Cloning (again and again and again...)

[rambling man]

While driving to and from Virginia yesterday, I heard a lot of views on this subject and decided to throw them at y'all

What if a company invests in and creates a human clone with its own materials. Does the company, then, "own" it?

Will we see people created just to serve certain functions, such as vegetable picking, that most of us find too difficult to do?

What happens to natural humans if a large group of people with enormous intelligence and superior physical ability are created? There will be a biology gap that renders natural born humans subordinate. What then?

Someone else mentioned that you can't stop cloning once a method is developed, it will happen no matter what the House of Representatives says or does.

I think I am going to get cozy, buy myself a lot of liquor, and hunker down to wait for the apocalypse. If you believe in God, either He is going to just come down and rid the earth of our stupidity once and for all or he will wait for the clones to do it and say "Serves you right you bunch of jackasses."

 

[rambling man]

adding some thoughts and shamelessly bumping this back to the top now that additional people are here

The Italian has already either tried to clone or has cloned already. He refused to answer the BBC when they asked him if he had tried it already. It probably failed.

The French woman is also a bishop in a UFO cult. I mean do these people get any scarier?

If it is going to happen, perhaps it would be best to consider allowing real researchers in real facilities (besides the former Nitro, West Virginia high school building which also housed the police department and a community center) to do it right, taking precautions and care to prevent any human suffering as a result of these experiments.

To be honest, I strenuously believe it should never occur at all

I still maintain that this will bring on the apocalypse

 

[miles]

I haven't made up my mind yet, but some of the reasons people who oppose it sound like the same arguments against many other new inventions, scientific breakthroughs, or technologies.
In the end I think it will be used almost exclusively for couples who are unable to have children. I don't buy the argument over dastardly evil-doers breeding a race of superhumans - for what?
What will they do with them - build an army? WIll those soldiers be any harder to kill?

What's so bad about having a lot more intelligent humans? Would you rather have a whole lot more stupid ones?

 

[rambling man]

I don't see Lex Luthor creating an army of supervillians, maybe the Pentagon, but not Lex Luthor
Maybe terrorists "grow" bomb carriers, too

I'm talking about normal parents who want their kids to be the best and brightest at everything. They will be the ones to create the biology gap....nothing wrong with smarter people, except maybe when you consider that most historians consider Nixon and Clinton to be two of our smartest presidents

Will these clones have so much more mental and physical ability that they dwarf the rest of us, that's the question. And if so, what are the consequences of that if there are enough of them to constitute a sizeable group?

 

[Doulton]

One point that people seem to be continuously overlooking in this matter is that clones are not created out of thin air. You still need a mother to bring the embryo to term and give birth to it. How many women do you know dying to give birth to a baby they can then sell to a corporation? Know of anywhere it is legal for a corporation to adopt a baby?

And if god was going to wipe is out for our stupidity, why's he taking so long? People said the same things about nuclear war. The fact is, even if we tried to wipe ourselves out with a combination of nuclear bombs and genetic, biological and chemical warfare, we would fail, and life would go on. I ain't sayin' don't be afeared, just that spouting nonsense about the end of the world ain't really a productive way of confronting the situation.

People pose nightmarish ideas about what corporations could do with certain technologies, claiming that the answer is to do away with technology. Sometimes technology helps, sometimes it does harm. Capitalism and huge profit-seeking corporations will always be evil. In my opinion, you're looking in the wrong place. You want to make a positive change, look to politics, not science.

 

[Doulton]

I got a bit preachy there, huh? Sorry, guess I'm just in that kind of mood. And a bit too tired to monitor myself properly

 

[rambling man]

That's the problem is that this is being driven by people who are driven by profit motive and sensationalism. At least the stem cell guys can make a claim that they are improving the world in some way. The cloners just sit there and say they are going to do it no matter what the consequences and to hell with anyone who wants to argue. They don't care because they are doing their research in secret places under less than ideal conditions (like the aforementioned Nitro, WVa Community Center)
The only reason to legalize the research is to take it out of the hands of these people who are reminiscent of back alley abortion doctors and put it with responsible parties.

 

[Doulton]

I think "The cloners just sit there and say they are going to do it no matter what the consequences and to hell with anyone who wants to argue" is probably a bit of an over-generalisation. How many "cloners" have you heard from? From what I've read here at the BB there is one Italian or group of Italians who are doing cloning on humans.
And what do you mean "At least the stem cell guys can make a claim that they are improving the world in some way" Stem cell research could lead to replacement organs and help millions. It could be the most significant advance in medical technology in human history.

 

[rambling man]

There is an Italian and a French woman and their researchers, that I have heard of. From what they were saying to the press and the American Academy of Science, that seems to be their attitude.

They have already done it, I almost guarantee. Otherwise, why refuse to answer the question from the BBC?

Science allowed to run amok without having to answer to anyone is an extraordinarily dangerous situation. Science has the power, as you said, to cure diseases and relieve the suffering of millions. Wonderful. They also have the power to destroy and cause immeasurable suffering to millions or to one malformed cloned child.

