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Harvard to Clone Human Embryos? 549

Posted by samzenpus from the me-and-more-me dept.
Lifix writes ""Harvard University scientists have asked the university's ethical review board for permission to produce cloned human embryos for disease research, potentially becoming the first researchers in the nation to wade into a divisive area of study that has become a presidential campaign issue."
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Harvard to Clone Human Embryos? More

Harvard to Clone Human Embryos?

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  • Yes, it's legal... (Score:5, Informative)

    by jtmas83 ( 794264 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:27AM (#10521511)
    ...they just can't use federal money to fund it.

  • Human cloning... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Justin205 ( 662116 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:30AM (#10521524) Homepage
    Human cloning is scary stuff. What happens when we start to clone the "perfect" human for soldiers? Or when we clone too much that it leaves too little genetic diversity? Or worse, combining genetic manipulation with cloning, creating "super-humans", so-to-speak?

    Personally I think those are questions best left to speculation, and not ones that should ever have their answers truly known by anyone.

    • Re:Human cloning... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Hollywood called!

      They want their ideas back.

    • Re:Human cloning... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by polecat_redux ( 779887 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [hciwmaps]> on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:36AM (#10521553)
      Or when we clone too much that it leaves too little genetic diversity?

      Or when natural humans become the "inferior" minority and are then subject to racism and mindless stereotypes.

      • Re:Human cloning... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by owlstead ( 636356 )
        There are so many people subject to racism and mindless stereotypes that I don't think this would constitute a major change from the current situation. Sure, *different* people might be subject to racism and mindless stereotypes, but hey, society changes. /sarcasm_on Luckily the basic features of mankind (look down upon other human beings) always stay the same. /sarcasm_off

    • Re:Human cloning... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jtmas83 ( 794264 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:37AM (#10521560)
      I think that a British doctor put it best in a recent New York Times article [nytimes.com] about cloning embryos for stem cell research:

      "I don't see a slippery slope," she said, "because the technology to do reproductive cloning in mammals is there, and I don't think that anything we do is going to significantly change the development of that technology. What stops it is that the law says we can't do it, and it's banned."

      Preventing cloning of embryos for stem cell research does not in any way help prevent human cloning, it only prevents science and medicine from progressing. The technology is there -- we can't change that -- but what we can do is use it to save lives.

      • Re:Human cloning... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by rainman_bc ( 735332 )
        Fair argument. Now let's hypothesize for a moment. There are some people who are immune to aids, and we think it's in their system. We determine that by cloning embryos, that we can cure AIDS. Do we start cloning babies to kill them for the cure to AIDS? I'd hate to be forced to come up with an answer for that question... I know it's a lot of "what-if's", but it's something I foresee us having to deal with in the future.

        • Re:Human cloning... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by metlin ( 258108 ) *
          It's a choice we'll have to make at some point of time or the other.

          Do we let millions upon millions die _after_ they've matured into full humans, or do we save them by killing millions upon millions before they are anything more than a mass of cells?

          Another thing to think about is this - so many millions in this world are killed everyday due to poverty, disease and strife - are we being fair in spending money on this rather than that?

          I could go on so forth ad infinitum, but the point remains that this i

          • Re:Human cloning... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @04:36AM (#10521736) Journal
            Bags of several dozen cells (which is what the embryos we're talking about are) aren't life. At best, they are the potential to become life, under the right conditions.

            And, before people start shooting from their various moral highgrounds, please realise that none of the embryos that we're talking about have been ripped from anyone's womb without their consent. The few hundred embryos available for research use are the excess produce of IVF programmes, and if they weren't being used to further medical science then they'd be lying frozen in a tube somewhere or destroyed.

            So, talk of "killing millions upon millions before they are anything more than a mass of cells" should be saved for the likes of National Enquirer. There aren't millions of millions, and they aren't being killed. But I guess "baby killer" is an easy argument to make for those too afraid to examine the facts properly.
            • I'm well aware of the fact that these are not fully grown embryos and they are embryos from fertility clinics that may probably be destroyed if they are not used for some purpose or the other (which is why the have even the anti-abortionists supporting their research).

