Cloning

You have to be more specific to elicit a response, real life.

You still have to be more specific or I don't play.

neologist wrote:

Most of you folks are missing the point of what real and I are trying to say. How many broken bodies and psyches are you prepared to leave bobbing (perhaps literally) in the wake of this wave of technology?

It is very interesting. Some people are appalled by the entire idea of cloning, because it might not be perfect, and might produce defective humans.

On the other hand, many of these same people are horrified that a woman, after her amniocentesis shows severe defects in the fetus that she is carrying, chooses to abort the pregnancy, and are attempting to deny the woman that right.

How do you explain that?

How would you react if you cloned a human who, after being born naturally, displayed some terrible defect of health or character as a result of imperfect cloning, but had normal intelligence? What would you say to that person when they realized how they came to be?

Why is this topic even here?

All the countries that have legalised cloning have pretty much agreed on banning reproductive cloning, the very cloning you speak of here.

Wolf_ODonnell wrote:

Why is this topic even here?

All the countries that have legalised cloning have pretty much agreed on banning reproductive cloning, the very cloning you speak of here.

Worth repeating, I think.

'Twas the second part I meant to repeat. Didn't even notice the first.

The reason I think the second part if worth repeating is that the issue is commonly portrayed as a false dilemma: either we submit to a future in which humans are cloned and grow to adulthood to satisfy the whims of science or we shut the door on cloning altogether.

The issue is a great deal more subtle than that. In my opinion, there is no reason why cloning for the sake of reproduction should ever be done. (But, then, I'm an ardently ZPGer -- if not an NPGer -- and I don't see the point in breeding people when there are perfectly good unwanted children out there any more than I see the point in purposely breeding dogs and cats when there are perfectly good unwanted dogs and cats out there.)

At the same time, I don't see a blastula as a sacred, untouchable entity -- particularly when those cells might be able to ease the suffering of people who are already out there experiencing the world. And I especially don't see the point, as many people do, of throwing away cells that already carry this potential rather than using them. If using cells from existing embryos for experimentation is disrespectful, surely incinerating them is doubly so.





That better?

They are not completely separate issues, especially from a regulatory point of view -- though I admit that I did wander a little far afield. Nonetheless, the same folks who object to using ES cells from aborted fetuses also object to any sort of cloning techniques that could create a viable embryo for the same purpose. Since the moral objections to both are frequently on in the same -- that is, it is wrong to create human life only to destroy it/experiment with it -- the two issues are intimately connected.