Hey guys!! What do u think about cloning in general and Reproductive (esp. Human) cloning in particular? I think with the available technology u can clone a human? How about cloning Bill Clinton, Mandela or in the other hand cloning Bin Laden, Bush. May be we can think about cloning GBBS, Paras, Prachanda, GP and MKN and of course our great PM SBD????? Well, cloning them would be worthy in any sense?

Note: I don't know if this topic is being discussed before in Sajha!



Nut

I think the technology is good. Cloning research will in the forseeable future be used for purposes of making replicated organs and other regenerative theraupies. But then again i must admit that....i am pretty nervous about human cloning....but more because of the idiots who will likely be in charge of it than the technology itself.

Meanwhile I always favor research in the sector and the concept of spare parts is somewhat appealing to me. ;)

Personally what I think is cloning can be a very helpful scientific achievement for making different kind of organs for transplantation..I wud better compare it with nuclear power..as we know electricity- a good use of it can be for the improvement of mankind..on the other hand the same nuclear power or knowledge can lead us to deadly atomic bombs ..u wud never know when u can bring mankind to an end.

Similiarly if cloning goes in wrong hands they r no less dangerous than dirty bombs...I think we better watch out for this.

me view..:oD...

well cloning is possible..we can make the same thing..person phsically....the brains..the phyique etc...but in the end..how the person turns out to be...the 'soul' part....isnt it more about how the person is brought up...and the experiences he/she goes thru..we dun hate when we are born do we?we are taught to hate thru experience..and yap i do belive...hitler would have been a better person if he was brought up in a diff evironment....and the most dumb person if he was brought up in the worst situations..he would be the most chalak...backstabber...etc..there ever was..:o)....

well i do think what i would be ..if i was brought up in another country..in another family...and tho i do think i might end up as me..as i am right now..in the end..logicallly i know..i might have turned up..less screwed in me head..or more..wahahah..

dhat why do we waste our time in 'what ifs" questions....cos in the end...spending too much time on such things..is waste of time..or is it?someone pls let me know :o)...im waiting to know i know..:o)


and sersioulsy..doctors can be god one day cant they?god gives live...and well once ppl ..doctors/scientist can clone ppl..isnt that eternal life?immmortal?in some ways?so thats god aint it?well...im lookin in a weird way..dun think i make sense hehe..but thats the way i think so let it be..we are all diff in the end ..tho we are all in the end..same ..humans hehe..ironies..ironies..ironies hehe...

dyam i think i better go to bed..before me jhyapness makes the asylum come after me wahahahah ;oP.

one the the many

danny.;o)

I agree with you guys! Sense you brought a very good comparison between Cloning and Nuclear Reactors. I was also considering the same concept when i was preparing my seminar on one of the papers that was published by the Korean Scientists in "Science"- Therapeutic cloning something similar to generating electricity from the Nuclear reactor and Reproductive cloning something that would be equivalent to making a Nuclear bomb!! And of course most Scientists of the present world do not favor human cloning!!
But there might be some scientists they are just crazy about cloning human and in fact Clade is the name of a company that has claimed that it has already cloned human. This report is to be verified independently.

As i started looking deep into the therapeutic cloning, there also you have to destroy a lot of human embryos and the success rate of SCNT is something around 20%. That means to produce 20 blastocysts you have to sacrifice 100 human embryos. And there comes the ethical and health related issues related to the egg donor (the mother). She has to go through unnecessary risk of taking high dose of drugs that stimulate the production of ovum from her uterus and other invasive procedures. And of course there are reports of toxicity related problems with the tissues that were prepared from the therapeutic cloning. Well there are some reports where instead of human egg Scientists are working on ways to find procedure for using animal (other mammals) eggs for the therapeutic cloning. Let?s hope that would make things easier in the coming days for the patients with Neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease and Diabetic patients who have completely destroyed their terminal beta-cells- insulin producing cells. These are the very few examples where therapeutic cloning that can be used. But again there are lots of chances where even therapeutic cloning could be misused! So be careful about this!!

Well Matrix Gal has also brought good points about the cloning!

I expect from you guys to comment more about ethical issues that are related to cloning human embryoning stem cells!!

Nut

Hey Dananah you just brought a very sensible issue about the reproductive cloning. Yes u are right it is the environment that would decide what a child would be in the future. There are some misconceptions that cloning would copy exactly the same individual! It is true that cloning copies the genetic make up of an individual but it is not necessary that it would copy the intellectual capability of that individual. Cloning can not copy the mental cognition of your brain into the brain of ur clone. What I mean to say here is that you can not expect a clone of Mandela where that cloned child (little Mandela) would exactly behave in the way Mandela did in his life time! I have even doubt about the physical posture (height, weight and other outward appearances) of that would be little Mandela.
That?s why u are right, why human cloning at the first place? You don?t to have physical copies of individuals in this highly populated world. Science is to seek solutions for complex things instead of contributing another complex in the network of complexes of present world.

Nut

Correction: *You do not want to have more physical

Duhhhh.... there's nothing wrong with cloning....besides the gene-pool problem (having two people with the same genes is worse than inbreeding, gene-pool wise)
now;

A) cloning will not allow us to grow spare organs. At least, it won't work as well. It is better to use cells from the person needing a transplant, get them to regress back to stem cells, and then grow the organ tissue as needed. it's not cloning, it's just a modified form of healing (growing back damaged tissue). Since the most likely version of cloning will consist of getting stem cells first, you might as well just use the stem cells to grow a new body part, instead of waiting several years while the cloned body part grows (after all, you don't want a 2 year old lung!). Stem cells are faster, cheaper, and easier.