              My point was merely to put across to the original poster my ideas - embryos may not be fully grown or humans to you or me - but they are to several people. It's easy for us to say that they are just bags of several cells, it's hard for those
              • You may be aware that when we say embryo here that we're talking about 70-odd cells but most people don't.

                Studies have shown that the public - even many doctors - believe that the research is carried out on foetuses that are at least partially developed. When asked to draw what they think an embryo looks like most people draw something that has a head, a torso and four limbs.

                It's mistaken beliefs like that, fuelled by the scaremongering of extremists in the pro-life camp, that unfairly label the scientist
              • embryos may not be fully grown or humans to you or me - but they are to several people.

                So what? There are minorities all over the world who believe in various types of horseshit. Just because they believe it doesn't mean I or anyone else is required to pay attention. They have the right to speak, but they don't have the right to be heard.

                Max
                • Because unfortunately, we live in a world where they are the majority and we are the minority.

                  Just go out there and suggest this to people across the world, immaterial of where they're from. They'll imaging babies being killed, as the original poster portrayed them to be.

                  I suppose you have not had to deal with convincing religious folks on science. I have. It's simply not possible.

                  And guess what? The government is not going to change its policy because of what a bunch of scientists believe. They care abo

            • Re:Human cloning... (Score:3, Insightful)

              by amorsen ( 7485 )
              Bags of several dozen cells (which is what the embryos we're talking about are) aren't life.

              This is simply wrong. Noone sane argues against the fact that single-cell organisms are alive.

              The question is whether they are human.

            • Of course they are life. Whether they are HUMAN life is what the debate is about - they are most certainly life.

        • Re:Human cloning... (Score:3, Informative)

          by Angostura ( 703910 )
          >Do we start cloning babies to kill them for the cure to AIDS? I

          No. We start cloning stem cells. As far as I am concerned a stem cell is not a baby. The people dying of AIDS, are, however people.

          FWIW, I'm pro theraputic cloning (as you have probably deduced) and anti the creation to to-term human clones.
    • What's much worse than what you mentioned is what the Harvard researchers are suggesting: cloning human beings for "research" purposes. Imagine creating a human child just to perform experiments on it. And, no, just because it is an embryo doesn't make it right. This is nightmare stuff.

      Don't get me wrong; I'm pro choice, and I don't see anything particularly terrible about harvesting cells from aborted fetuses that have already died. But it's one thing to use cells from a dead organism, and a completely DI
      • And, no, just because it is an embryo doesn't make it right.

        And yes, just because it's an embryo and can't possibly be considered to be even remotely human except by a few wild-eyed fanatics, it DOES make it right.

        Evil and ignorant religious extremism aren't strangers; in fact, they're bedfellows.

        Max

      • Re:Human cloning... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        But it's one thing to use cells from a dead organism, and a completely DIFFERENT thing to create a living organism and experiment on it.

        Why? A bunch of electrochemical impulses do not constitute a person. It's okay to experiment on planets. It's okay (for many people) to experiment on animals. Why not a bunch of human cells? It's not like they are experimenting on fully-developed babies - these are mindless clumps of cells. It's as unethical to experiment on them as it is to experiment on toenail

      • BLANKED REPLY TO EVERYONE FREAKING OUT: (Score:5, Insightful)

        by crazyphilman ( 609923 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @08:57AM (#10522871) Journal
        To everyone who feels like freaking out and telling me off, let me save you all some time and lay out my actual positions on this stuff, so you don't waste time calling me a religious maniac or whatnot:

        1. Stem cell research: good.

        2. Cultivating stem cells acquired from IVF sources: good.

        3. As I've heard suggested in the media, cultivating stem cells acquired from aborted embryos, fetuses, whatever: good. DISCLAIMER: DO NOT PANIC. I AM NOT ACCUSING ANYONE OF DOING THIS. IT IS JUST HYPOTHETICAL FOR CHRIST'S SAKE. Sheesh, People around here are too high strung.

