instead of focusing all our efforts in war and politics, why dont we just develop our technology for space travel, colonization so no more problem for overpopulation in the future... (sorry just watched star trek voyager [img]smile.gif[/img] )

truthfully, the earth can easily accomodate all of us (if we all work together) but all of us know that will never happen.. there will always be a factor in our human instict for disputes, arguments and challenges. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Cloning has far too many complications, at least in it's current incarnation, to be possibly good. Just one:

In-breeding only causes problems (physically, morally, well, eww) because it accentuates the genetic flaws of both parents, which makes the offspring particularly vulnerable/weak/less capable in certain areas. Now, if you had a cloned person with those same flaws, you have bypassed evolution (survival of the fitness.) The point of inter-breeding is that you can stamp out, progressively, as many faults within a species as possible. Now, let's say that someone's vulnerable to smallpox. They get cloned. Now that person goes out, gets a spouse, and has kids. All of a sudden, you have a lot more people running around with this same vulnerability. Easy pickings for some terrorist. :(

Just a note: I don't believe in cloning humans. Livers, kidneys, hearts, embryo research, sure. But in humans, you find that one of their most important needs is social. How can you possibly be expected to live a normal life when you are a mere "copy" of someone else? You can't live life to the fullest, because, even if only mentally, you are not your own person.

I am a biologist (well, almost - one more year), and an atheist. This is my opinion:

1)About cloning organs: first of all this is still science fiction - many researchers are trying to move in thet direction, because they (and I) believe this can be done, but we can't even see it on the horizon. There are some major problems:
A-we don't know how to force stem cells into a precise develpoment pathway - the biochemical signaling is as yet almost completely obscure. Building an organ in vitro presumes the complete knowledge of those signaling pathways. Also I doubt anything could be accomplished this way even if we knew them, because it would be extremely difficult and expensive to simulate the complexity of a developing body.
B-the alternative is to grow these organs in host bodies, which of course wouldn't be human bodies but animals (pigs or monkeys). Monkeys would be better because they are more similar to us, but they are really expensive and difficult to keep. Pigs are the next best choice, and the cheapest. Obviously, no matter how similar we are to monkeys, there are still extremely heavy technical problems, the first of which is the tissue compatibility between animal and man.
C-Also, provided we can overcome these obstacles, there are still some dangers of diseases transmitted from the host species to man, and also of time - you cannot get a fully grown heart in less than one or two years in the most optimistic forecast.

This is the reason why biology is moving towards xenotransplantation. this is still far in the future, but the initial research goals have already been reached.

Second part: about cloning.

I am against that, for two reasons.

first of them is technical: Nuclear cell replacement (the technique used for cloning) produces cells which are old, as someone has already pointed out: the somatic cells from which the nucleus (=DNA) comes from have already underwent many replication cycles, meaning their chromosomes are shorter due to the absence of telomerases. Hence the newborn cells will be limited in the number of divisions, and we don't know yet what this might cause. In fact some problems of aging have been pointed out about dolly.

second is ethical: contrary to what many think, a clone would share with the "original" person only body features and at most some general attitudes. Your DNA doesn't determine what your personality, culture, background and whatever will be. So a clone would be just a body copy, no more. The problem is, the newly cloned individual will have serious identity problems, no matter what science says.

So my point is, cloning is dangerous and will lead to problems to the clone. And this must not be done. This is intentionally causing harm to a human being. UN banned that, EC did it as well, and I agree.

P.S. MAnipulating stem or embryonic cells is entirely another matter: you don't "produce" individuals, you simply produce cells.

Good post [img]smile.gif[/img] As are many of the others....good to see a nice mature, intelligent discussion (was tempted to say "for a change" but there are a few on here)

[ 11-30-2002, 02:29 PM: Message edited by: Vaskez ]