Scientists Make First Embryo Clones From Adults
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
These egg cells don't grow on trees. They must be harvested from human beings. Egg cell harvesting is a complex process, requiring the donors (young women) to take experimental drugs with possibly harmful long term sideeffects.
If we are using human egg cells for experiments, or at some point in the future, for curing old people, aren't we exploiting the young woman we take those egg cells from?
e: I hate to complain about downvotes, but did totally miss your point here or something? I think this is a good conversation to have, and I was replying in good faith.
There is a significant proportion of feminists who are against prostitution and pornography because it exploits women's bodies, and your statement can be used as a potential argument to dislodge their beliefs.
On the other hand, it is more unacceptable to suggest at times a person might not be always fully rational, and even more unacceptable to generalize this to a group of people. So your statement has brought up a contradiction in the beliefs of a subset of people, which you're not supposed to do.
I'm sure that your comment is in good faith, and I'm not one of the ones who downvoted you. I only want to show you that, from this point of view, "informed consent" is not a good enough excuse for how these women are being used. (And I would also question whether these girls are truly "informed" about what's really going to be done to their children.)
> An informed consent can be said to have been given based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, implications, and future consequences of an action.
Of course, as you say:
> I would also question whether these girls are truly "informed" about what's really going to be done to their children.
This is completely fair, and I agree coercion or enticement may preclude informed consent. I know that this can be a sensitive issue, but I believe in working towards this goal rather than avoiding the issue. For instance: many people donate organs and tissues, but it is (generally speaking, and in the USA) illegal to sell these services. Thanks for the rsponse.
The sucess rate of an IVF is relatively low, and the procedure to extract the ova is complex, inconvenient and not risk-free.
Ovaries are overstimulated to produce more than one egg. They are all collected and fertilized, but, usually, only two or three are implanted at a time, to balance the low success rate and the non-null chance of multiple pregnancy (that's how octuplets are made :\).
If a successfull pregnancy occurs before running out of embryos, the mother/couple may donate the remaining embryos for research (that's how it works in Belgium, at least).
As such, it would be unethical to attempt to create a possibly failed human clone.
But since by definition we would need to perform experiments on non-consenting humans to perfect the technique, there isn't any ethical way to get to there.
Note that they haven't managed it yet on monkeys (surprised me).
Prediction: when it's been working perfectly on all primates for quite a while, these laws may start to change... perhaps at first for special cases, such as infertile couples (or a clone of an infant who died of non-congential causes - I don't know what to make of that, it's simultanesouly creepy and tugs at my heart-strings). IVF programs have similar restrictions.
China will be the first to clone humans because they don't have our ethical restraints. Since China already is interested in eugenics, its easy to infer that they'll be interested in cloning geniuses.
It will get interesting if a large population of geniuses in China starts to tip the technological and military balance and whether other countries would feel compelled to respond.
If all you needed to get an edge on other countries was a bunch of intelligent people, that would be known for a long time and India and China would be leading the world by now. But that's certainly not sufficient.
However, wouldn't you agree that China is getting closer to the US in technological sophistication? How does that picture look if a much larger proportion of China's population is geniuses?
I'll admit, I don't have enough experience to say whether or not that's true, but the person who was making the argument to me had lived in China.
There's a article linked to below in the comments that talks about cultural differences and how it effects the ethics of cloning.
Original source publication:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1934590914...
Identical twins are "natural" clones. They are genetically identical. (Barring mutation.)
People take issue with "artificial" or reproductive cloning.
If you reproductively cloned an identical twin, you would end up with three genetically identical people. One is just born later, with a more certain outcome.
[Edit: I am not advocating anything. This is a descriptive observation of genetics, not a normative one.]
It's pretty understandable and a default position to advocate for it, but it could be a slippery slope, and will definitely push the politics towards engineered babies over natural ones.
A hypothetical clone (in the popular connotation of the word) of myself is essentially identical to my hypothetical identical twin sibling, the distinction is that the hypothetical clone is born after me, and was 'deliberately conceived.' Declaring one to be 'natural' and one to be 'unnatural' is unkind. And arguably, bigoted. (I'm speaking generally, not accusing you of doing this.)
The hypothetical clone will still be a human being in every sense of the word. I suppose you could call them the 'deliberates', but are they more 'deliberate' than those born of copulation or old fashioned, 20th century artificial insemination?
Would identical twins be considered as a higher caste than the 'deliberates'?