        4. Cloning stem cells: good.

        5. Cloning entire embryos: touchy ground. I think it's different from using already cast-off tissue that would have died anyway. And, the phrase "cloning embryos" is too damn unspecific anyway. Are you talking about actual cloning, or just culturing cells? If cloning, I think it's a bad idea. Which is what this whole stupid argument thread is about.

        I see an embryo, and of course a fetus, as an entire unit, a potential person. Therefore, if that potential person is already dead, as with castoff IVF material, or the clinic idea I've heard mentioned in the media, I don't see any harm in it. On the other hand, if you've just created a viable embryo just to disassemble it for the stem cells, that seems kind of ugly. And I do think it would be only a few steps from some much more serious nastiness down the road. I don't trust scientists as far as I can throw them, sorry. I've read too much about what they've done in the past. Like the guy who invented the lobotomy and then proceeded to inflict it on thousands of patients because he thought he was "helping" them.

        6. I am not particularly religious, I have no desire to outlaw abortion, IVF, or any other such thing, I'm not an ignorant, evil redneck, and this is all just my opinion anyway.

        Slashdot, people, is an OPINION SITE. Not necessarily the news.

        Now, THIS is my WHOLE opinion on the subject, everybody relax.

    • you might as well chastise Intel every time they bring out a more powerful CPU. I mean I've seen terminator and consider myself an expert, it'll all end in man's subservience to our new electronic overlords. Also I'd like to take this opportunity to express my disgust at these new spinning jennys which will cost us all our jobs.
    • I'll tell you what happens!

      We will engineer super intelligent beings that have giant heads and perfect vision in all light spectrums. The human race will eventually evolve (die out) into this new race only to find out that genetic mutations will kill off their existence! So they develop means to travel back in time and kidnap goatse.cx guy so they can anal probe him!

      The reasoning for the anal probe is obvious: It's so the future big-headed, grey-skinned, lanky humans can figure out how not to die. Do
    • What happens when we start to clone the "perfect" human for soldiers?

      To the extent that it works (which is probably small, the environmental affects being what they are) we end up with an army all of whose soldiers have the same weaknesses.

      It's like monocultures in agricultre, except people wil be explicitly looking for ways to kill off the clone.

      Except for very special circumstances, evolution is hard on groups with low gentic diversity, and the selective pressure on a battlefield is quite intense.

    • Re:Human cloning... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mrsev ( 664367 ) <mrsev&spymac,com> on Thursday October 14, 2004 @04:56AM (#10521796)
      My god you read too much science fiction. Let me give you this example, why do we all not have plastic surgery? We could all look "perfect", we dont because that is not important.

      I am sick and tired of people always assuming that scientists are somewhere beteen Dr Mengele and Dr Frankenstein. Your idea of morality has nothing to do with science.

      These people are doing this research to try and save lives and cure diseases. Anyone who says we should not do this is mad. I am an asmatic If I had the choice I would perefer not to be one.

      You say "..."perfect" human for soldiers" you seem to forget that you would need to find a mother to carry the child and then raise it for 18 years and then train it! I think the training part would "make" the soldier, not the lab!

      Regarding the level of gentic diversity, if we cloned every person on earth we would be left with the same genetic diversity to begin with.

      Gentic diversity come from sexual reproduction, take two clones, not including genetic recombination, there are 70368744177664 geneticaly different children they could have.

      Do not mistake your morality with objective "reality" a good example is organ transplantation. Go back 200 years and explain to people that because little timmys heart is no good you are going to take the heart from someone else and use it to replace timmy heart. Explain that this is fine and little timmy will be health again. .. If you are still alive and not burnt for being a witch.. they will probably say that what is the soul of the donor tried to come back and take over timmy, what if timmy stopped being timmy, what if the donor was still alive in his heart and was unable to enter heaven....... you get the picture.

