies create clones who are already 30 years old and share memories with their genetic twin. The actual act of cloning is rather dull compared with hollywood's take on the subject.

    Cloning is really only slightly different from normal reproduction: all chromosomes are taken from one individual, rather than mixed from two.

    Some unethical things can be done with cloned humans, like harvesting their organs, but then laws that prevent you from enslaving your neighbor's child and doing the same thing will apply.

    Doug
  • If you read the whole post, you'll find that I think there are places where the technology is useful and a reasonable application.

    What I object to is the cloning of the entire being. I think THAT is where we should just not bother to go.
  • I appreciate your candor, but I certainly disagree with your conclusion. Any ethical system that does not provide for the survival of its adherents is a faulty system. It's nice to imagine a world where everybody cooperates with one another and lives in peace and harmony, but unfortunately it only takes a very very small number of people (like one) who want to take advantage of that situation to turn it into a totalitarian bloodbath.

    In my ethical structure, any person who would not kill to protect themselves, or their family, is making a serious error in judgement. People who say that it's wrong to kill, and send other people to do the killing for them, are ethically bankrupt.

    For a microcosm of this situation, I consider my relationship with the orthodox Jewish rabbi next door. From sunset on Friday through sunset on Saturday, adherent Jews are not permitted to do any "work" (which is a formally defined concept in their faith...they may not turn lights on and off, they may not turn on the oven, but they can serve food and travel a certain distance...very complicated stuff). Anyhow, oftentimes he and his family will host a dinner for members of his synagogue (sp?). If for whatever reason dinner is not ready by sundown, he or his wife will often come to our house and ask whatever Gentile opens the door to come help them. I certainly don't mind helping out, but I'm continually troubled by the ethical compunctions of acting as a "cat's paw" for somebody else. If it's wrong to work on the Sabbath, isn't it wrong to get somebody else to work on the Sabbath for you? Why is it OK to preserve yourself from "damnation" (or the equivalent Jewish concept) by "damning" another person?

    Discuss. (I think I have a way to let the Rabbi off the hook, but I am interested in other thoughts...)
  • "They claim they will develop ethical guidelines to determine when to clone and not to clone."

    I imagine something like this in small black print:
    *note- ethical guidlines may be waived for a $50,000 fee

    -gerbik
  • This argument is morally corrupt in my mind.

    I have the technology to build an H-bomb, and the material. So I go build one and use it.

    I must have been ready!?!

    Exchange the H-bomb for cloning. It's a simple argument, but I think/believe the technology you are talking about is JUST as influential.

  • by 037 ( 309843 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @09:31PM (#468697) Homepage
    You are wrong.
    Sorry.

    It is no longer feasible for the human race to react to virii and bacteria through evolution. They do that better than us. Micro-mutations inside of a generation can cause some ability to react better to parasites such as these. However, in the space of one human generation, the number of bacterial (to say nothing of virii which are potentially faster) generations many many orders of magnitude beyond that. Probably 7 or 8 orders of magnitude.
    Also, for humans to respond through evolution, humans have to be subject to natural selection. This is not a good situation. Even if nature is cleverer, we are much nicer to the old, the weak, and the genetically disadvantaged. For us to react well to disease we would need to kill or sterilize Stephen Hawking (or allow him to die) to preserve "genetic strength" this is the type of thing that "clever" nature does. Please remember that nature is mean and horrible, and as much as you seem to hate antibiotics, they are heaps better than the "clever" solution.
    Everyone tosses the word "natural" around as if it is necessarily superior. Natural is getting torn apart by lions. Natural is having fleas for your whole life. Natural is bad. Clever it's not. Please reflect on thoughts like this.