 

[sexy-girl]

i highly doubt they have done it ... when "dolly the sheep" was cloned they had to try it over 500 times to get dolly ... many were still born or had to be aborted ... some were born with defomaties so bad that they had to be put down


what will happen if human is born with severe deformaties will they put that one down ... how many babys will have to be aborted or will be still born ... i am totally agaisnt human cloning anyway but its terrible that they are going to try and attempt it now when the science and results are so poor ... thats why they have 200 women ... its highly unlikely that any of them will give birth to a normal human clone


and even if they did its a clone why would you want to give birth to yourself ... how weird is that ... there cloning the father so the boy will be an identical twin of his father ... very creepy

 

[Doulton]

Alright, it appears one step at a time we have both been heading towards a similar goal here

Oops, too slow. That was a response to Rambling man, not Sexy girl

 

[rambling man]

Sexy-girl mentioned something I was saying to some guythe other day. The animal cloners are against human cloning (mainly the sheep cloners in Scotland) because it causes such horrible problems

I have beat this dead horse too many times, but these people were doing cloning experiments in a community center, not any kind of accredited lab. They were trying to clone the dead child of a former member of the West Virginia House of Delegates...it was the same woman, Bridget Boussilier, or something like that, the BBC interviewed recently....The authorities here, I think it was the Kanawha County Sheriff's department, found out when they were called by the London Times about it....the conditions were not scientific at all or even all that clean, it was an old high school classroom.

So far these researchers have shown zero regard for human life or potential suffering, they just want to pocket as many $200,000 fees as they can

If it is truly inevitable, let real scientists do it, but I think either way, it is a bad omen for our future

 

[shadowsource]

Freaks and fascists (& Type A Yuppies)

We don't need a God to make this one turn out badly. Any reassurances anyone can offer about responsibility go flying out the window whwn you take a llok at those two scientists (who may or may not have already tried it, as Rambling points out). They're clearly bent on doing it, whether it helps anyone or not, whether it even works or not.

Problem one is that there will a lot of failures: Freaks. What happens to the ones who survive? How is this prospect acceptable to us? What's the payoff? What is the value for humanity here?

Doulton's reassurances about mothers refusing to carry commodity babies to term are absolutely empty. Plenty of women bear children for people they find odious; they need the money. And Hitler's SS had lots of women breeding for them in special units - they were wide-eyed volunteers for the Reich. If anyone doubts that Saddam Hussein or Kim Il Sung would blink at the ethical problems entailed in creating identical super-soldiers (with the same crappy officers, of course), please explain. And plenty of folks in the Pentagon will find this a wet dream: Conditioned troops for desert warfare, or polar. And outer space - W's new military frontier?

Even for reproduction, the parents who intensively test their kids at the age of three are going to be very tempted to try to perfect the little buggers. There will a lot of efforts to alter babies' genetic makeup anyway, and many of these will backfire and produce freaks. They'll probably begin by offering free experimental therapy to poor people (Black mothers with a chance for free natal care and the possibility that their kids won't get sickle cell anemia? Sign here). Then the rich people will try to create Master Families, until they get bored with the wife and run off with a trophy to start a new brood.

People are too shallow and megalomaniacal for this shit. Noithing good will come of it. Rambling's right. But we can fuck everything up all by ourselves. And we will.

 

[sexy-girl]

i do think though in any circumstance they shouldnt go ahead with creating complete human clones .. the stem cell research is slightly different ... but even if they can create human clones without any dangers to the clone or the mother ... they arent thinking about how the clone would feel or what kind of life it would have ... they are just trying to do it for selfish reasons and self promotion ... theres no scientific reason to create a human clone ... saying for childless couples is a phony reason it wont give couples a child it will give them an exact copy of themselves either the father or the mother ... theres better ways now to give a couple a child without it being a clone


changing someones genetic makeup is slightly different from cloning since you can do it too non cloned children ... also there is some benifits in being able to stop genetic diseases ... but i think picking someones eye colour or hair or maybe making them smarter is a bad road to go down

 

[shadowsource]

the genes -

There aren't really all that many genes, and the active, relevant ones have mixed functions that seem to bear no relation to one another. The human blueprint's totally jerry-rigged (no intelligent design manifested - just a messy series of progressive accidents) . Messing with a gene to achieve one effect will have very serious unintended consequences for a long time to come. In 7-10 years, when you all are reading about poor people filing class-action suits against labs who recruited them to "help" them and their babies, remember that you read about it here, first!

 

[rambling man]

Very true.....every time I see these mad scientists, I think of Dr. Mengele

 

[Pyper]

I just can't see any benefits to human cloning. As many here have already pointed out, human cloning could lead to a whole slew of disastrous possibilities, and what would the upside be? Is anyone envisioning "Gattaca"?

This whole thing about using cloning for childless human couples is bull. There are so many children out there without good homes, just waiting to be adopted. Cloning yourself to produce a child is just selfish. And cloning your dead child? How twisted and sick is that? Just have another one and get on with your life.