      Some people mention things like bringing Hilter back... well given a different upbringing Hitler clone would probably give Poland a miss, especialy if raised in Harvard. People often forget about upbringing as a crucial factorm, if raised in Boston he might have problems writing Mein Kampf in German!

      By "super-humans" I like to think of disease free . I mean we dont all dress the same so why would we all clone the same. You have visons of 6ft tall muscular, blond haired , blue eyed people marching in file.

      Personaly I want the best for my children and that is all. For exolition to progress you need "selection". Now we must have selection in a population: If you look at the Dodo it was as good as it needed to be for its island paradise. No predators, no need to fly, just get fat for the lean winter months. Along come humans and rats and bye bye Dodo. The moment we accepted modern medicine we preventeed people from dying who "naturally" would have died. For example a type 1 diabetic, his children now have an increased suceptability. Continue this for 100 genertations and we have a problem. Now we can either solve the problem before it happens or treat the person after the fact. Treament after the fact means that their children will be born with the same mutations, and will require treatment too. Now if we just repair the mutated genes in the embryo then problem solved.

      It is a bit like having a well patched system or running virus removal tools once an hour to keep your system virus free.

    • Nature clones all the time. It's called "twins". I don't see people engaging in hysterical hand-wringing over the birth of twins.

      Or worse, combining genetic manipulation with cloning, creating "super-humans"

      How the hell could this be a bad thing? Making your kids stronger, faster, smarter, immune to genetic diseases? Damn straight we should be trying to make them better than we are.

      Max

  • ERROR: Normal political syntax no longer valid.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anubis333 ( 103791 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:30AM (#10521525) Homepage
    "We must allow this research, I mean some day this could allow Chris Reeve to.. oh.."

    "Michael J Fox, you know him right? Well someday.."

    I believe they should talk to people about the issues and the benefits instead of the constant name dropping of a few celebrities stem cells and cloning could *magically* heal. And since when is scientific research in line with religious dogma or morality? Science is the terrier that tugs at the great curtain. As we legislate based on dogma, many other countries are passing us by in science and technology.
  • It will be stem cell research. Then again, with overcrowding in the world, I don't even know if that's the best good idea. It's going to be a long century, and at the moment, this kind of thing isn't safe either privatized or government regulated.
    • What crap.

      There is enough and more space in the world. It's just our cities which are crowded. Next time, take a drive around to the wilderness and outlands a few miles off your city and you'd notice how much free space is out there.

      The only thing of worry is the crunch it may have on our natural resources, but I'm sure we'll find a way around it. Afterall, our species has shown the most resilience only when pushed to our limits.

      It's going to be a long century, and at the moment, this kind of thing isn'
    • Dawkins hinted at a way to increase average life-span... (and doing population control) is by progressively increasing `allowed' reproductive age.

      ie: don't let anyone under 30 have any kids . Then after a few generations, raise that by some number of years. You slowly but surely can get to people living for a few hundred years without any major health problems. (while at the same time without overpopulating the earth). Although I'd imagine it would never happen in the real world...

  • Why.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:31AM (#10521528)
    can't they just pray to have our Lord who ar't in Heaven deliver the knowledge unto them?

    Maybe if some of us took a few days off from praying for the President, and his children, and their peace of mind, and Iraq, we could pray for the researchers to happen upon a divine epiphany, and if they were good, God fearing servents of our Lord, he'd just write it on up and send it on down via an Angel.

    I bet we could get that on the 700 Club!!! Think of how much money would be saved by not wasting any of it or the time on science, and better yet with the donation to the 700 Club we could feed poor kids in Africa, or by the Church a Holy 120' Conversion Vessel of The Lord, with day spa!

  • More information (Score:4, Informative)

    by metlin ( 258108 ) * on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:32AM (#10521531) Journal

    Here're the Yahoo! blurb [yahoo.com] and the NZ Herald [nzherald.co.nz] stories.

  • The clones will be of Harvard luminary Alan M. Dershowitz who is already accused of cloning others [thecrimson.com].