  • What about viruses? We as humans are constantly the prey to the ever pesistant predator in the form of viruses. It is generally accepted (perhaps wrongly??) that genetic diversity is what helps human kind to keep ahead of the game. As viruses mutate, so we mutate, so they mutate, etc. Those who live in western society already exist in a higly santitised, over pharmaceutacised world that makes them vulnerable to bacteria and viruses when they go abroad - malaria tablets and the lot. Will we not simply be producing clones of people fed on anti-bacterial impregnated chopping boards with little or no defences to the onslaught of what nature has to throw at us. PEOPLE OF THE WORLD - THIS IS BAD!! WE ARE NOT CLEVERER THAN NATURE. Honestly. I think that anybody who thinks this is a good idea has seriously let their ego get the better of them, and a society supporting this has really lost it's way. Perhaps we should all turn of our computers and televisions and think seriously for once what the implications of this are for everyone, not just comsumerist westerners, but the whole of human kind.
  • Are you trying to be sarcastic or just disturbing? "Po folks?" Being poor isn't a crime. Human rights aren't doled out based on how much money we have. Most poor people are working and trying as hard as they can to make ends meet. Very, very few are living off welfare and having as many kids as they can to get more money from the state. There are people like that but to use them as some kind of stereotype is terribly inaccurate. This kind of perception is created by politicians for their own gain, not because its true.

    As for selective breeding my whole point is that genetic engineering makes that irrelevant. Take cystic fibrosis for example. The gene responsible for it has been known for some time now. There are genetic tests for the defective gene. I would recommend genetic tests for people who want to have children, but I would not agree with the idea that these tests should be used to prohibit anyone from having children, or that they be viewable by employers/insurance companies. It won't be too much longer before gene therapy will be used on conditions such as cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, etc. The step after that is detecting and correcting these genetic problems in unborn children.

    I still think human stupidity should be eliminated because stupid people vote if for no other reason. Politicians do stupid things because they're trying to keep stupid people happy. But imagine if the people they had to keep happy were brighter and more aware of the implications of the issues at hand. Wouldn't that be better? Your comment about someone working at 7-11 is valid though. I don't know what to do about that. Actually come to think of it that problem doesn't really exist? Why? because the number of jobs which a person who isn't too bright can do are dwindling. Once upon a time manual labor was the backbone of the US economy whether you were talking about manufacturing or agriculture or mining or what have you. That isn't true today. Now we've got huge tractors and combines and robotic assembly lines and continuous miners. Jobs at which someone can earn a good living are becoming more and more technical and skilled all the time. For the most part our society has been able to keep up with this because of improvements in education, but that won't go on forever. How many people understand how modern technology works? For most people a computer is a genie, a magic box that is as mysterious as it is powerful. They're smart enough to use for word processing and web browsing, but few of us are smart enough to understand them well enough to program and design them.

    If we don't do something to improve the average IQ of humanity then you'll simply have an aristocracy based upon intelligence. The beginnings of that are already appearent in our culture right now. Once upon a time ability was more or less evenly distributed. If you were poor and living on a farm someplace then how smart or determined you were usually didn't matter that much because your situation didn't provide you with any opportunities to utilize that intelligence or ability. This began to change after WW-II with the GI bill. Men who would otherwise never see the inside of a college classroom were going to college. It's continued from there with programs and grants and you name it to the point that just about anyone with the desire and ability to make something of themselves can do so. The end result of this is that our society is becoming something of a meritocracy. Not completely of course but close enough that it has an effect upon the types of people you're likely to find at different socio-economic strata. Throw in women's lib and you've got a pretty good formula for smart/able people meeting, marrying, and having smart/able children.

    Jump forward a few generations and what do you have? A society where those born into high income families are also almost always born into high ability/intelligence families. The problem with this is that this class of people would have rights and freedoms that would be denied to others. They would control everything and the rest of the people would essentially be serfs.

    I hate to think we've come all this way only to return to a world reminiscent of a dickens tale. I'd like to think that our future is a bright one.
  • But it's still a good idea, rather than proceeding outside of the rule of law.

