OF COURSE Reproductive Cloning is on the Biotech Agenda
Nature (no link) says so: "Meanwhile, the main debate [over human cloning] still focuses on making cloned embryos for research. 1997 was just three years after the Washington Post declared that it would be 'unconscionable' to create embryos for research; and in 1997 itself the European Convention on Human Rights and Bioethics was opened for signature, which turns the the Post's repugnance into international law by prohibiting signatories form creating embryos for research.
"In contrast, what has been universally deemed as unacceptable is the pursuit of human reproductive cloning - or the production of what some have called a delayed identical twin. Here, the two issues that have dominated the discussion have been dignity and safety. There is a consensus that dignity is not undermined if a human offspring is valued in its own right and not merely as a means to an end. But there is no consensus that we will eventually know enough about cloning for the risks of creating human clones to be so small as to be ethically acceptable.
"The debate may seem to have been pre-empted by prompt prohibition. But as the science of epigenetics and of development inevitably progresses, those for whom cloning is the only means to bypass sterility or genetic disease, say, will increasingly demand its use. Unless there is some unknown fundamental biological obstacle, and given wholly positive ethical motivations, human reproductive cloning is an eventual certainty."
HT. Nigel Cameron
Labels: Reproductive Human Cloning
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:02 PM
8 Comments
8 Comments:
I recall reading someone who talked about Dolly and the potential for creating a clone of oneself, and one of the things I remember him discussing was making copies of himself to do different tasks, like one would be formed with his good parenting skills brought to the forefront so he could have someone tend his kids, while another would have his physical abilities heightened.
All the while I'm thinking, "Wait a sec, you're making a human being, and that requires that human growing up from a baby. What's all this talk about having different designer clones for oneself, since they'd all be different individuals?"
Well, you may or may not know this, but I'm an anime fan, and one of the series I love best out of Japan is called Ghost In The Shell (a rough translation of the notion of the "ghost in the machine," meaning a living soul inside a body that's little more than an andriod). One of the things that the characters can do is have their brains and spinal columns wrapped up in special metal thingies that can be removed and implanted in different bodies - you'd have your own mind but you'd have a whole new body. In the cartoon they use robots for this, but one of the folks at the anime society on campus made a comment, "Wouldn't it be cool if you could really do that? Then you'd be able to make a whole bunch of kinds of yourself and always be perfect, and if you screw up one body you can just change to a new one like changing your clothes."
I can't gurantee that's an exact quote, except for those last four words - "Like changing your clothes."
I wonder how many people are thinking of different ways to make a baby grow up really, really fast, then taking his or her brain out so that the body is up for use by the original, because he wanted to change his clothes, so to speak.
Don't laugh - they did it to a monkey. Literally. A scientist who is into that kind of thing beheaded a pair of monkeys - one head he threw away, and the other he put on the opposit monkey's body. The monkey couldn't move, but he hooked up the organs and all - it lived a few hours or maybe as long as a day or two, certainly not more. But it lived, its brain making the new body's heart beat. It actually woke up and tried to bite the scientist once.
I guess someone doing it to a robot body wouldn't bother me - anything that has human DNA is a human, and as long as a brain is supported by something, it (containing human DNA) is alive and therefore human, and I'd be as willing to accept that a brain by itself is a human as much as I accept that an embryo by itself is human, and both are people in my estimation - but doing it to a cloned body is just plain evil, and I can see people going in that direction.
Tabs: You wouldn't pull an old man's leg, now would you? Switched heads on monkeys? Really? Proof, por favor.
No joke. From Wikipedia.org:
"The first head transplants were conducted in 1812, although they had only a marginal amount of success. There were many successive attempts on a variety of animals including rabbits and dogs. It wasn't until the 1970s that there was any real success.
In the 1970s a group of scientists from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland Ohio, led by Robert J. White, a neurosurgeon and a professor of neurological surgery who was inspired by the work of Vladimir Demikhov, performed a highly controversial operation to transplant the head of one monkey onto another’s body. The procedure was a success to some extent, with the animal being able to smell, taste, hear, and see the world around it. The operation involved cauterizing arteries and veins carefully while the head was being severed to prevent hypovolemia. Because the nerves were left entirely intact, connecting the brain to a blood supply kept it chemically alive. The animal survived for some time after the operation, even at times attempting to bite some of the staff. [1] In 2001 the operation was successfully repeated again on a monkey by the aforementioned Dr. White. [2]"
Also from Wikipedia.org:
"In the 1970s, after a long series of controversial experiments, White performed a successful transplant of one monkey head onto the body of another monkey, and the transplanted head lasted for hours after the procedure.
White has also pioneered now widely-accepted spinal cord and brain cooling techniques, which now allow for therapeutic procedures not previously possible. For 40 years, he was a neurological surgery professor for Case Western Reserve University medical school, but is now retired.
White also served as an advisor to Pope John Paul II on medical ethics[1]."
