Jesse

I came across an article a little while ago that suggested that a "quirk of primate cell biology" might make primates a lot more difficult to clone than other mammals:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993614

Tom Sawyer

I don't think that a clone would be any less of a person than a non-cloned person. That to me is why cloning humans is a lot more complicated than cloning animals; it's the moral issue of it, not the scientific one.

Even if, as Jesse says, there are quirks about primate biology that make cloning us more difficult than other animals, it's not something that we could not overcome. However, in order to overcome it, we would need to do a lot of experimentation and go through a lot of failures. Each one of those failures is a human life, who's existence is no less valuable than the like of someone who was born through natural means.

Even leaving the abortion issue aside, if we could get clones carried to term, there's a good chance that they would have a higher risk of medical problems and shorter life spans, like Dolly and others did (if I'm mistaken about this being the case in cloned animals, please let me know). Those are human lives, not animal lives and that makes it unacceptable.

Even if you don't agree with the moral view that that's not acceptable and think that it's better that they have some life rather than none at all or make comparisons to children with natuarally occuring birth disorders, there is a legal issue as well. If a clone develops a heart defect at fifteen, that's at least a hundred million dollar lawsuit against the company that cloned them (probably more) and insurance companies are going to know this before any cloning procedure takes place and the premiums needed to be able to perform human cloning would make it economically unfeasible.

Clones would be as much people as anyone else. That being the case, we can't take the risks with their lives that we can with the lives of other animals.

Lobstrosity

Well, at least this successfully fends off the claim that the true cause of our cloning difficulties is a lack of a soul (unless they want to claim that rhesus monkeys also have souls).

Answerer

So given that we evolved from monkeys(generally speaking), so do the christians think that monkey have souls?

:boohoo: :boohoo:

Wounded King

How much of a clone does he want?

Labs in china claim to have already produced embryos by NT that reached the balstocyst stage. But apart from a paper in a chinese journal I am unaware of any of this work being published. Ian Wilmut is currently applying to work on cloning human embryos for therapeutic purposes, so maybe he's the one to watch.

TTFN,

Wounded

Doubting Didymus

Terminology question: Does the term "clone" imply anything other than "creature with identical DNA"? Does it specifically imply 'is the result of a nucleus transplant' as well?

For example, if you nicked one of the four cells after the first two divisions in the zygote post-fertilisation, and kept it safe (in some nice tupperware or something), and used it to create an individual after the first individual was already alive for some time, is that a 'clone'? If so, isn't an identical twin also a clone, or is there a 'born at a later date' criteria thrown in there as well?

Wounded King

Id say that technically all that is required to be a clone is genetic identity. That is why biologists talk about cloning genes. A monozygotic twin is definitely considered a clone biologically.

Common usage is obviously a different thing and probably most peoples understanding of cloning technologies is more based on science fiction than biology.

TTFN,

Wounded