    "Outside of the rule of law"? You said you live in the US. In the US (and everywhere else I've heard of) whatever is not illegal is legal - something's not "outside of the rule of law" just because there aren't any laws about it. I, personally, would much prefer the government keep its sweaty little paws off as much of the world as possible - because in my experience, the only thing we can trust the government to do is screw things up.

    not necessarily; for instance, something that could get a LOT of people's dander up, two gay men approach a woman to be a surrogate mother to twin clones of the gay men. . .

    I will never agree that we should have regulations to allow narrow-minded people to cuddle up to their bigotries to keep themselves warm at night. We don't make laws because "some people aren't comfortable with it"; we don't make laws that say "you can't do this, because we don't like you". (On a side note, I've already promised to be a surrogate mother for two gay men; you picked a sore spot with me here)

    I know that surrogatemotherhood can be very complicated wrt emotional entanglements and such, but scenarios can arise where the birthing mother's role is trivial, and roughly equivalent to the "brewing vats" we know and love from Sci Fi B movies.

    And? I fail to see why this is a problem. If that's the way that all parties are comfortable, so what?

    On corporations "owning" clones.
    - you tell me to not be ridiculous; tell Amazon.com to not be ridiculous about 1-click shopping

    To reiterate, we're not talking about people being grown in vats here. We're talking about women giving birth to babies who just happen to be genetically identical to their mothers (or fathers).

    We don't worry about corporations "owning" test-tube babies, or even the embryos left *after* the ones they've implanted take. This is the same sort of thing. It's a new kind of IVF, not Forty Thousand in Gehenna.

    Cyclopatra
    "We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore

  • No, the real danger is that those with lots of money and power will never die.

    I do not believe this will ever be the case. There is still the issue of telemere degeneration. Cells in the body are just going to kick the bucket in accordance with a bell-shaped distribution curve over time.

    Beyond that, How do you reconsile the transplanting of one's defunct brain? Do it sectionally???

    The biggest issue, however is that our general unhealthy lifestyle will catch up with us no matter how many transplants we utilitize? Are we to do a full-body capillary root-canal?

    I see this as a sort of "second chance" on life.. A person in their 20's won't necessarily live a healthy life, and they, of course, pay for it in the 40's and beyond.. It might be possible to correct "some" of their geneticial defects and unspectacular life-style.

    Beyond this, the growth of blood could be an enormous life-saver at hospitals.. Just think.. I'm not donating blood, but the DNA for the synthesis of blood (since the telemere's wouldn't allow an unlimited supply of blood to be synthesized from the same sample indefinately).

    -Michael
  • by Anonymous Coward
    I'll agree that creating organ factories is not unethical, but increasing a human lifespan drastically might be. What with over 6 billion people in the world, and roughly 30% of them below poverty level (if I remember UN stats right), making people live longer will only make more people starve to death. That warrants some thought, at least.
  • by Cyclopatra ( 230231 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @10:50PM (#468746)
    But it's also ridiculous to believe that this isn't going to have a substantial impact on our worlds' culture.

    I didn't say it wouldn't change things. I just don't see why that's a reason to be so Chicken Little about it.

    Take everything you know about life and reconsider.(...) What is life, really?

    Is this a question you claim to have the answer to? Do you think cloning is likely to change that answer?

    If you answered 'yes' to both of the above questions, you don't have the answer yet. Come back when you have a theory that can't be shaken so easily.

    Do clones have the same rights as any other human? Will this create a new sub-class of humans? Most likely.

    Please tell me how you can tell the difference between someone who is a clone and someone who is not. Quickly, walking down the street or talking to them in a bar.

    How can you discriminate against or deny rights to a class of people when you can't determine who its members are? How will this "create a new sub-class" of humans, unless they somehow engineer all clones to have, say, purple spots on the middle of their foreheads (which, before you go getting all pseudo-philosophical or hysterical about genetic engineering, we can't do yet)?

