Is human cloning good or bad?

...so you can _ _ _ _ yourself?

 

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Cloning is not what they make it look like in the movies.

 

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I assume it will be expensive and will not address current issues better than spending that money on feeding the poor, giving cheap anti-IV medications to Africans or whatever.

 

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Seems like some here do not understand much about the cloning process.

Refined techniques should cut down the failure rate. Furthermore, the cloning process replaces the nucleus of an ovum with the nucleus of a complete cell. The ovum is implanted into the uterus of an adult.

If all goes well, there is a live birth. If the female is willing to undergo this process what is the ethical problem? Obviously an informed adult would not volunteer if the success rate was so low.

If the failures are in the celluar work, only a few cells are destroyed with each failure. If the failures are after implantation in a uterus it is like a miscarriage. I would not expect the woman to volunteer for 277 attempts.

BTW: A clone is essentially a twin born many years after the person being cloned. Unlike the SciFi stories, you do not get a true copy of the adult being cloned. There are some here who do not seem to understand this detail.

 

I do. To fail 277 times means 277 eggs need to be harvested from donors. Refining a technique for a sheep doesn't imply a greater success rate than 1/277 in humans per se.

Dolly was put to sleep aged 6, because she had health problems, seemingly related to mitosis and cell aging. If stem cells could be used it might overcome some of these problems, granted.

But to have a success with a human, in the same manner we counted success with 'Dolly'? That gives the human clone a life expectancy of around forty years. Not good, eh?

 

"Good" and "bad" are arbitrary terms used as labels by individuals based on their own perspective. A real world event may be seen as "good" by one person and as "bad" by another at the same time, while the actuality is that the even is neither - it just "is", it "happened" and the rest is your reaction to that.

Asking if cloning is good or bad is like asking if the moon landing mission was good or bad. It cost a lot of money, took a lot of effort and resource....meanwhile babies were starving in Africa. Unfortunately for those babies, it is nowhere written that we are responsible for feeding them and some would say it would be more cost - effective to neuter the parents rather than attempt to do damage control after the fact.

While the moon landing effort cost the US big time, the technological spin - offs from the space program have been powering our economy since then and this has 'bumped up' our game, economically speaking.

Like the moon landing, or breaking the sound barrier, or the first successful organ transplant, the first cataract surgery, chemotherapy, x -ray machine etc etc etc, there are very positive common life paybacks for a lot of folks from those breakthroughs.

Cloning will be the same. It is going to be done, regardless of religious objections, and there will be positive life improvements for a lot of folks when it has been accomplished. Yeah, there will be some less desirable stuff too, and that will needs be dealt with, just like everything else.

 

despise not cloning because it is a form of art sublime, so trancient it is, imagine seeing yourself not in the mirror , not in your imaginations but as a true reality in double....so enchanting!

 

THAT WILL BE... hermophodite you...mmmmh or what, try we are all waiting to see

 

why do you think africa needs help that much? it could a desolate jungle , yes,but it stands in its own serenity. why not try Punjab in india or Uzbekistan!!!!

 

the only problem I see with cloning is why would we want to create more people when there's already an oversupply of us. instead of cloning we need to put our brains on getting other planets livable so we can spread out.

 

Event though I'm a pro-science guy. After watching Moon I have decided against it, for obvious reasons.

 

Except that they'll always be much much younger than you...

 

Cloning Jessica Alba is good, clone me a few so i have a few spares incase they escape or get damaged.

 

Here here! :cheers:

 

You clone a human when a man & woman has sex

 

At the moment mammalian cloning is terribly inefficient and produces a high number of abnormalities in the few cells that survive to blastocyst (before embryo) and later stages.

The main reason is that the process of cloning involves a crude injection of genes from the animal being cloned into a surrogate egg cell. This method does not take into account the epigenetic regulation of genes that involves chromatin structure (such as acetylation of histones or methylation of DNA).

In other words, scientists are still unable to effectively control the intricacies of gene-egg cell interactions. Genes need to be expressed or repressed appropriately in early stages of development for proper functioning of the adult organism. This is where scientists are just now beginning to study.

For example, the DNA in embryonic cells from cloned embryos are more methylated (compacted) than cells from uncloned embryos. We need to develop better methods of altering these processes of chromatin structure (how the DNA is compacted). Right now our methods of cloning are unable to effectively control these aspects.

Because DNA methylation helps regulate gene expression, misplaced methyl groups can interfere with embryonic development. This has shown up in the greatly increased likelihood of cloned animals having abnormalities and physiological complications such as cancer.

Bottom line: we still have a long way to go before we can clone humans with any degree of success.