First Human Clone Born? 667
slantyyz writes "A religious cult, the Raelians, has claimed that the birth of first human clone is one of theirs. While this hasn't been corroborated yet, it's making headlines in Canada, where the cult is based. There's supposed to be a press conference on Friday in Hollywood. This story just may have legs."
Re:Silly People Don't Realize... (Score:3, Insightful)
religion? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Silly People Don't Realize... (Score:5, Insightful)
They're afraid that the technology isn't mature enough. Even the cattle cloning industry has a disturbingly high failure rate.
They're afraid of public backlash costing them their jobs, or perhaps shutting down the company they work for.
They're afraid of loosing their friends.
They're afraid of screwing up, and ending up with a...thing. At that point they'll have to decide if they're going to put it out of it's misery or not.
Re:Silly People Don't Realize... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, we call it "having sex". It's an amazing cloning technique that nature gave us that allows one to combine traits and create "clones". If you really want purity, incest might be in order: Some sisterly love and you'll have a virtually perfect family clone.
Of course then there's the small problem that we've tinkering in things that we have only the slightest clue of. Already cloned mammals are showing shorter lifespans and other ailments clearly pointing a massive spotlight on the fact that they aren't a pure clone: There is something going wrong, but to use paraphrase a lame line from Jurassic Park "We're so caught up in if we could that we never question if we should".
Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, Christianity itself is merely one of the few socially acceptible cults.
That being said, I wonder how they managed to cull the genetic goofs that cloning invariably leads to? After all, how many sheep were born warped before Dolly existed? And even she wasn't perfect.
Press Release Journalism (Score:2, Insightful)
For your INfo (Score:2, Insightful)
One nice thing I like about this cult is that sexe is good and evryone can have sex with any one. They even set up big picnics in nature where everybody have sex.
Also, Rael is a car racer. Unfortunatly, when he was engineered by the aliens, he was not implemented with the good racing dna.
There was a controversy lately with them trying to recruit student from secondary school, which is, in my opinion, not worst than Catholic religion trying to recruit in primary schools
Re:Too bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Cloning has the potential to really help some couples with fertility issues
Adoption also has the potential to really help some couples with fertility issues. Granted, it doesn't carry the same pride of ownership, but it's still a proven alternative. After all, modern medical science has pretty much got the entire adoption procedure down. Rarely, if ever, do adoptions produce the kinds of defects seen in animal cloning and feared possible in human cloning.
No way to stop it (Score:3, Insightful)
Still, I suppose we have to try and slow down some of these changes to the human race. The nuclear bomb came before we were ready for it, and we are still struggling to catch up to it politically and morally. Cloning has the potential to change the world even more, so the more lead time we have for legislators and philosophers to work on this, the better.
But I will be shocked if the first legal and widely advertised cloning clinic is not openned in 2003 or 2004.
Re:Sounds better than Scientology (Score:2, Insightful)
Its not their beliefs that worry me when it comes to scientology. Its their brainwashing methods, money extraction techniques and the way they control people's lives that worries me.
I don't know anything about the Raelians, but they could be just as bad in that respect.
Re:Probably fake... (Score:3, Insightful)
> defects shown in many of the cloned animals. Doing
> this to a human being is in my eyes not any better
> than the medical experiments conducted by the
> Nazis.
and it's somehow worse than doing it to other animals? What makes humans so special that we should be exempt from any kind of experimentation? We generally know more about ourselves than we do any other species on the planet, seems like we'd be the best candidates.
Not that I'm suggesting we open the floodgates, I'm being rhetorical. But saying it's a bad idea just because the Nazi did it doesn't help either.
Re:Silly People Don't Realize... (Score:2, Insightful)
the same as a virtual class, these can never be instanciated, they're it's only used as a base class to the dysfunctional familiy class (of which every instance of the family class is instanciated from.
"We're so caught up in if we could that we never question if we should".
there are talkers and there are do-ers. you can spend you time going around wondering about everything, or you can put the rubber to the pavement and get some shit done. you make mistakes, you learn from them.
What about the life that is created? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Silly People Don't Realize... (Score:5, Insightful)
And you base this on what? Your abundant lack of knowledge about cloning technology and basic biology?
The first adult mammal cloned was Dolly the sheep [sciam.com]. She has some rather serious defects as a result of that cloning, such as rapid aging. It took 277 attempts to produce a viable clone.
A cow was cloned in 1998 without the aging problems, and it took a "mere" 104 attempts. [bbc.co.uk]
China cloned their first cow [xinhuanet.com] in October of this year. Brazil attempted to clone a cow [ananova.com] and wound up with a bull instead.
Cloning isn't easy. It's not like you can just go to the corner drug store and buy a clone'o'matic [sun-sentinel.com]. It requires a great deal of lab resources, time, and lots of money.
And while you may very well find scientists who would try to clone a human, you also have to find 50-100 women willing to be implanted with a cloned embryo, given that 90%+ of them will miscarry (the human body is pretty good at detecting and aborting non-viable fetuses -- and I apologize right now to anyone who has had to deal with a miscarraige in their family, I know they are deeply traumatizing). This immediately increases the number of potential leaks.
Right now is about the earliest it would have been possible to clone a human... after all, no matter what you try to do, it's going to take 9 months from implantation until birth.
It has nothing to do with fear, at least not for me. I think the ethics are questionable at best, primarily due to the large number of failures in current cloning methods. For the record, I'm pro-choice, but that doesn't mean that I would want dozens of women subjected to the trauma of a miscarraige (or worse), or that I think playing with human life this way is a good thing.
Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is simply incorrect. Major world religions with some history behind them are not called cults while many sects that have their roots in Christianity are considered cults.
That being said, I wonder how they managed to cull the genetic goofs that cloning invariably leads to?
I would imagine their story would be that the aliens taught them how to goof-proof the process.
A few holes (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Their leader is French.
2) He calls himself "Rael," moved to Canada, and started a cult.
3) This cult believes that aliens created humans from DNA they brought to Earth.
4) The cult's headquarters is called "UFO Land."
5) They claim to have cloned a human.
Now, why the hell should I believe 5 if 1-4 serve to discredit any idea that intelligence and legitimacy may be present here?
Re:News? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah yes, Slashdot logic:
flamebaiting Christians via AC is +1 insightful.
Re:News? (Score:1, Insightful)
That must be Christian logic:
We're right everyone else is wrong.
Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess it mainly depends on who's doing the talking... anything can be called a "cult", if you like. But here's one variant of the generally accepted indicators that a community is a cult. These signs can be applied to Christianity, too, and often rightly so. But when you compare the mainstream religions to the "cult" religions, the difference between the two is extreme. E.g., my parents are Christians--have been all their lives--but they've never exhibited any of the signs of a cult [rickross.com].
Well, maybe the "if you leave the church, you're wrong" sign, but that can be said about any standard: If you cross on a red light, you're wrong; that doesn't mean that traffic laws are a cult, though. Certainly I've never seen Christians, or Buddhists, or Neopagans punish their ex-members the way the Scientoligists or the Jehova's Witnesses do.
I don't know if the Raelians meet the more technical definition of a "cult", or if they're simply being discrimintated against because they're non-Christian. I suspect it's a little bit of both, though. Since they're refusing to publish their methodology, open their experimental process up to peer review, offer any sort of supporting evidence, or allow for independent corroboration of their claims, I'm content to let the media put them in the "cult" bucket pending clarification of the matter.
this is nothing. (Score:2, Insightful)
wait for tutankhaman or borgias (first such post) or... adolf to be cloned. There was a book on adolf clones some years ago. soon there may be mammoth ---or neanderthal clones too.
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
What dictionary are you reading? Did you even look it up yourself before posting? The absence of a supreme being is not the litmus test for cult status, although it is a common characteristic of cults.
More properly, it is simply the unorthodox nature of its religious system that determines its "cult" status. Of course, orthodoxy is in the eye of the beholder. For example, the term is often used in Christian circles to refer to highly unorthodox forms of Christianity such as the one practiced by David Koresh and his followers. Some refer to the LDS (Mormon) church or the Jehovah's Witness faith as cults for the same reason. An atheist, on the other hand, might refer to any belief of a supreme being as cultic.
Not that it's the final authority or anything, but here's what Merriam-Webster has to say. Note that the absence of a supreme being appears nowhere in this list. Definitions #2 and #3 are the relevant ones here.
1 : formal religious veneration : WORSHIP
2 : a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also : its body of adherents
3 : a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also : its body of adherents
4 : a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator
5 a : great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as a film or book); especially : such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad b : a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion
Re:Probably fake... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is very shallow reasoning, but unfortunately very common. When the line between animals and humans is blurred, treating humans as animals becomes ethically justifiable. If the notion that humans are little more than advanced animals is allowed to lodge in the collective political mindshare, then abuses far worse than what the Nazis did will become commonplace.
The battle over cloning is not a battle to prevent the advance of technology. The problem is one of ethics - if cloning becomes widespread, humans may very well become disposable - subject to arbitrary termination when their "useful" lives are over. The primary problem of the human condition has never been the cure of disease, but rather the lack of respect that various groups show each other. All of the major atrocities in history start with the devaluation of the human: the Nazis devalued the lives of Jews; Stalin devalued the lives of his opponents; Pol Pot, the lives of his people; the American South, the lives of Blacks. Once the notion that certain classes of people were somehow inferior to others arose, it followed logically that the inferior were not worthy of the respect of the superior (whoever they claimed to be...) Cloning represents the separation of humans into two classes, cloned and uncloned. Once this distinction is made, and once obtaining an "ideal" (read: obedient, hard-working, easily exploitable) human becomes a matter of technology, people in general will become commodified and exploited in ways far worse than they have been in the past. There will be little need to treat a person with dignity and respect once obtaining a "replacement" becomes a simple matter of gathering a few hairs and calling a cloning agency.
Re:Probably fake... (Score:3, Insightful)
> very common. When the line between animals and
> humans is blurred, treating humans as animals
> becomes ethically justifiable.
You got a good point.. but in response, again I say, what makes humans so special that we should treat ourselves better than we do animals?
I'm not a PETA nutjob or anything, I'm simply acting as a devil's advocate.
Put it this way, if there was some higher conscience out there, something so advanced that humans and other animals would appear equally primitive, what do humans have that would make them a less likely target for experimentation?
Or in the moral sense, what would this advanced conscience see in the behavior of humans compared to the behavior of mice that would encourage them to decide that devaluing humans was worse than devaluing mice?
The entire human history is barely a word long in the novel that is the entire universe. I have no expectation that anyone out there sees me as anything of value, and while I do have a vested interest in staying alive, I do it with the detachment to realize I'm equally as important as the aforementioned mouse.