I find it odd that the only moral issue people seem to find with procedures like this is whether it is okay to kill an egg cell, or an early stage embryo.
These egg cells don't grow on trees. They must be harvested from human beings. Egg cell harvesting is a complex process, requiring the donors (young women) to take experimental drugs with possibly harmful long term sideeffects.
If we are using human egg cells for experiments, or at some point in the future, for curing old people, aren't we exploiting the young woman we take those egg cells from?
AFAIK, they use the embryos left after a successful IVF (if the parents agree).
The sucess rate of an IVF is relatively low, and the procedure to extract the ova is complex, inconvenient and not risk-free.
Ovaries are overstimulated to produce more than one egg. They are all collected and fertilized, but, usually, only two or three are implanted at a time, to balance the low success rate and the non-null chance of multiple pregnancy (that's how octuplets are made :\).
If a successfull pregnancy occurs before running out of embryos, the mother/couple may donate the remaining embryos for research (that's how it works in Belgium, at least).
Current practice from the doctors I've talked to in North America is to encourage people to implant one egg per attempt, with two eggs being allowed if the couple insists.
Well, all of the egg donors are adults with (presumably) the ability to make rational decisions. They should of course give proper informed consent and potentially be given due compensation, but in that case I don't think it's fair to call it exploitation.
e: I hate to complain about downvotes, but did totally miss your point here or something? I think this is a good conversation to have, and I was replying in good faith.
There is a significant proportion of feminists who are against prostitution and pornography because it exploits women's bodies, and your statement can be used as a potential argument to dislodge their beliefs.
On the other hand, it is more unacceptable to suggest at times a person might not be always fully rational, and even more unacceptable to generalize this to a group of people. So your statement has brought up a contradiction in the beliefs of a subset of people, which you're not supposed to do.
They are being paid to become mothers to children who they will never know, who will likely die in miscarriages (implantation of IVF embryos is not very successful), and (per the WSJ article linked) may very likely be intentionally murdered by "scientists" to collect "tissue" (and citations, and grant money). These are young women, typically college students with poor earning prospects and lots of debt, being enticed with large amounts of money they may not feel free to turn down.
I'm sure that your comment is in good faith, and I'm not one of the ones who downvoted you. I only want to show you that, from this point of view, "informed consent" is not a good enough excuse for how these women are being used. (And I would also question whether these girls are truly "informed" about what's really going to be done to their children.)
To me, informed consent has a specific meaning. From Wikipedia:
> An informed consent can be said to have been given based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, implications, and future consequences of an action.
Of course, as you say:
> I would also question whether these girls are truly "informed" about what's really going to be done to their children.
This is completely fair, and I agree coercion or enticement may preclude informed consent. I know that this can be a sensitive issue, but I believe in working towards this goal rather than avoiding the issue. For instance: many people donate organs and tissues, but it is (generally speaking, and in the USA) illegal to sell these services. Thanks for the rsponse.
Not completely related since "the embryos created in these recent experiments may have certain limitations that would prevent them from giving rise to a human clone", I was thinking how would a clone embryo differ from a twin? We know that environmental factors physically change twins, and that also applies to clones. So if we consider twins to be different people, we should also consider a clone to be a different person.Then why all the pushback and "laws explicitly banning human reproductive cloning"?
I've seen a clone described as a "twin born at a different time." I don't see it as inherently raising any ethical dilemmas.
But since by definition we would need to perform experiments on non-consenting humans to perfect the technique, there isn't any ethical way to get to there.
I believe these laws target human cloning experimentation, rather than cloning as "twin manufacturing". The fact is, we don't know how to make fully viable clones yet (see the fate of our most advanced animal experiments for reference).
As such, it would be unethical to attempt to create a possibly failed human clone.
You'll likely produce many deformed babies before you get it right. Horrific.
Note that they haven't managed it yet on monkeys (surprised me).
Prediction: when it's been working perfectly on all primates for quite a while, these laws may start to change... perhaps at first for special cases, such as infertile couples (or a clone of an infant who died of non-congential causes - I don't know what to make of that, it's simultanesouly creepy and tugs at my heart-strings). IVF programs have similar restrictions.
probably going to get jumped on for using this phrase. but that feels like it goes against the "sanctity of life". In that it seems like it diminishes the value of the individual both the original and the clone, When you can just order up a replacement.
Here's a prediction I've heard that I actually thought was kind of interesting.
China will be the first to clone humans because they don't have our ethical restraints. Since China already is interested in eugenics, its easy to infer that they'll be interested in cloning geniuses.
It will get interesting if a large population of geniuses in China starts to tip the technological and military balance and whether other countries would feel compelled to respond.
> if a large population of geniuses in China starts to tip the technological and military balance and whether other countries would feel compelled to respond.
If all you needed to get an edge on other countries was a bunch of intelligent people, that would be known for a long time and India and China would be leading the world by now. But that's certainly not sufficient.
