Freethought & Rationalism Archive

pz · 03-06-2003, 05:35 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Valentine Pontifex
Okay the epithelial cells don't have all the non-genetic structures and appropriate genes activated. But I would think that it is a safe assumption that the cloners have access to such material from other sources i.e. appropriate cells from another individual. Then the genome of that appropriate cell can be replaced with the genetic material obtained from the cheek cell.

Yes! That's exactly what we've been saying the current cloning technique is -- you take a nucleus from the individual you want to clone, and you insert it into an appropriate enucleated cell. The only appropriate cell is an oocyte.

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Of course that is, I am sure, well beyond current abilities. But is there any reason why that could not be done in the future if the people in the future wished to?

I don't understand. That's what we do now.

It hasn't been done in people, but there are no serious scientific obstacles to it. It would take time and practice and would have an extremely high error rate, but it could be done.

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Of course it would not be an "exact" copy of the cloned person if only because enviromental effects. How much difference would having different starting membranes have?

We don't know. I'm inclined to suspect quite a bit, as I see much of the range of normal variation (as opposed to the more stable constants of a species) in individuals being a consequence of extra-genomic information.

This is a hard subject to test. We don't have good quantitative tools to measure the extranuclear information present, and we don't have many ways to consistently manipulate the cytoplasm. It's not as discrete as the genome.

Valmorian · 03-06-2003, 09:59 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Kachana

He came back with a probabilistic argument to the effect that the set of the sperm and an egg is less likely than a fertilised egg to result in a human.

Well DUH. And a fetus carried to the third trimester has a greater chance of being born than one which has just been conceived. I don't see how this helps his argument at all, since he's simply arbitrarily picking what is acceptable and what is not.

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