    When asked why he has chosen himself as the seed of all future Harvard clones, Professor Dershowitz responded, "Cloning is evil. Someone must stop others from cloning themselves and the answer is a worldwide army of Alan Dershowitz's working together to stop this scourge in its tracks."

    A greatful world thanks Professor Dershowitz for choosing himself to shoulder this heavy burden, as only he can.

  • I'm for it, I guess (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spineboy ( 22918 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:34AM (#10521545) Journal
    Kinda hard to really think about this. Yeah I guess it could be a life, but then alot of things could be considered that too. I used to work in a lab where we had immortalized cell lines from people to study a heart disease - you take their white cells and mix them with a type of cancer cell which produces a cell that keeps living. - A lot of these people were dead, but I had in my refridgerator a little piece of them still living. It kinda freaked me out for a few days when I realized this, but after a while I realized that it wasn't much diffferent than a piece of hair that had fallen out, or some blood that had leaked out of some cut.

    My point is that as long as we keep the clones somewhat small - say less than 1024 cells, I have no moral problem with disposing them - that I'm not killing anything. Yes this has a HUGE grey area, but I think that a reasonable compromise can be reached.

    Let the flame/holy wars begin...

    • Probably HeLa, which is one of the most agressive cell lines. One interesting aside on HeLa is that there is now a greater weight of HeLa cells around in the labs of the world than there ever was in Henrietta Lacks, the original source of the cells.

    • Re:I'm for it, I guess (Score:5, Funny)

      by D-Cypell ( 446534 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @04:46AM (#10521764)
      My point is that as long as we keep the clones somewhat small - say less than 1024 cells

      Sure, they will be marketed as kilocells but when the marketing folks get their grubby hands on them we will only get 1000!!
    • Well... it's my personal, not-so-humble opinion that we all make our own ethical choices. Yeah, duh, that's obvious, right? But what it means is that while I, personally, have moral issues with killing insects, you may not. I respect your choice and your freedom to make it. Your choices may (or may not) make me think less of you, but the same can be said about any choice you make. It's your freedom to make that choice, just as it's my freedom to judge you one way or the other for it. In the end, perha
    • In my opinion, cloning embryos is a trivialization of the creation of human life. And I see that a lack of value for human life has preceded many historic tragedies. That is, lives and their loss are being made to represent something other than and in precedence to its value as people: in war, life and its loss is made a military tool to an end; in genocide, it is abstracted as some negative impact or social obstacle that needs overcoming. Okay, so the comparisons aren't perfect because they deal with life
      • The majority of all human embryos (about 2/3 under the best of natural conditions, perhaps as many as 3/4) fail to be carried to term. The majority of those lost simply fail to implant, or implant but fail to adhere. Most of these are not abnormal as far as science can tell, they just don't "take".

        If you are looking for an ethical or metaphysical meaning to take from this, it's that small bundles of cells just aren't important; it is much more important to make sure that babies, children and adults are hea

    • Re:I'm for it, I guess (Score:5, Funny)

      by nuclear305 ( 674185 ) * on Thursday October 14, 2004 @07:22AM (#10522281)
      "My point is that as long as we keep the clones somewhat small - say less than 1024 cells"

      640 cells should be enough for anyone...

  • The Question (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DLR ( 18892 ) <dlrosenthal@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:34AM (#10521547) Journal
    The question here isn't "Can we do this?" but rather "Should we do this?", and I just don't think we know enough to answer the 2nd question yet. After all, what are we (as a culture, people, race, as well as individuals)going to think if further research reveals that Life begins at conception? Will posterety record us a a generation that created an entire class of people for the sole purpose of scientific experimentation? And philosophical considerations aside, with all the cloning errors with Dolly (dozens of attempts, one "success") and other issues (genetic diseases present in Dolly that weren't present in her "mother") is any research we perform on a human clone going to have any medical validity?

