Cloning

[Flee Fleet!]

So , I pretty much don't know a lot about cloning , except it started in 2000....I think? Well anyway , I thought we could share our suggestions about how to take more advantage of it in the future or discuss the current use of it by scientists. I currently don't have any suggestions of it myself but I'll get some ideas about it later.

[Roflolxp54]

It started earlier than that -- IIRC, Dolly the sheep clone was born in like the 1990s (1997 I think).

One of the caveats is that clones don't last as long when compared to the originals (unless the cells used from the originals are from when the originals are still embryos or something).

[Luce]

I think people started talking about the possibility of cloning much before Dolly, but she was the first mammal being cloned or something like that.

In any case, cloning would be very, very useful for medical purposes (the first thing that comes to mind is that you could clone an organ for transplants multiple times, so that no one would have to wait ages), or maybe for preventing the extinction of some animal species. I think cloning is a very interesting subject but also that it should not be taken lightly; I mean, I find it silly to clone animals just because they died (like the Copycat case), especially because they would not even retain their same personality. They would just share the DNA, and that's about it. I think that's just a huge waste of money.

Anyway, yeah, cloning has many many controversies (just think about what it could mean to clone humans) and could cause genetical problems (like, I don't know, various kinds of cell mutations?). It just needs further research though.

[Skynstein]

The problem is that the DNA somehow keeps track of the aging data, so, considering Dolly was cloned from the DNA of an adult sheep, she grew quickly and her actual age was much older than her chronological one.

Creating copies of oneself is useful to create copies of organs, but little further than that. There's no practical purpose to cloning a whole adult organism yet.

[amiabletemplar]

The problem is that the DNA somehow keeps track of the aging data, so, considering Dolly was cloned from the DNA of an adult sheep, she grew quickly and her actual age was much older than her chronological one.

Creating copies of oneself is useful to create copies of organs, but little further than that. There's no practical purpose to cloning a whole adult organism yet.

It's not actually a "somehow," there's several well-known genetic factors in the process of aging. The most commonly cited, and the one that clearly applied to Dolly, is "shortening of the telomeres." The DNA in each chromosome (for creatures which have chromosomes, which is AFAIK all multicellular life, including sheep and humans) has a bunch of junk "buffer" data tacked onto each end, and this junk data is called "telomeres." This is fundamentally necessary for cellular health, because the nature of the chemical reaction behind DNA replication that occurs when regular body cells divide (as opposed to stem cells or gamete cells) "shaves off" the last handful of base-pairs. This is completely unavoidable, a fact of the mitosis (cell-division) process. It takes many, many cell generations for the telomeres to run out--typically, that cell line dies for other reasons long before this happens. We don't really know what the consequences of systemic telomere shortening are, mostly because it almost never happens in nature. (This is because stem cells have an active gene, inactivated in non-cancerous body cells, which "adds" extra telomere data to the ends of each chromosome.)

However, with all that said? I've done the research on Dolly. Apparently, although her telomeres were shorter than normal for a sheep, this is not believed to have played a major role in her health. She did die of cancer, at a relatively young age (something like 3-4 years earlier than normal for sheep of her breed)--but so did several sheep from the flock she was born in. Apparently, the kind of cancer she died from is often precipitated by some kind of infection (viral, I think?), and may have been shared amongst most members of her flock, even though she spent most of her life separated from environmental influences (so the scientists could monitor her health over time more accurately).

Now, with that out of the way: Cloning is a terrifically important area of research, which we should absolutely be pursuing with great diligence. However, many of its most promising possibilities--such as the single-organ cloning discussed above--are still decades away. Even cloning Dolly required thousands of failed attempts, and even higher-order mammals (such as dogs) can require ten times as many failures before a single success occurs.

So, while the science of cloning is still in its infancy, we need to start answering philosophical and legal questions before they become disputes about real things--and real individuals. Note my use of the word "individuals" and not "people"--that, in itself, is one of the moral and legal questions raised by the possibility of human cloning. Are clones people? Are they distinct people? Do clones have the same rights as naturally-fertilized humans? Do people have a "right" to their genetic code, and if they do, how does that right interact with the possibility of clones (who must, by definition, share that code)? Is it legally permissible to clone a person without their knowledge or consent? Is it morally permissible to do so, even if there is no law about it?