 

[Doulton]

You have a point about mothers who would bare children for a corporation Shadow. I guess I was only thinking of stable first world countries.
I fear that I don't have all the information to address this properly, but I will do what I can on the point of cloning having "no scientific reason." Very few scientific projects are done purely for the sake of science in today's world, but the purpose of science is to increase our understanding and knowledge. This research will certainly do that. I'm not saying it's worth the cost necessarily, but knowledge is an extremely valuable thing. That no good can come of this is an extremely naive point of view, in my opinion.
I'm not entirely sure what is meant by the term "cloning" in this case, and from what I have read in previous posts, it sounds like most of you aren't really sure either. You're bundling up every sci-fi horror story you've ever seen and blaming it on something you don't understand.
As I mentioned in another post, the purpose of one animal cloning project was to create milk that can cure disease. I don't think anyone is hugely interested in creating a race of people who are all identical. Cloning in this regard does not mean creating replicas. They may be trying to clone the fathers at the moment, but this is still at a highly experimental phase. Cloning may be the end of genetic disease.
I agree that the ideas are scary, and I have no problem with people arguing the dangers of cloning, but it seems to me you people have made up your minds without even really considering the case.

Now I am really really tired, struggling to keep my eyes open (Never mind why I'm still up, but it's got nothing to do with the BB ) So my sentences probably haven't been making alot of sense, but I hope someone can still get something out of it. Someone else will have to pick up where I left off and hold the fort until tomorrow.

 

[shadowsource]

.

 

[Purple Haze]

The whole idea of cloning super soldiers is ridiculous if you think about it. First of all, it would be an extremely expensive way to build an army. I can't imagine cloning will ever be cost-effective if you compare it to the old-fashioned way humans are produced. Second of all, modern warfare depends less and less on killer humans, technology will make the foot soldier a thing of the past, if it hasn't already.

A clone is not an exact replica of the original. It's like an identical twin, and if you've met any identical twins you know they have distinctly different personalities, talents, senses of humor, although they share the exact same DNA. Cloning John Lennon, for instance, would not guarrantee a great singer/songwriter even if you were able to replicate the environmental influences. This clone could very well be a talented carpenter or plumber for all we know.

Could cloning be useful in producing spare parts, as opposed to whole human beings? How many parts would you need to have before you are declared a human being with human rights? This seems to be the issue of concern that has me and everyone else baffled is where you draw the line, and then of course there's always religon to complicate things even further.

 

[rambling man]

the super soldier would be a product of genetic refinement, higher tolerances to heat and cold, increased aggressiveness and hormones, things like that..im sureit has crossed someones mind...but it's not the highest of my list of fears about this stuff

 

[Kymberley]

So many good points here for both sides ...but...

Just because we are capable of doing it, should we really do it?

There are known ways to create the perfect murder...but should we do it?

There are ways to pull off the perfect bank robbery...but should we do it?

We have the knowledge of how to wipe out entire continents with chemical weapons that have no cure...but should we do it?

Hitler envisioned a perfect race. Blonde and blue eyed...my youngest son would not have fit this pattern...would he eventually under Hitler's world rule have been slaughtered?

We have people in this world who can afford to finance this operation. Osama Bin Laden! There is a man who would stop at nothing to destroy all his enemies. Do we all think that the science and its benifits would be worth such a risk as to allow him to get his hands on such things?

There are issues of what to do with the deformed ones. This practice is so unstable still. So many errors occur in all the attempts. So few are successful like Dolly was. Do we dispose of them the way we do lab rats that have been poisoned and tested on until they are beyond medical researcher's usefullness?

Are they not to be considered human beings and should they not upon birth be given the same rights as all on this great planet have? Do we keep them in labs when the incubator moms have delivered them? Who raises and nutures them? Or maybe we just educate the mind with all the text book stuff and the physical training to make them superb human clones?

If the point of cloning is to produce babies for childless couples, what is wrong with the old fashioned method of invitro? Not good enough?

As with every scientific discovery and research, the financing is only put up for a reward of more money later. The drug companies do it just to make more money when they find cures, and corner the market on those drugs. The military projects are developed for power and wealth and control.

I am not opposed to expanding all we can about things we don't know everything there is to learn. I am opposed to experimenting with something so precious as life. The severe reprocussions of our arrogant actions can and will come back to haunt us.

Let's use medical research to cure diseases that kill millions every year. Let's stop with cloning humans for what ever reason and stick to working with genes that cause or can end genetic deficencies. Let's use the money that finances something as ethically questionable to find a way to make a sick baby heathly and allow it to live a happy life.

Let's forget that we were given the ability to alter the human being in such a drastic way and go back to being human beings that are fallable and with feelings and thoughts that make us who we are.

At what point are we willing to stop playing God?

Remember the old saying, "Give them an inch and they will eventually take the whole mile."

TV did this. 20 years ago, cussing was a no-no on the boob tube, now it is the norm. Sex before marriage was a no-no now is accepted. Violence was never something that was dealt with so graphically or depicted in our society as it is these days in movies, songs, and TV.

We are human, always having to one-up each other. Where does that stop with cloning just to replace body parts? At what point would the game be won in this war and who would be in power when it was over?

My point would be, just because we can, should we?

Off my soap box now and looking for a great place to live secluded from the rest of the madmen.

 

[miles]

O-kayyy