    • Re:The Question (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Kufat ( 563166 )
      "...if further research reveals that Life begins at conception..."
      This is a religious/ethical question, not a biological one. Thus no amount of research or medical data can "answer" it. (What, do you think that someone with a really big microscope is going to say "This is when the soul goes in?")
      We know about the stages of embryo development, but the idea of Life with a capital L is subjective and very personal.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Did you read the article? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by goldcd ( 587052 ) * on Thursday October 14, 2004 @04:24AM (#10521702) Homepage
      Do you actually have a grasp on the subject? They're not cloning humans to create a new master-race of perfect beings (it'd be far cheaper just to educate the ones we do have - but I digress). They wish to create stem cells - that's all. Just cells. You then completely muddy the water with your final point, either deliberately, or because you couldn't be bothered reading/understanding the original article - THEY'RE NOT TRYING TO CREATE CLONED PEOPLE (you got that now?) Secondly, just because something fails doesn't mean we should stop trying. Are you under the impression that all the great advances in the history of mankind just sortof worked first time? NASA just decided to shoot Neil into space on a whim one day and it came off?
      • The ethical delima you seem to have missed is, are embroyos human, are they people? I realize this topic has been debated with quite a bit of heat for several decades now and I have no intention of continuing that debate here. If they are, then we have created a group of humans for the sole purpose of scientific experimentation. This is not like sending a man into space. There is not much ethical consideration there beyond "are we taking all resonable precautions to keep our astronauts alive?" Going in

  • justification de jour (Score:3, Funny)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:36AM (#10521552)
    For those of us born without evil twins, cloning is the best way to protect ourself against conviction based on DNA evidence. It musta been my clone.....
  • I'm guessing that their goal is to cull stem cells from the cloned embryos, and use those for disease research, as a team in South Korea did in February.

    If they're allowed it could free up stem cell research in general by providing "victimless" stem cells.

    With all the talk of "super cures", it's about time somebody got the ball moving.
  • Isn't cloning currently illegal (or in the process of becoming illegal)? This would get Harvard into a world of trouble if they agreed to do this.
    • Cloning humans is. Cloning embryos is not.

      There is a fundamental difference. They're doing the latter and not the former.

      The government policy against the latter is only that it cannot be federally funded (since it uses the tax money from people who may oppose it, or so the claims go).
      • The government policy against the latter is only that it cannot be federally funded (since it uses the tax money from people who may oppose it, or so the claims go).

        Heh, now that's a rare policy if true.

        Like tax money from people is never otherwise used for something if they oppose it.

      • Re:Cloning illegal? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by beuges ( 613130 )
        at the risk of going a bit off topic here, but couldnt the same argument be used to prevent government spending money on any other arb thing, like, say, executing prisoners, because executions use tax money from people who may oppose it? (i used this as an example cos there's a significant number of people who are opposed to the death penalty).

        it seems to me that the government policy on this matter is only what it is, because its more friendly towards the religious groups that are against cloning altogeth

        • Re:Cloning illegal? (Score:3, Informative)

          by metlin ( 258108 ) *
          This is the Bush administration's policy.

          I'll quote from the NZ Herald article [nzherald.co.nz] -


          Current law prohibits the use of federal funds to make human embryonic stem cells, and in August 2001 President George W Bush said scientists could work only on a few already existing cell lines, using federal funds. ...

          The Bush Administration argues that people who oppose experimenting on human embryos should not have their tax dollars used in such research, but it is silent on what privately funded groups can do.

          I gues

  • Cannibals need breakfast food too... (Score:3, Funny)

    by SeanMac ( 648938 ) <seanmacncheese&gmail,com> on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:37AM (#10521559) Homepage
    Cannibals need tasty breakfast food too---

    JIMMY DEAN BREAKFAST EMBRYOS!

  • Why is cloning controversial? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Evets ( 629327 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:50AM (#10521611) Homepage Journal
    Why is it that cloning so controversial?

    Because of what might happen? Because we've seen some crazy science fiction movies?

    It's ridiculous that people who least understand the research hold the strongest opinions about it and try to stop it from happening.