Even single-organ cloning presents concerns. If you can selectively clone only some parts of a person, is it morally (and legally) permissible to clone a human body without a brain? At what point is partial-body cloning acceptable? Few people have problems with cloning organs, but these extended applications of this technology need to be considered.

[georgetruman]

What would be the moral argument against cloning a human body without the brain? Its all the organs except the one that actually feels the pain and suffering. I think thats a no-brainer.

Edited December 19, 2015 by georgetruman

[amiabletemplar]

What would be the moral argument against cloning a human body without the brain? Its all the organs except the one that actually feels the pain and suffering. I think thats a no-brainer.

Pun aside, creating full-body clones raises a serious concern for largely the same reasons as abortion. You're manufacturing brain-dead humans. Anything you do with them should be morally and legally equivalent to what you would do with a normal human, who has simply suffered from severe brain damage, or was born with a severely damaged brain but an otherwise healthy body.

So, let's say that these full-body clones are considered a-okay.Without a brain, we would have to keep them on life support systems (nutrient IV mainly; autonomic functions of the spinal cord are probably enough to maintain breathing and heartbeat). What do we plan to do with them? If we can selectively remove one organ, it seems likely that we should be able to selectively remove most organs, thus alleviating the need (and expense!) of cloning the entire body. So that argument is out. Dissections can quite easily be performed on cadavers. So it would seem their primary purpose would be to have "living" human test subjects which lack any ability to deny consent--a concept I find extremely troubling. These humans are not like an individual organ, which could not even in principle survive on its own; these are almost-fully-functioning people, with just the minimum required alteration to make them "not people." We will be playing fast and loose with the boundary between "merely tissue" and "a lobotomized living person." If it's permissible to clone a brain-free body, what about a body that only contains the lowest (e.g. non-cognitive) portions of the brain? What about one that retains the parts of the brain that allow movement? Vision? Hearing? What about a body that has everything except the frontal cortex (thought to be the main center of planning, voluntary movement, and inhibition)? If, in the future, we learn precisely which portions of the brain are necessary for possessing agency, what about a body cloned with everything except those small portions--leaving a body perfectly capable of carrying out tasks, but unable to "feel" or "will" anything?

Consider it another way: it is clearly wrong to intentionally damage the brain of a healthy, naturally-conceived human being, for the purpose of creating a braindead body. That would very clearly be an act of violence. Similarly, decapitating a healthy, naturally-conceived would be an overt act of violence. But what about a fetus, still in the womb, or in an artificial womb? Is it morally wrong to take a developing fetus and expose it to chemical or biological agents which prevent it from developing a brain? I would argue yes--absolutely. You're intentionally destroying a real part of a real person, destroying the thing that makes them a person, for somebody else's gain. I don't care what that gain is--it's disturbing and wrong, for the same reasons that the Bokonovskification and "decanting" process used on fetuses in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is disturbing and wrong.

[Skynstein]

Thanks for the biology lecture. :)

A fully functional clone will inevitably be considered a de facto person. Genetic information is only one aspect of identity. Clones aren't robots, they're animals just like every human.

[amiabletemplar]

Thanks for the biology lecture. :)

A fully functional clone will inevitably be considered a de facto person. Genetic information is only one aspect of identity. Clones aren't robots, they're animals just like every human.

Sorry about that. I tend to get very long-winded and technical. I hope it was still a useful read!

As for the latter: I certainly hope that a fully-functional clone will be considered a de facto person. But, knowing humanity, I cannot bank on that hope crystallizing into reality all on its own. I believe we have a moral imperative to ensure that fully-functional clones are de jure persons, and that trying to skirt around the law by selectively cloning JUST enough to not be fully-functional will not be tolerated (even if it isn't necessarily met with the same force as mistreating fully-functional clones).