    It becomes easy to abdicate responsibility for such attrocities as nuclear weapons, the hydrogen bomb, the holocaust (you think Hitler knew the best way to gas jews?), the list goes on. "It wasn't me!" the scientists cry

    Notwithstanding Godwin's Law [tuxedo.org], you've just abjured responsiblity yourself, by foisting it all off on those evil, mean scientists who are obviously out to sell all our souls to Hell with their Godforsaken investigations. This kind of thing is nothing more than Frankenstein revisited. If you want to be a Luddite, fine. But why drag the rest of us down into this morass of fear? Some of us prefer to look on every new discovery as an opportunity, instead of a reason to be afraid.

    Cyclopatra


    "We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore

  • by meridoc ( 134765 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:42PM (#468758)

    There have been studies of identical twins who were separated at birth (I think there was a special on "20/20" or "Dateline" a few years ago). These twins never knew they had a sibling until they had kids of their own. The twins were astonishingly similar in habits, likes/dislikes, career choices, etc., even though they had grown up thousands of miles away from each other.

    Now think of things in terms of this new, cloned kid. The saying "You are original, just like everybody else" won't be so funny anymore.

    He or she will know exactly what they will look like later in life, what kinds of grades they're capable of in school, what kinds of jobs they'll be predisposed towards. They will be constantly compared to, well, themselves (about 20-30 years down the road). What if they don't live up to the standards already set by their parents, who set them by simply going through life?

    Additionally, this kid will know what diseases or habits he/she will probably contract later in life, be it balding, tendancy for alcoholism (I'm not sure if I believe this study or not), diabetes, cancers, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, sickle-cell, (etc.), which all have genetic links.

    Basically, this kid's whole future will already be known. Where's the excitement in that kind of life?

  • by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:44PM (#468760) Homepage Journal
    Nature is much more robust than people think. It requires quite an ego to think that the simple-minded meddling that humans are doing now with genetics could achieve anything that billions of years of evolution could not.

    --

  • by ubernostrum ( 219442 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:29PM (#468783) Homepage

    OK, you are approaching the brick wall of reality at speed...prepare for impact...

    There are a couple of problems with the reasoning here. First of all, there are non-biological differences between the sexes. I know that doesn't fit with some people's ideologies, but it's true. There's a fascinating field called evolutionary psychology that does nothing but look at stuff like this, and it sure looks like there's more difference between a man and a woman than one has a penis, one has a vagina and breasts, and hormone ratios are different. Men and women display different social behaviors and mating instincts, not because it's "artificial" or imposed on them by society, but because in evolutionary terms it is to their advantage to do so. These behaviors exist in other species that do not have societies and they have existed in humans since before we had societies. Why are women on average more picky about who they'll have sex with? Because in physical terms sex is a huge risk for a woman. It involves nine months of carrying the fetus, the near-death experience that is childbirth, and then nurturing the child with her milk (yes, Dad can help raise the kid, but his nipples aren't functional. Sorry.). Why are men generally "easier" and more promiscuous? Because sex isn't that much of an investment and propagates their genetic material. These are behaviors that split neatly on gender lines and are not "artificial"; they always have existed and always will exist in Homo sapiens. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Many many many behaviors that people of certain ideologies are fond of attributing to "society" or throwing around words like "artificial" and "imposed" can be explained just as simply, if not more so, in terms of evolutionary advantage.

    Allow me to recommend a book by Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works [amazon.com]. Yes, the title is rather presumptuous, but it's a good read, and it'll give you a new view of just what ideas are "outmoded" and "prenicious".


  • by tgibbs ( 83782 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:30PM (#468785)
    What's to get upset about? It's just a twist on in vitro fertilization, which people have been doing for a long time. I can see lots of reasons why people might want to do this (aside from the occasional case of narcissism).

    I lost my wife before we had a chance to have children. It would be wonderful to have a daughter like her. She was a delightful person--the world could use another one like her (of course, that's assuming I could do as good a job of child-raising as her equally delightful parents). I am sure that there are parents who have lost children to accident or disease who feel the same way. Why roll the genetic dice again when you already had a winning throw?