    Now why exactly is any research involving embryos controversial? People aren't lining up at abortion clinics to make an easy 50 bucks by donating their unborn babies to research. Is it better to put the embryos in a landfill than to make use out of them?

    Politics should not dictate research. It certainly should never prevent research.

    The flip side is that people use superman as a political tool on the opposite side. "Let us do research. We'll make superman walk again!" I guess that won't be happening. If only he could have held out 'till election day...

  • Clones? They're already all around us... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ites ( 600337 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @03:53AM (#10521621) Journal
    It's quite amazing the hysterical reaction people have to clones when natural clones - also known under the technical term "same-egg twins" - are neither freaky nor the harbingers of a brave new world.

    Anyone who is against cloning has to come up with better arguments than "it's unnatural".

    Personally, I feel the discussion about cloning is largely provoked by people with political agendas, as are many divisive arguments around the world. People who have true feelings about the value of human life should better try to help the victims of war and famine, man-made disasters that kill millions.

    But, I guess one clone is more of a danger to our claims of moral superiority than a million dead Sudanese or Congolese.

    Call me a cynic but this debate is full of shit.
    • It's because our current technology can't ensure that the artificially cloned human will be healthy. Would you want to be the scientist responsible for bringing a defective (excuse the term) human being into the world? If that person had to spend their life with terrible illnesses, premature death, or some bizarre mutation? Once our cloning technology has progressed to the point where we will be confident the cloned person will be perfectly unharmed by the procedure, then maybe there will be a case for huma

  • Gattaca, and ethical dilemmas (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ghostgate ( 800445 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @04:12AM (#10521673)

    Remember, the goal of this is not to clone entire humans (although, someday, who knows what will happen) but instead to perfect genetic engineering.

    People will likely look back one day on the movie Gattaca [imdb.com] as amazingly prophetic. For those unfamiliar with the film, it did an amazing job portraying what society may be like when genetic engineering becomes perfected. Coming, sooner than many think, are the days when we can engineer the child of two parents; not to be a perfect child, but instead to be the "best" of those parents. The child is more intelligent, stronger, etc. than the average child produced by those parents would be, and will have a much lower likelihood of diseases and other problems. This will be a fantastic thing, but those children born the old-fashioned way are likely going to be disadvantaged. Because we'll be able to weed them out just by plucking a hair and checking their DNA.

    Should we forbid someone from taking a certain job based on their genetic makeup? And how long can we breed the "best" children before the best become so far ahead of the worst, that the worst no longer have any "value" to society at all? Those will be the real ethical dilemmas. The so-called ethical dilemmas we're faced with today are just temporary hurdles created by people who are frightened of progress and/or don't understand what the goals are.

    • the real difference between one human and the next nowadays is intellectual

      i mean look at stephen hawking: he can't run, who knows how healthy his immune system is, but he's still an extremely valuable member of society

      and people know this

      and clearly, some people are gifted intellectually, and some are not

      but when you go into intelligence and try to quantify it, there's not much we can quantify and measure about "intelligence" as it is: it's an intangible

      sure there are iq tests, but this is useless: so
    • but those children born the old-fashioned way are likely going to be disadvantaged

      Maybe but maybe not, it might be more likely that they will be treasured for their inherent genetic variety, not to speak of their uniqueness and "purity". Gentic variety is one of the priceless treasures of this world and keeping it all in a tube decreases the net variety over time as it is static and not free to evolve naturally. Prized for their value as objects of knowledge as the genetically "streamlined" suffer a boom

    • People will likely look back one day on the movie Gattaca [imdb.com] as amazingly prophetic. For those unfamiliar with the film, it did an amazing job portraying what society may be like when genetic engineering becomes perfected.

      I've never understood the premise of the movie Gattaca. In the movie, the "hero" cheats his way into an astronaut's position by using the DNA of another man. But the "hero" should never have been an astronaut. In one scene, he's running on a treadmill and his fitness is not u

  • Would the world really be better of if we stopped progressing,stopped inventing? Just because these new inventions can be abused by nasty-bad evil people, should we stop advancing?

