Isolde
Guardian's Desire
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2000
- Posts
- 4,432
If anyone has approached this topic. And I know everyone hates a cut and paste job but here goes anyway.
I was going into the store the other day and my gaze caught the headlines of that days newspaper which, along with the article, is below:
Human clones 'will be done'
Researchers disregard safety warnings
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
New York Times
Aug. 08, 2001
WASHINGTON - Despite warnings from leading experts that experiments in human cloning would inevitably lead to babies that are deformed, three researchers vowed Tuesday to press ahead with separate efforts to create the first cloned human being.
"This will be done," said chemist Brigitte Boisselier, who directs Clonaid, a company founded in 1997 by the Raelian Movement, a religious group that believes scientists from another planet created mankind by manipulating DNA.
Entrepreneur Panayiotis Michael Zavos, who runs laboratories in Kentucky, conceded hurdles must be overcome but said, "We are determined to get there."
Boisselier and Zavos made their remarks at a symposium of the National Academy of Sciences, an independent research organization that has convened a panel of scientific experts to study cloning. The academy advises Congress on scientific matters.
Dr. Severino Antinori, an Italian fertility specialist who gained notoriety in the mid-1990s by using in vitro fertilization to help a 62-year-old woman have a baby, joined the two proponents.
Because all three proponents operate in secret, it is difficult to assess how serious they are or whether their assertions are realistic. Of the three, only Boisselier, who recently was a visiting professor of chemistry at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., hinted that she has attempted human cloning, but then stopped short of saying she had done so.
The trio's remarks clearly disturbed some scientists attending the symposium.
"I think they are serious," said Alan Colman, director of PPL Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that collaborated in the creation of Dolly the sheep, the first and most famous clone of an adult mammal. "I think they will fail, but one of the problems about the fact that they do it all in private is that we won't hear about the failures."
The cloning proponents' comments, coming a week after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to ban cloning even for medical research, undoubtedly will inflame the debate over the wisdom of creating babies that are genetic replicas of adults. But while the House debate focused on the ethics and morality of cloning, Tuesday's discussion focused almost exclusively on science.
The consensus among the panel and most of those who testified was that cloning people is not safe. A high proportion of clones die soon after birth and many of those that do survive are plagued with genetic problems.
"We are seeing a great range of abnormalities," said Ian Wilmut, who as director of the Roslin Institute in Scotland led the effort to clone Dolly. "We should expect a similar outcome if people attempt to produce a cloned human."
Dolly's birth was announced in 1997. In the years since, scientists have succeeded in cloning five species of mammals: sheep, goats, pigs, mice and cows. Wilmut said 18 percent of cloned mice die; among goats, the figure is 38 percent.
Those numbers did not appear to deter the proponents of human cloning.
Cloning, also called nuclear transfer, involves taking genetic material from an adult's cell and slipping it into a female egg whose nucleus has been removed. In theory, the technique could be used to treat infertility in cases in which the man cannot produce sperm. That is the scenario that Antinori said he envisions. Zavos said he would use cloning only to help infertile couples who could not conceive in any other way.
Boisselier went further, arguing that cloning is a basic human right. "It is our own choice to use our genes the way we want," she said.
The three cloning proponents said they simply would screen embryos for genetic abnormalities. But animal cloning experts countered that there is no way to test a cloned embryo to predict whether it will result in a healthy birth. When Boisselier claimed to have devised such a test, Alan Trounson, an Australian embryologist, dismissed her assertion as "ludicrous," adding, "I don't think that is at all possible."
Gatherings at the National Academy of Sciences are usually staid affairs. But Tuesday's seminar was more like a circus than an academic gathering; at one point, a horde of television cameras followed Antinori to the bathroom.
On stage, the debate was passionate. When Mark Siegler, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, asked Zavos what it would take to dissuade him from cloning a person, Zavos replied, "If we cannot do it right, we will not do it."
Siegler complained that he was not satisfied with that answer. "Well," Zavos said angrily, "that's all you're going to get."
Irving Weissman, a professor of cancer biology at Stanford University and the chairman of the panel of experts, suggested that Tuesday's meeting served as a warning of sorts to Zavos and the others.
"This was one way to inform them of the animal science," Weissman said. "Now they're informed."