However, wouldn't you agree that China is getting closer to the US in technological sophistication? How does that picture look if a much larger proportion of China's population is geniuses?
Why China, which has an over-population problem. Why not countries who want to solve their declining population problems such as Russia, Japan, many Western European countries, or Israel (whose Jewish population is declining quickly relative to other groups)? Those with popular biases in favor of specific ethnic groups might see this as the alternative to immigration or national decline.
The problem for Japan and most Western nations is not that their young people are infertile, it's that their young people are unwilling to marry and have children. (And even those who are willing, are only willing to have one or two children, and only at age 35+.) Cloning can't solve that problem!
How does it relate to this discovery: https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-smashes-barrier-growin...
("By manipulating the appropriate signaling, the U.Va. researchers have turned embryonic stem cells into a fish embryo, essentially controlling embryonic development.")
This is wonderful news for the many women who are currently forced to carry someone else's child via in-vitro fertilization if they want a child. Hopefully they'll be able to have a child that is biologically theirs in a reasonable timeframe as further developments occur.
By "theirs" do you mean a clone of themself? That's a pretty weird prospect to me. I don't see how cloning could be used to create an embryo that shares only one set of chromosomes. If the woman's eggs are still viable, it seems like regular IVF could be used. Or am I misunderstanding your point?
Why the down-votes? It is actually pretty easy to get some tissue from pretty much everyone. And knowing there are perverted, rich individuals out there it's quite conceivable this will happen.
> Impressive from a perspective of science, but also deeply unsettling to me. It's clearly only a matter of time before a human clone is created.
Identical twins are "natural" clones. They are genetically identical. (Barring mutation.)
People take issue with "artificial" or reproductive cloning.
If you reproductively cloned an identical twin, you would end up with three genetically identical people. One is just born later, with a more certain outcome.
[Edit: I am not advocating anything. This is a descriptive observation of genetics, not a normative one.]
Keyword is natural though. It's one thing to push science to it's limits. It's another entirely to delve into eugenics.
It's pretty understandable and a default position to advocate for it, but it could be a slippery slope, and will definitely push the politics towards engineered babies over natural ones.
For what it's worth, I wasn't advocating anything. I was just pointing out that cloning occurs every day. I was also hoping to highlight that deliberately cloned people are essentially the same as 'randomly/naturally' cloned people.
A hypothetical clone (in the popular connotation of the word) of myself is essentially identical to my hypothetical identical twin sibling, the distinction is that the hypothetical clone is born after me, and was 'deliberately conceived.' Declaring one to be 'natural' and one to be 'unnatural' is unkind. And arguably, bigoted. (I'm speaking generally, not accusing you of doing this.)
The hypothetical clone will still be a human being in every sense of the word. I suppose you could call them the 'deliberates', but are they more 'deliberate' than those born of copulation or old fashioned, 20th century artificial insemination?
Would identical twins be considered as a higher caste than the 'deliberates'?
Also, what percentage 'clone' do you have to be to be considered a 'clone'? (After all, each 'normal' person only differs from one another in one nucleotide out of every thousand.) Can we replace our damaged organs from those bio-printed of our own DNA? How will this limit proteomic engineering? If we engineer a protein that confers some immunity or cure to an affliction, would we have to deliver it like we do 'artificial' insulin? Or could we "cut the middleman" and edit in a 'copy' of the engineered gene that yields the engineered protein? Might that put the entire genome over some arbitrary 'clone' threshold? Do we wait until the genetic immunity randomly/selectively occurs in nature? Or do we stay 'organic'?
Genomic engineering and artificial genomic reproduction will certainly be the debate of the 21st century. The two fields might engender the next major civil rights movement.
What about eliminating allergies, Alzheimer's, and cancer? How about increasing the intelligence of the human species?
Do we want to give our children better opportunities? Forget superficial stuff like blond hair and blue eyes, we're talking about the possibility of having guaranteed super-healthy, super-happy, super-smart children.
That's all been doable for a long time, using controlled breeding. We do it all the time with animals; look what we've done to dogs. The only difference genetic engineering brings is how quickly it can be done.
But that's eugenics, and it's been rejected as immoral by pretty much everyone. A big part of the problem, I think, is that a custom-engineered child is a lot more expensive to create than a natural random-chance child, and therefore eugenics only produces super-humans for the rich and powerful, who will become even more rich and powerful by breeding themselves into master race that enslaves everyone else.
Eugenics can't upgrade all of humanity directly because natural breeding, being cheaper, is also much more common. So the vast majority of inferior humans will always outnumber the eugenics-produced super-humans. That's where the enslavement comes in; the super-humans will have to use their inherited wealth and power to make sure they retain control because they can't out-breed everyone else.