    Maybe we should have stopped when we "invented" fire way back when, because it can be used for detructive purposes, but seriously, what kind of life and society would we have today if we had?

    Lets try to learn a lessons from the dark middleages and maybe not fear knowledge, science and progress so much.

  • If you are against stem cell research.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by $criptah ( 467422 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @09:46AM (#10523363) Homepage

    You should spend an hour caring for a person with a spinal cord injury. Better, why do you not move in with such a person and live with them for a week or so. How many of you will handle it?

    I am not taking this out of my ass; I have actually been around people who cannot move and have no hope of improvement because of their conditions. My best friend has a mild-form of CP; the guy has been suffering all his life because his fucking legs are crooked and there is nothing he can do about it! Do me a favor, look into his eyes and then tell him that you are against stem cell research. Tell him that it sucks to be him because he was born different. Then visit a nursing home and try to take care of patients with Alzheimer's....

    I still do not realize why this issue is an issue for our presidential candidates... This is a no brainer that should not be discussed in a country where religion is separate from the state. Then again, just like Kerry I am a liberal guy from Massachusetts :)

  • Some people's minds need an upgrade (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Austin Milbarge ( 723855 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @10:13AM (#10523694)
    If you really look into this whole issue of cloning or stem cell research, you obviously see two arguments at work here. The technical and (I believe) moral (non-religious) one that shows the benefits of such research on saving peoples' lives and/or giving them better quality of life as apposed to the non-technical (religious) one in which some book created thousands of years ago can somehow know the future and is able to dictate the decisions in our lives for the present day.

    Of course we know that this book makes no mention of stem cells or cloning embryos because it can't. However, sadly enough, certain people use this piece of material as a means to scare and manipulate others into thinking this sort of science somehow equates to the work of the "devil" or some other "fictional" evil character that punishes those who disobey (what essentially is) another man's law.

    Now, this line of thinking may have seemed legitimate thousands or even hundreds of years ago where people really believed Chris Columbus and his ships would fall of the edge of the Earth, but today, in a world where we have the capability to send robots 50 million miles away and land on other planets I think it's time that we put all this imaginary, spooky stuff to bed. We're just to intelligent for this.

    This is progress folks and we need to move on. At times it seems scary, but that has never stopped us before. Put it this way, when was the last time one scientist beheaded another scientist for disproving his theories? When was the last time a group of engineers at one university jailed and then publicly hanged one of their fellow engineers for spreading an "evil" belief that Linux is a sucky operating system? Think about it and then you may laugh.

  • This is just wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dtjohnson ( 102237 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @11:41AM (#10524770)
    Everyone has heard the arguments about how those little embryos are not really little people but just 'embryos.' I'm sure the Romans had really great arguments about why it was fine to kill slaves in their Coliseum in Rome because the slaves were not really people but just 'slaves.' And those many civilizations which practiced human sacrifice in the name of spiritual good for the whole were certainly convinced that they were doing no wrong. But try as we might to obscure the issue, those little embryos of a handful of cells are just as much a human life to be protected as the person sitting next to you...and deep down we all know that. Killing embryos to obtain their stem cells to improve our health is no different than killing prisoners to extract their organs so that others might have better health. It is immoral to improve our own health at the expense of other lives. Stem cells may have therapeutic value but they need to be obtained from methods other than breeding people to obtain them.

    • Re:This is just wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheSync ( 5291 ) on Thursday October 14, 2004 @12:55PM (#10525929) Journal
      Yes, it is different from killing prisoners to extract their organs. Blastocysts have no central nervous system, thus no concept of pain or existence. To be a human being, you need a central nervous system.

      Others suggest that to be human, you need higher-order consciousness. That is why it is acceptable to "pull the plug" on hopelessly brain-damaged patients that have no hope of recovering consciousness, even if the brain stem survives and there is some level of autonomic respiration.

      On the other hand, allowing REAL human beings to die by our inaction on studying blastocyst stem cells, I consider that unethical.

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