Although cloning for reproduction is legal in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has asserted jurisdiction over human cloning experiments and has extracted a written agreement from at least one scientist, Boisselier, not to pursue them.
An American investor in Boisselier's company recently pulled out, and its lab in the United States has closed.
But Boisselier said Tuesday that she would establish a laboratory overseas, in a country she would not name, to continue cloning experiments. And R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, told the panel that cloning attempts would go on someplace, regardless of whether the United States or any other country makes cloning a crime.
"We haven't been able to outlaw human slavery yet," she said, "let alone human cloning."
I was stunned, I simply stood there outside the store and tried to comprehend this. I mean, I know that we would eventually get to this point of playing 'god' but, I am sorry, as a mother of four wonderful children, the thought of this makes me sick to my stomache.
I cannot see this as simply playing with their own genetics. I dont think they are looking at the consequences cause they dont think it applies to them. They are treating human life as an experiment and that is just plain wrong.
Okay, lets say that, against all the odds, they do produce a healthy baby from this effort. (And my heart goes out to all the unhealthy and deformed babies that come before it. What are they going to do with those? Simply kill them off and disect them to see what went wrong? Anyone think that they wont? Or maybe watch as they slowly die so that they can put down a life expectancy number on a chart.)
What then? That 'baby' will be a living, breathing, thinking and feeling child. Now what? Do they let that child go to a family to live a 'normal' life...at least as normal as it can for as long as it can seeing as how no clone has lived anything but a shortened life as stated in the article. Or do they, more than likely, keep it in a lab and run him/her through tests and more tests daily?
And we might want to hope that the baby doesnt live very long. Can you imagine such an existance? Can you imagine yourself or one of your own going through such an existance? It wont be a baby, a human being or even a life...it will be an experiment.
There have also been articles on how cloning could extend people's lives.
It all reminds me of a movie I once saw ages ago. So long ago that I dont remember the name. But it was about a firm that cloned human beings and then 'grew' them for the sole purpose of using the clone's organs to lengthen the life of the origianal person. Only one clone got away and you had to realize that this was a living, breathing, thinking person. But not for long cause he got captured again. The movie did not have a happy ending.
So, I guess my question is this....Is this our next slavery?. Making humans in labs to serve our own purposes whatever that may be?
I was going into the store the other day and my gaze caught the headlines of that days newspaper which, along with the article, is below:
Human clones 'will be done'
Researchers disregard safety warnings
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
New York Times
Aug. 08, 2001
WASHINGTON - Despite warnings from leading experts that experiments in human cloning would inevitably lead to babies that are deformed, three researchers vowed Tuesday to press ahead with separate efforts to create the first cloned human being.
"This will be done," said chemist Brigitte Boisselier, who directs Clonaid, a company founded in 1997 by the Raelian Movement, a religious group that believes scientists from another planet created mankind by manipulating DNA.
Entrepreneur Panayiotis Michael Zavos, who runs laboratories in Kentucky, conceded hurdles must be overcome but said, "We are determined to get there."
Boisselier and Zavos made their remarks at a symposium of the National Academy of Sciences, an independent research organization that has convened a panel of scientific experts to study cloning. The academy advises Congress on scientific matters.
Dr. Severino Antinori, an Italian fertility specialist who gained notoriety in the mid-1990s by using in vitro fertilization to help a 62-year-old woman have a baby, joined the two proponents.
Because all three proponents operate in secret, it is difficult to assess how serious they are or whether their assertions are realistic. Of the three, only Boisselier, who recently was a visiting professor of chemistry at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., hinted that she has attempted human cloning, but then stopped short of saying she had done so.
The trio's remarks clearly disturbed some scientists attending the symposium.
"I think they are serious," said Alan Colman, director of PPL Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that collaborated in the creation of Dolly the sheep, the first and most famous clone of an adult mammal. "I think they will fail, but one of the problems about the fact that they do it all in private is that we won't hear about the failures."
The cloning proponents' comments, coming a week after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to ban cloning even for medical research, undoubtedly will inflame the debate over the wisdom of creating babies that are genetic replicas of adults. But while the House debate focused on the ethics and morality of cloning, Tuesday's discussion focused almost exclusively on science.
The consensus among the panel and most of those who testified was that cloning people is not safe. A high proportion of clones die soon after birth and many of those that do survive are plagued with genetic problems.