An article about the head transplant:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1263758.stm
"The professor told the BBC's Today programme how he believes the operation is the next step in the transplant world.
And he raised the possibility that it could be used to treat people paralysed and unable to use their limbs, and whose bodies, rather than their brains, were diseased...
He admitted that it could appear "grotesque", but said there had been ethical considerations throughout the history of organ transplants...
The arguments against head and brain transplants were outlined by Dr Stephen Rose, director of brain and behavioural research at the Open University.
He said: "This is medical technology run completely mad and out of all proportion to what's needed.
"It's entirely misleading to suggest that a head transplant or a brain transplant is actually really still connected in anything except in terms of blood stream to the body to which it has been transplanted.
"It's not controlling or relating to that body in any other sort of way."
He added: "It's scientifically misleading, technically irrelevant and scientifically irrelevant, and apart from anything else a grotesque breach of any ethical consideration."
"It's a mystification to call it either a head transplant or a brain transplant.
"All you're doing is keeping a severed head alive in terms of the circulation from another animal. It's not connected in any nervous sense.""
Pretty intense stuff. I've always found this kind of thing fascinating, myself. I'm with White, as I believe that the soul is connected to the body through the brain, but then again I have a different vision of the soul than most people. That's why I don't have a problem with people wanting to transplant their brains into robots. It's only when you talk about messing with another human body that I get upset.
One last article:
http://healthyliving.allinfo-about.com/head.html
"Head transplants on animals have been attempted since 1908, but it was not until 1970 that Robert White first successfully transplanted the head of a rhesus monkey. When the monkey recovered from anaesthesia, White noted its aggression, but also the fact that it would eat and could follow people around the room with its eyes. Monkey’s lived for up to eight days in these early experiments. Since then technology has advanced but it is reported that monkeys are put down after about a week for ‘humane’ reasons.
According to White, now 75 and retired from medicine in the States, human head transplants are the next logical step. Human heads would be easier, he says, because surgeons are more used to dealing with humans and the blood vessels and tissues are much larger."
By the way, Wesley - I'm not really clever enough to make this one up out of whole cloth, I admit it. LOL
Oh, something else - this one isn't an article per say, but it's written by Dr. White himself, discussing the head transplants:
http://www.langues-vivantes.u-bordeaux2.fr/Interactive/P2/transplant2r.htm
"Equipping old minds with new bodies--whether
you call it head transplantation or body transplantation--is
not outside science's ken. How would it work?
By Robert J. White...
Longer Life For The Paralyzed?
Who might benefit from a head transplant? The first candidates for the procedure will probably be people who have been paralyzed from the neck down because of an accident. For reasons that are still unclear, such individuals often die prematurely of multiple-organ failure. Although transferring a paralyzed person's head to another body would not--at least at this point in the development of the technology--allow them to move or walk again, it could prolong their life. And many hope that in the 21st century, physicians will find a way to heal severed spinal cords, so those who have their heads transplanted onto a new body might someday receive sensory information from and gain motor control over it.
Where will bodies for head transplantation come from? The recipient body would be someone who has been declared brain dead. Such individuals already serve as multiple-organ donors, so there should be no strikingly new bioethics considerations for head transplantation.
But how well will we as a society accept the concept that human brain transplantation involves transplanting the mind and spirit? Are we willing to acknowledge that the human brain is the physical repository of the soul, something this operation implies? These are the questions facing us as we go in reality where Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley went only in fiction."
Good grief. Time to dash myself on the rocks. Thanks.
If anyone wants to get in line for my body after I tansfer my brain to a robot, I've set up an auction on eBay. Bidding starts at $25,000.
John:
"If anyone wants to get in line for my body after I tansfer my brain to a robot, I've set up an auction on eBay. Bidding starts at $25,000."
Hahaha! I'm not saying it's *possible* or ever will be, just that the idea doesn't bother me as much as actually swapping heads. Ugh, that's a horrid thing.
But seriously, we're getting closer and closer to developing wonderful artificial limbs and organs that will help people live their lives fully and to their best end, and that's a good thing. If I find out that someone without arms can get replacement "robot" arms that are so life-like that nobody can tell the difference, that's a *good* thing.
But it would be hypocritical of me to say, "Well, I can see us replacing limbs and such with robotic parts, but people putting their brains in robot bodies is evil," because really, it doesn't change the fact that the brain is 100% organic, that it's got human DNA cells, etc etc.
Since I doubt it'll ever happen, I just say, "Yeah, on the off chance it happens it doesn't bother me, since we're not harvesting other people for their bodies."
But I should have clarified. That's *one* area that I'm totally cool with - robotics! You get a robot that is able to do the things that people use human organ donations for, and volia! No ethical problem because one person who values his life and his own dignity chooses to make modifictaions that let him live the best possible life right up to his death, and *does not* interfere with the rights of other people. Folks who don't believe in organ donation don't have their morals offended anymore than those of us who are all for it.
That's all I'm saying.
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