    The "unique identity" thing is a non-issue. After all, identical twins happen once in awhile, and they manage just fine. The fact that they are not genetically unique doesn't stop them from developing their own unique identities.

    From a biological point of view, I suppose that we could get concerned about some kind of genetic monoculture. What if there is a fad for clones of some famous person, and everybody wants to have one? But clones are going to be a bit too costly for that to be an issue for quite a while. And face it, the one thing that we are *not* lacking on this globe is human genetic diversity. We can tolerate a lot of cloning while still having more genotypes in circulation than have ever before existed at one time.

    I suppose there is the problem of the clone of the famous person growing up under the pressure of inflated expectations. Probably that clone of Einstein will decide to become a performance artist just to defy everybody's assumptions. But again, this isn't really any different from the problems faced every day by the sons and daughters of celebrities. It isn't easy, but they get by--occasionally, they even surpass their illustrious parents.

    I think people are afraid of cloning, not because of any real threat of cloning itself, but because they perceive it as the leading edge of genetic modification, and that is indeed scary. At some point in the future, we are going to start changing our own genes. And the technology will soon be moving faster than our own generation time, which means that we will sooner or later introduce some sort of disastrous genetic "bug" that causes cancer, dementia, or worse, later in life. And it will be in a whole bunch of people before anybody realizes the problem. There will doubtless be tragedies to make thalidomide and diethylstilbesterol look like small potatoes. But it's not really cloning that is the leading edge--it is gene therapy. And that can't be stopped. Who is going to tell somebody that they aren't *allowed* to cure sickle cell? Or Huntington's Disease? But the concept of a genetic "disease" is unavoidably slippery. Once something becomes fixable, it automatically becomes a disease. Find a gene for perfect pitch? You've defined a "poor pitch perception" disease! Let's cure everybody!

    I don't think it can be stopped. I don't even think it necessarily should be. Sometimes, you just have to weather the storm....
  • by ndfa ( 71139 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @03:37PM (#468816)
    OK so i am not at an expert on the field (if you are comments would be good). But here is what i am thinking, what happens when ppl. get to decide who to clone and how much to clone ? The idea would be (from what i recall about a discussion of this in Internation Times) that you have a kid, and you can at a later date get a clone of it... Now this in itself does not sound that bad right, but it does lead to the question that what happens when someone has a damn smart kid/a great soccer player/or ms. portman ? ? I mean if you think about it seriously you are going to be able to get rid of a lot of genetic fuck ups! This can then go along with the idea of being able to stop a birth of someone who might be born with a desease, hell just use a clone of a GOOD baby! This gets rid of the fact that you might have a kid thats not PERFECT! Damn, is it not natural for there to be differences/weaknesses in ppl... and is this mutation not essential ? ?

    Then of course the artile mentions that ----"The effort will be to assist couples that have no other alternatives to reproduce and want to have their own biological child, not somebody else's eggs or sperm", Well sadly thats life and you ahve to live with it... i know a lot of couples that could not have kids and went with the idea of adoptions, and are doing fine.

  • by jafac ( 1449 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @04:02PM (#468851) Homepage
    it remains to be seen whether the existence of nuclear weapons has been a "good thing".

    After the nuclear strike on the dawn of world war three, remind me to clear the rubble off of my broken, burned arm, and smack your charred, fleshless skull upside the head.
  • by tokengeekgrrl ( 105602 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2001 @04:09PM (#468855)
    "The irony about it is that there are so many people that are attempting to do it, and they could be doing it even as we speak in their garages."

    Does little Johnny or Susie not have any "real" friends?

    No problem!

    They can clone themselves a new best friend in the
    garage over the weekend with the Home Cloning Kit!

    Now on sale at K-Mart for only $49,999.99!

    - tokengeekgrrl
    "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions

"Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"

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