"We are seeing a great range of abnormalities," said Ian Wilmut, who as director of the Roslin Institute in Scotland led the effort to clone Dolly. "We should expect a similar outcome if people attempt to produce a cloned human."
Dolly's birth was announced in 1997. In the years since, scientists have succeeded in cloning five species of mammals: sheep, goats, pigs, mice and cows. Wilmut said 18 percent of cloned mice die; among goats, the figure is 38 percent.
Those numbers did not appear to deter the proponents of human cloning.
Cloning, also called nuclear transfer, involves taking genetic material from an adult's cell and slipping it into a female egg whose nucleus has been removed. In theory, the technique could be used to treat infertility in cases in which the man cannot produce sperm. That is the scenario that Antinori said he envisions. Zavos said he would use cloning only to help infertile couples who could not conceive in any other way.
Boisselier went further, arguing that cloning is a basic human right. "It is our own choice to use our genes the way we want," she said.
The three cloning proponents said they simply would screen embryos for genetic abnormalities. But animal cloning experts countered that there is no way to test a cloned embryo to predict whether it will result in a healthy birth. When Boisselier claimed to have devised such a test, Alan Trounson, an Australian embryologist, dismissed her assertion as "ludicrous," adding, "I don't think that is at all possible."
Gatherings at the National Academy of Sciences are usually staid affairs. But Tuesday's seminar was more like a circus than an academic gathering; at one point, a horde of television cameras followed Antinori to the bathroom.
On stage, the debate was passionate. When Mark Siegler, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, asked Zavos what it would take to dissuade him from cloning a person, Zavos replied, "If we cannot do it right, we will not do it."
Siegler complained that he was not satisfied with that answer. "Well," Zavos said angrily, "that's all you're going to get."
Irving Weissman, a professor of cancer biology at Stanford University and the chairman of the panel of experts, suggested that Tuesday's meeting served as a warning of sorts to Zavos and the others.
"This was one way to inform them of the animal science," Weissman said. "Now they're informed."
Although cloning for reproduction is legal in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has asserted jurisdiction over human cloning experiments and has extracted a written agreement from at least one scientist, Boisselier, not to pursue them.
An American investor in Boisselier's company recently pulled out, and its lab in the United States has closed.
But Boisselier said Tuesday that she would establish a laboratory overseas, in a country she would not name, to continue cloning experiments. And R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, told the panel that cloning attempts would go on someplace, regardless of whether the United States or any other country makes cloning a crime.
"We haven't been able to outlaw human slavery yet," she said, "let alone human cloning."
I was stunned, I simply stood there outside the store and tried to comprehend this. I mean, I know that we would eventually get to this point of playing 'god' but, I am sorry, as a mother of four wonderful children, the thought of this makes me sick to my stomache.
I cannot see this as simply playing with their own genetics. I dont think they are looking at the consequences cause they dont think it applies to them. They are treating human life as an experiment and that is just plain wrong.
Okay, lets say that, against all the odds, they do produce a healthy baby from this effort. (And my heart goes out to all the unhealthy and deformed babies that come before it. What are they going to do with those? Simply kill them off and disect them to see what went wrong? Anyone think that they wont? Or maybe watch as they slowly die so that they can put down a life expectancy number on a chart.)
What then? That 'baby' will be a living, breathing, thinking and feeling child. Now what? Do they let that child go to a family to live a 'normal' life...at least as normal as it can for as long as it can seeing as how no clone has lived anything but a shortened life as stated in the article. Or do they, more than likely, keep it in a lab and run him/her through tests and more tests daily?
And we might want to hope that the baby doesnt live very long. Can you imagine such an existance? Can you imagine yourself or one of your own going through such an existance? It wont be a baby, a human being or even a life...it will be an experiment.
There have also been articles on how cloning could extend people's lives.
It all reminds me of a movie I once saw ages ago. So long ago that I dont remember the name. But it was about a firm that cloned human beings and then 'grew' them for the sole purpose of using the clone's organs to lengthen the life of the origianal person. Only one clone got away and you had to realize that this was a living, breathing, thinking person. But not for long cause he got captured again. The movie did not have a happy ending.
So, I guess my question is this....Is this our next slavery?. Making humans in labs to serve our own purposes whatever that may be?
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