I certainly agree that genetic information is only one part of identity. But not everyone believes that you have a right to your genetic code and how it is used. Some believe that it is perfectly okay to patent human genetic codes they discover in other people.

[georgetruman]

Wait what is the moral objection against messing with a body with no sentience? Is it that you aren't sure if it has sentience?

[amiabletemplar]

Wait what is the moral objection against messing with a body with no sentience? Is it that you aren't sure if it has sentience?

Well, there's always that, but that's not what I was concerned about. It's that you are taking sentience away from a thing which would have had it, if you had not been involved.

Cloning an individual liver, for example, or a femur, or even a pair of lungs with a heart, doesn't fall victim to that problem. If the mass of tissue in question cannot, even in principle, possess sentience, then we have nothing to be concerned about. But when what you're doing can be summarized as, "I'm going to deactivate the genes that would give this fetus a brain," what is the difference between a naturally-fertilized fetus, an in-vitro fertilized fetus, and a clone? It seems as though it is perfectly equivalent--they are all, scientifically, fetuses. If we say that it is perfectly okay to remove just the organ-of-sentience from the clone, why can't we do so to the other fetuses? I would argue that it is morally wrong to intentionally induce brain atrophy in a human before they're born--including a cloned human. You are inflicting the most severe possible form of developmental disorder on a future living, breathing human being--again, presumably so that the soon-to-be-born being's body can be used, consumed in some way to benefit other humans whose development wasn't tampered with. Whether they are "cloned" or "natural" should not matter as to the morality of that act.

Our society puts a great deal of weight, now, on the idea of giving informed consent. Is it not, then, a deep and profound wrong to prevent a person from even the potential to give informed consent?

[georgetruman]

ohh I though you were talking about frankensteining together a bunch of cloned body parts.

[amiabletemplar]

ohh I though you were talking about frankensteining together a bunch of cloned body parts.

Haha, no not at all. My apologies for being unclear.

[Luxian]

Sorry to bring up this topic, but it kinda made me curoius, but I didn't have the time to find arguments on it, my generalk nowledge being rather limited. And my english is far from being perfect, and I'm terribly lazy at reading lenghty posts... I truely apologise.... but I'll stick with a few questions instead anyway...

So Dolly the Sheep was born in the 1990s ? So when was decided the first moratorium ? I heared the scientists hold back on cloning for safety reasons (well, no wonder...) And what about 1975 ? Is there some link with genetic modification ?

And a more recent topic, what do you know about designed babies ? Like those telomere, stem genes.... I don't know much about biology and I use to catch things better when someone explains me than just readging at wikipedia...

[amiabletemplar]

Sorry to bring up this topic, but it kinda made me curoius, but I didn't have the time to find arguments on it, my generalk nowledge being rather limited. And my english is far from being perfect, and I'm terribly lazy at reading lenghty posts... I truely apologise.... but I'll stick with a few questions instead anyway...

So Dolly the Sheep was born in the 1990s ? So when was decided the first moratorium ? I heared the scientists hold back on cloning for safety reasons (well, no wonder...) And what about 1975 ? Is there some link with genetic modification ?

And a more recent topic, what do you know about designed babies ? Like those telomere, stem genes.... I don't know much about biology and I use to catch things better when someone explains me than just readging at wikipedia...

I'm not sure I understand some of your questions. Yes, it is correct that Dolly was born in the 90s, specifically July 5, 1996.

I'm not sure what you mean by "moratorium"--there are still scientists testing, and practicing, cloning today. Cloning is quite common in small/"less-advanced" creatures, but progress is slow on improving the technique for more "advanced" organisms. It's currently possible to get a clone of a dog or cat in the United States, for example. Specifically human cloning, in the specific sense of "reproductive cloning" (cloning with the intention of producing a new, fully viable organism), has been banned in a large number of nations; the United States has had laws against it (such as federal funding for reproductive cloning experiments) since at least 1997 and possibly earlier.