Also, what percentage 'clone' do you have to be to be considered a 'clone'? (After all, each 'normal' person only differs from one another in one nucleotide out of every thousand.) Can we replace our damaged organs from those bio-printed of our own DNA? How will this limit proteomic engineering? If we engineer a protein that confers some immunity or cure to an affliction, would we have to deliver it like we do 'artificial' insulin? Or could we "cut the middleman" and edit in a 'copy' of the engineered gene that yields the engineered protein? Might that put the entire genome over some arbitrary 'clone' threshold? Do we wait until the genetic immunity randomly/selectively occurs in nature? Or do we stay 'organic'?
Genomic engineering and artificial genomic reproduction will certainly be the debate of the 21st century. The two fields might engender the next major civil rights movement.
Do we want to give our children better opportunities? Forget superficial stuff like blond hair and blue eyes, we're talking about the possibility of having guaranteed super-healthy, super-happy, super-smart children.
But that's eugenics, and it's been rejected as immoral by pretty much everyone. A big part of the problem, I think, is that a custom-engineered child is a lot more expensive to create than a natural random-chance child, and therefore eugenics only produces super-humans for the rich and powerful, who will become even more rich and powerful by breeding themselves into master race that enslaves everyone else.
Eugenics can't upgrade all of humanity directly because natural breeding, being cheaper, is also much more common. So the vast majority of inferior humans will always outnumber the eugenics-produced super-humans. That's where the enslavement comes in; the super-humans will have to use their inherited wealth and power to make sure they retain control because they can't out-breed everyone else.
The other possibility, and the only way the super-humans can replace the normals, is to kill off all of the normals either directly or by making them infertile. That's even worse than enslavement.
No matter how you look at it, eugenics has a bad outcome if it's not available to everyone at the same time. And if it was available to everyone, we wouldn't call it eugenics. We'd call it 'medicine', 'vaccination', 'pre- and post-natal care', and 'preventative care'.
Selective sexual reproduction and genetic engineering are actually markedly different. Genetic engineering involves precise splicing, insertion, or rearrangement of an organism's genome (or subset of genes). Selective sexual reproduction is a directed random rearrangement of genetic material over successive generations based (on often poorly understood) "meta-characteristics" or traits.
The critical distinction is that genetic engineering is the deliberate editing of exact genetic information, whereas selective sexual reproduction is a gradual, iterated, locally-random mixing of genetic information with imprecise results.
Furthermore, genetic engineering enables genetic mixing that aren't possible with selective sexual reproduction. For example, the insertion of genetic information into E.coli in order to produce human insulin for diabetics. Or, the modification of a particular cyanobacteria to secrete petroleum after photosynthesis.
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/gc/c3gc42...
>> ...eliminating allergies, Alzheimer's, and cancer...
> That's all been doable for a long time, using controlled breeding...
This is incorrect. You may be surprised to learn that those deeply complicated, diverse families of afflictions would not be effectively treated via 'controlled breeding'.
A simple, naive disproof of the assertion that cancer can be eliminated in domesticated or selectively selectively bred animals (via artificial selection): pigs, huskies, and laboratory mice all get cancer at rates that are more or less congruent with wild boar, wolves, and rats.
I don't think something having a natural analog makes it any less unsettling. I also have not specifically advocated anything, although it's probably clear that I have reservations.
I'm not sure where you are disagreeing with me. I wasn't really trying to simplify anything. I was just saying that genetic clones already exist.
Identical twins are clones. They are genetically identical barring mutation. That's basically a catch-all for copying errors, environmental mutations, fetal environment, etc.
> Artificial cloning methods as I understand them are distinct from the way natural identical twins form.
Correct, artificial cloning is commonly divided into therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. The pop culture idea of cloning is closest to reproductive cloning. You mentioned that we were close to creating a 'human clone'. I was just pointing out that there already are clones. We might be talking past each other, I was not saying that we have reproductively cloned (or that the two methods are the same). I was just trying to highlight the fact that twins are essentially genetically the same as what reproductive clones would be, as in the outcome isn't that much different.
People do take issue with reproductive cloning. Reproductive cloning in humans is still hypothetical at this point, but it is theoretically possible and could yield people that are 'identical' in the same way that identical twins are 'identical.'
> If it were so simple to reproduce "natural cloning", it would already done and commonplace. In reality, it seems to require quite a bit of hacking.
I didn't really say it was simple or currently possible, I said people take issue with it.
> I don't think something having a natural analog makes it any less unsettling.
Suppose, that whether we like it or not, for better or worse, somewhere cloning occurs. Through no choice of their own, these clones exist. They are exactly the same as the natural analog. They are people that would deserve the same treatment and consideration as you or I. The thought of these people being oppressed is unsettling.
That really depends on how you define "cloning". It absolutely can be considered therapeutic cloning, and it would serve as an initial step in reproductive cloning.