The other possibility, and the only way the super-humans can replace the normals, is to kill off all of the normals either directly or by making them infertile. That's even worse than enslavement.
No matter how you look at it, eugenics has a bad outcome if it's not available to everyone at the same time. And if it was available to everyone, we wouldn't call it eugenics. We'd call it 'medicine', 'vaccination', 'pre- and post-natal care', and 'preventative care'.
> That's all been doable for a long time, using controlled breeding. We do it all the time with animals; look what we've done to dogs. The only difference genetic engineering brings is how quickly it can be done.
Selective sexual reproduction and genetic engineering are actually markedly different. Genetic engineering involves precise splicing, insertion, or rearrangement of an organism's genome (or subset of genes). Selective sexual reproduction is a directed random rearrangement of genetic material over successive generations based (on often poorly understood) "meta-characteristics" or traits.
The critical distinction is that genetic engineering is the deliberate editing of exact genetic information, whereas selective sexual reproduction is a gradual, iterated, locally-random mixing of genetic information with imprecise results.
Furthermore, genetic engineering enables genetic mixing that aren't possible with selective sexual reproduction. For example, the insertion of genetic information into E.coli in order to produce human insulin for diabetics. Or, the modification of a particular cyanobacteria to secrete petroleum after photosynthesis.
>> ...eliminating allergies, Alzheimer's, and cancer...
> That's all been doable for a long time, using controlled breeding...
This is incorrect. You may be surprised to learn that those deeply complicated, diverse families of afflictions would not be effectively treated via 'controlled breeding'.
A simple, naive disproof of the assertion that cancer can be eliminated in domesticated or selectively selectively bred animals (via artificial selection): pigs, huskies, and laboratory mice all get cancer at rates that are more or less congruent with wild boar, wolves, and rats.
I don't think you can have both - super-happy and super-smart. But otherwise, yes. I see no problems with you creating super-smart children that will be able to wipe out all the stupid ones. Who knows, maybe this is the only way to save humanity from AI menace ;)
I think it's not quite that simple. We're more than just our chromosomes. How much more is a matter of philosophy, but even restricting ourselves to just what we know by science, we know that the fetal environment, mitochondria, etc. play a role. Artificial cloning methods as I understand them are distinct from the way natural identical twins form. If it were so simple to reproduce "natural cloning", it would already done and commonplace. In reality, it seems to require quite a bit of hacking.
I don't think something having a natural analog makes it any less unsettling. I also have not specifically advocated anything, although it's probably clear that I have reservations.
I'm not sure where you are disagreeing with me. I wasn't really trying to simplify anything. I was just saying that genetic clones already exist.
Identical twins are clones. They are genetically identical barring mutation. That's basically a catch-all for copying errors, environmental mutations, fetal environment, etc.
> Artificial cloning methods as I understand them are distinct from the way natural identical twins form.
Correct, artificial cloning is commonly divided into therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. The pop culture idea of cloning is closest to reproductive cloning. You mentioned that we were close to creating a 'human clone'. I was just pointing out that there already are clones. We might be talking past each other, I was not saying that we have reproductively cloned (or that the two methods are the same). I was just trying to highlight the fact that twins are essentially genetically the same as what reproductive clones would be, as in the outcome isn't that much different.
People do take issue with reproductive cloning. Reproductive cloning in humans is still hypothetical at this point, but it is theoretically possible and could yield people that are 'identical' in the same way that identical twins are 'identical.'
> If it were so simple to reproduce "natural cloning", it would already done and commonplace. In reality, it seems to require quite a bit of hacking.
I didn't really say it was simple or currently possible, I said people take issue with it.
> I don't think something having a natural analog makes it any less unsettling.
Suppose, that whether we like it or not, for better or worse, somewhere cloning occurs. Through no choice of their own, these clones exist. They are exactly the same as the natural analog. They are people that would deserve the same treatment and consideration as you or I. The thought of these people being oppressed is unsettling.
> somatic cell nuclear transfer isn't really cloning because it doesn't include the mitochondria.
That really depends on how you define "cloning". It absolutely can be considered therapeutic cloning, and it would serve as an initial step in reproductive cloning.
Genetics major here - I think I'm going to be sick. I have no problem using genetics as a source code from which to print replacement parts if you will, but the idea of creating life from an existing person terrifies me for some reason. Is our future some version of an awful Bruckheimer movie (The Island)?
I never really got this line of thought. While creating life in a laboratory and creating life through sexually reproduction between a man and woman (or however it is other organisms manage it) have the same end result, I think it's fairly reasonable to recognize that they are two very distinctly different things.
These egg cells don't grow on trees. They must be harvested from human beings. Egg cell harvesting is a complex process, requiring the donors (young women) to take experimental drugs with possibly harmful long term sideeffects.
If we are using human egg cells for experiments, or at some point in the future, for curing old people, aren't we exploiting the young woman we take those egg cells from?