I'm not sure what 1975 in specific is supposed to mean; however, according to this timeline of achievements in cloning, the first "mammalian embryo created by nuclear transfer" occurred in that year. This means that biologists first demonstrated that it was possible to take a nucleus from one mammal cell (in this case, it came from a rabbit embryo) and insert it into a different cell that had had its nucleus removed (in this case, a rat embryo cell), and have that embryonic cell grow and divide into many more cells. This embryo was not implanted into a mother; it was probably terminated after proving that the embryo was growing.

There is not, as far as I know, any special link between cloning and genetic modification. The two can be used together, but research on cloning does not necessarily need to be research on genetic modification. Similarly, research on genetic modification doesn't have to have anything to do with cloning.

"Designed babies" is a misnomer, as there is no such actual thing. The closest you can get to "designer babies" is embryo selection. With embryo selection, a lab takes a woman's egg cells and sperm cells from a man (with consent, of course). They then fertilize the egg cells with some of the man's sperm--LOTS of egg cells get fertilized. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of embryos are produced. Then, the scientists take a DNA sample from the embryos, and freeze them (so they won't die while the long process of DNA testing is done). Once all of the embryos have been tested, the scientists attempt to determine the meaningful genetic markers present in those embryos. The prospective parents can then try to select a specific embryo, from that set, which has certain desirable characteristics, or avoids undesirable ones. Embryo selection is one possible answer to genetically inherited diseases; even affected parents can, sometimes, get lucky and have a child that doesn't have the disease, and embryo selection basically lets them buy hundreds of tickets to try to help them "win the lottery." Once the parents pick a particular embryo, it is implanted into the woman's uterus; if it takes, and no complications occur, she will then give birth to the resulting child. The other embryos may be destroyed, but the contract agreement for many labs like this allows them to keep the embryos for research purposes, or to sell to other organizations (such as research hospitals).

The important thing, here, is that embryo selection CANNOT add genes that the couple does not have. So, for example, if the two parents don't have any genes for red hair, it's not possible for them to choose an embryo that has red hair genes. To do that, they would have to ADD genes, which does not happen in this technique. On the other hand, if one of the parents has curly hair, it may be possible to select an embryo that is more likely to have curly hair than straight hair. (As with all genetic things, there is always some chance for the actual result to be different from what you expected.) So, because you CANNOT add ANYTHING to these embryos, it is a mistake to call them "designer" or "designed" babies--no "design" occurs, only picking from embryos you COULD have had purely by chance.

Telomeres don't matter for "designer babies" (embryo selection), because embryo selection works with completely natural, unmodified, and non-cloned embryos--they have all the telomeres a "normal" baby would have, because they ARE "normal" babies that just were fertilized in a lab and put into the mother's uterus later.

"Stem genes" isn't a term I'm familiar with. Stem cells are a specific type of cell, specifically, they are cells that can "infinitely rejuvenate." More specifically, stem cells are the "mother cells" that produce all of the other cells that make up our bodies. So, for example, you have a layer of specifically *skin* stem cells, deep below your skin. These are "adult" stem cells: they are already "locked" into being a specific category of cells, in this case, skin cells. Blood stem cells, on the other hand, are found in bone marrow, and can become any kind of blood cell (red, white, etc.) There are "adult" stem cells in most organs of your body: your liver, your lungs, your brain. These cells are what allow you to continue making new cells to replace the old ones. If you didn't have these "adult" stem cells, you wouldn't live more than a few years--your "regular" body cells would age too much and start dying off.

There is another kind of stem cell, however: "embryonic" or "pluripotent" stem cells. "Embryonic" specifically means a stem cell that came from an embryo--a not-yet-developed, but fertilized, organism. (A fetus is an embryo that has developed a little inside a female organism's uterus--in humans, at least 8 weeks.) All embryonic stem cells are "pluripotent"--they have the ability to change themselves into ANY kind of cell that organism might have--they aren't "locked in" the way adult stem cells are. It is possible to make non-embryonic cells turn into pluripotent cells, but it's difficult and may not be medically safe yet (studies have shown that these "induced pluripotent cells" can become cancerous.) As I'm sure you're aware, the use of actual embryonic cells is very controversial.

[Luxian]

Thanks for the clarification, and sorry if I was confusing.... I'm really bad at phrasing things. :/

Cloning dead-brain humans for medical purposes is kind of weird. Considering it is an inert body, how are we supposed to know if the bodyitself is healthy ?In that case, I agree taking organs from cadavers feels safer and it actually happened (iirc) quite a lot.

Now if you compare it to the bionical heart given to a patient, the "experience" (sorry if it sounds gloomy) did fail as well.

It seems those are two promising means to a same end. However, if ever the bionic solution was more advanced, I think people will rather opt for that solution. I mean, we don't know how single-organs are going to develop (assuming they are like "pluripotent cells", can't they be cancerous too ? Is that possible to control the mutations ? Or even create a single organ instead of a whole body or a body without brain ?) it might be expensive but not as much as keeping an inert body "alive". I may just be ignorant on that matter, but I'd sttill like to see how it develops though, it seems interesting.

And so... "designer babies" is a myth ? All the talk about curing diseases from birth or cut and repair or replace wrong sequences in a DNA is garbage ? I'll keep that in mind then... In the end that's just optimising the odds having a perfect kid then it seems...

[amiabletemplar]

Thanks for the clarification, and sorry if I was confusing.... I'm really bad at phrasing things. :/

Cloning dead-brain humans for medical purposes is kind of weird. Considering it is an inert body, how are we supposed to know if the bodyitself is healthy ?In that case, I agree taking organs from cadavers feels safer and it actually happened (iirc) quite a lot.

Now if you compare it to the bionical heart given to a patient, the "experience" (sorry if it sounds gloomy) did fail as well.

It seems those are two promising means to a same end. However, if ever the bionic solution was more advanced, I think people will rather opt for that solution. I mean, we don't know how single-organs are going to develop (assuming they are like "pluripotent cells", can't they be cancerous too ? Is that possible to control the mutations ? Or even create a single organ instead of a whole body or a body without brain ?) it might be expensive but not as much as keeping an inert body "alive". I may just be ignorant on that matter, but I'd sttill like to see how it develops though, it seems interesting.

And so... "designer babies" is a myth ? All the talk about curing diseases from birth or cut and repair or replace wrong sequences in a DNA is garbage ? I'll keep that in mind then... In the end that's just optimising the odds having a perfect kid then it seems...

Well, we can't actually clone humans yet (as far as we know), and even if we could, we're a long way away from being able to make clones that are "braindead" or that don't have a brain or whatever. It's a purely hypothetical situation, used to show that we need to think about possible (but not real, yet) situations and what the law should say about them, if they ever become real in the future. Science keeps marching on, you know?

You're correct that we take organs, like hearts, livers, kidneys, etc. from the bodies of the dead (that is, if the person signed up to be an organ donor in life).

"Bionic" organs--mostly hearts, for now--are still a long way from being perfected. Even the most modern variations on the Jarvik artifical heart (the first form, which most subsequent devices have improved in some way) still have an unacceptably high failure rate, often not lasting more than a year or two. Typically, artificial hearts are used as a temporary mechanism, to keep a patient alive long enough to get a "real" heart for transplant.

In theory, a "single-organ" clone would not be like an induced pluripotent cell. Now, remember, it is not currently possible to make "single-organ" clones. However, if it becomes possible to do so, in theory the cloned organ should be exactly like a "natural" organ--in fact, it should be almost indistinguishable from the diseased/removed organ, except effectively much, much younger. It would be the equivalent of somehow "copying" a person's own heart from when they were (say) 20 years old, then sending it forward in time to when that person was 80 years old or the like.

"Bionic" organs will always have a potential place, even if single-organ cloning becomes a reality. Some people just have fundamentally "broken" organs; for example, diabetics may have a pancreas that doesn't work. It's also possible to have genetically-based kidney or liver failure, or a congenital illness that makes your heart too weak to pump blood. Simply cloning one of these organs wouldn't work--the cloned organ would have the same problems as the original. A "bionic" organ (the usual medical term is "artificial") wouldn't have these problems. As long as the patient's body accepts the device, it would be much better than cloning in some cases...but "one-size-fits-all" artificial organs are a very unlikely thing. The advantage of single-organ cloning is that there's no worries of rejection, no need to take special immune-suppressing drugs, no nothing...it should integrate into your body exactly like the "real thing" because, from your body's chemical-sensing perspective, it IS the real thing.

Correct, "designer babies" in the sense of, "I want my baby to have blue eyes, and curly blond hair, and to have strong muscles and be great at music" is a complete myth. That would mean extremely advanced genetic engineering, plus the ability to predict how hundreds, or even thousands of genes overlap and interact over long periods of time.

In the future, we MAY be able to remove or repair disease-carrying genes while a fetus is still in the womb. You see this a lot in modern science fiction. For example, in Mass Effect, almost all humans are slightly genetically engineered, to remove disease, improve muscle mass and strength, improve eyesight, etc. (Of course, if this were real, the wealthy and powerful would have access to better genetic engineering techniques, but the game glosses over stuff like that.) There's actually a quest in Mass Effect 1, where a brother and sister are having a huge debate because her husband has died, leaving her pregnant with his child, and there's a chance that the baby might contract a rare genetic illness. There's a genetic treatment for it, but it has some risks to it. The brother doesn't want her to do the treatment because he's worried it could kill the baby before it's born, removing the last legacy of the baby's father. The sister wants to take the treatment, because the disease is serious and would have lifelong complications for the child, even if it's not very likely that the baby has it.

For now, though? There is no such thing as being able to add/remove/modify the genes of an infant. People talk about it because it's a scary idea, the specter of "manufacturing" our descendants, of having such great power over people who aren't alive yet to accept or reject that power. But we can't actually DO it yet. Again: it MAY become possible in the future. I'd say it's actually likely that, many years from now, we will learn enough about how DNA works and how to change it that we could do this stuff. But we *can't* do it right now.

In fact, right now, our ability to genetically engineer ANYTHING is extremely clumsy. We pretty much just shove a brand new gene (taken from some other organism) into an organism's DNA. It doesn't always work the way you want--because other genes can get in the way. For example, it gives you stuff like this genetically engineered "blue" rose:

Kinda...disappointingly purple, rather than a rich blue, right? That's because they took the "blue" gene--which roses don't have--from a pansy. Pansy petals aren't very acidic, while rose petals are much more acidic. The blue pigment from the pansy gene is sensitive to acid, degrading it, so that it doesn't quite show as strong as it should. Also, the original strain of rose used was naturally a deep burgudy-red color; the scientists altering the rose made another change to its genes, trying to "turn off" the red-pigment gene (rather, they tried to prevent a gene that makes a specific protein which is critically necessary for the rose to make its red color). But they didn't perfectly turn off that gene--it still works, just a little bit. That means the produced rose DOES have blue pigment in it...but less than they wanted...and also has red pigment in it, which they didn't want...so it ended up purple.

In other cases, scientists have stuck the "make stuff that glows" gene into fish, so the fish glow in the dark. But unlike the original organism, this glowy stuff spreads throughout the new fish's body, rather than focused in specific spots. That sort of thing can happen when you just "insert" new genes into a creature that already exists. And at present, it's VERY hard to just "remove" genes that are there. Most of the time, the only thing you can do is add new genes--new genes that mess up the function of bad genes are (at present) the only way to "remove" a gene's effects.

[Naughx]

But choosing a baby's gender is still somewhat feasible.

[amiabletemplar]

But choosing a baby's gender is still somewhat feasible.

That, actually, can be done without even preparing a mass of zygotes. X-chromosome sperm are larger, and more massive, than Y-chromosome sperm by a small amount. It is possible, albeit not trivial, to take a sperm sample, pick out just sperm of a particular "gender," and then put those sperm near an egg for in vitro fertilization. But gender selection isn't much compared to how "designer babies" are usually defined.