B) Anyone with the resources to grow a clone army has the resources to take over the world.

By way of explanation: A clone isn't even a fetus. It's a zygote. For a clone army of 1,000,000, you need: The right soldier to clone. You're gonna need a person who has the right genetics for everything in your army: strong enough for front line infantry, good enough reflexes for scouting and special ops, smart enough for command, etc. There is something to be said for nature vs nurture though.

Either 1,000,000 surrogate mothers, or the children will be a few years apart. If you give each child a full year of care by it's surrogate mother (they can double as child-care/nurses), then you'll probably need at least 100,000 surrogate mothers.

The resources to train 1,000,000 beings from infancy to adulthood. That alone could crush the entire project. You'll need food, education, shelter and more. This is gonna attract quite a bit of attention. Someone is bound to notice you have 1,000,000 people squirreled away somewhere.

The resources to equip 1,000,000 soldiers.

Obviously, we're talking large nation-level spending. Like a major effort by the USA or a European power. Something that every other major power will pick up on pretty quickly. It takes about 18 years to grow your army. What do you do if someone decides to stop you, and attacks at project year 14 (when you've committed a sizable amount of resources to the project already, but you're not yet ready to use the army). And 1,000,000 isn't particularly large for an army in wartime (hell, the armies in World War I were bigger than that!).

Hmmm If I had those resources, and I wanted to take over the world, I'd do it some other way. hehe.

D

That is quite an interesting thread you started, Nut....!!!

Well, either DNA cloning, Therapeutic cloning or Reproductive cloning (which you are keenly interested in this thread, and especially human), Cloning technology should be meaningful and purposeful. I wonder how this cloning impact the development of Nervous System, as you might have noticed for Human intellect matters a lot than as other animals they cloned like sheep,pig etc. Furthermore, what about the consequences of error while cloning?

Well, returning back to cloning Clinton, Mandela, OBL, Bush, SBD and others (on your list), I just have one question to you- are these living beings fall under the catagory of
"Endangered species" for making them potential candidate for cloning???? If so, then why not, otherwise think about that again...

However, I enjoyed reading your post along with others who joined you.

Pheri Vaytaula...!!!

Cloning on the cellular level has been going on for years now. A simple PCR reaction, in which you clone a DNA or an RNA strand using primers(first know the sequence of the DNA that needs to be amplified, and then design your primers based on the sequence) is indeed a form of cloning. Bear in mind that a DNA is just a molecule, and with PCR, a DNA can be amplified as many times as you want. While PCR is not that new a technique, it's invention has been a boon to the scientific community.
Furthermore, cellular functions found naturally, for example in bacteria, can be abused for cloning purposes. For example, suppose you want to study protein expression of a DNA strand. All you need to do is, amplify the gene in question, and then put it in a plasmid. Plasmids occur naturally in certain forms of bacteria like e coli, for example. Yeasts also come with plasmids. So you insert the gene in a plasmid, seal up the plasmid using some form of ligase enzyme, and then let the bacterium's cellular mechanism clone the plasmid for you. This way, you can get thousands of genes you're studying and use it for protein expression studies. There are many variations of plasmids. Cosmids for example are e-coli/virus hybrids. Viruses have also been used for cloning, as they spit out more clones than any other known organism(viruses are technically not living--it's a debatable issue btw).
Of course animals have been cloned, but cloning of a complex multicellular organism like a sheep or a cow, or even a human being, is an arduous task, but it can indeed be done. This however, is a long-term study, and will take years before it can be effective.
Oh, and cloning of plants is a cinch. Ever ingested one of those seedless melons? They're more than likely cloned.
So it's not like one your run of the mill l sci-fi movies where a cloning tank spits out a clone or two. If that sort of technology is to become available, I see it coming for Asian countries like Japan or China, where religion does not hinder progress. As for America, the religious right will keep moral decadence in check, if you know what I mean.

Well! My words of thanks to all those who have made comments on cloning. I can sense some kind of scientific knowledge in VR and TO and of course in MG?s writing! I am happy to see your thoughtful comments here. As u know, those of us who are working in basic and clinical research would of course know in detail about the principle behind the three types of cloning- DNA cloning, Therapeutic Cloning and Reproductive Cloning. When i first started writing on this thread i tried to distance myself from my personal experience in research. I thought that writing too much on scientific details would make those from outside the research field feel uninteresting. Anyway, thanks TO for the detail about the DNA cloning. So i tried to give more emphasis on ethical issues that are associated with reproductive cloning and also with therapeutic cloning. I guess this is the hot topic in the scientific as well as nonscientific circle in USA and may be in the world.

With respect to VR curiosity about impact of cloning on the development of Nervous system, this is an interesting aspect and i guess i have already mentioned that "It is true that cloning copies the genetic make up of an individual but it is not necessary that it would copy the intellectual capability of that individual. Cloning can not copy the mental cognition of your brain into the brain of ur clone." somewhere in the series of reply.

With respect to MG "A) cloning will not allow us to grow spare organs. At least, it won't work as well. It is better to use cells from the person needing a transplant, get them to regress back to stem cells, and then grow the organ tissue as needed. it's not cloning, it's just a modified form of healing (growing back damaged tissue)". I do not know about the context of her argument and i have not any serious disagreement except that you can not directly regress back any differentiate cell into Stem cell. For the organ transplantation (one of the applications of therapeutic cloning) you need to develop the progenitor of the cell type ur are looking for and stem cell can give rise to those cells if you provide right combination of mitogens and growth factors that stimulate stem cell to produce the differentiated cell types that you are interested in. I was not feeling comfortable with the directly digressing damaged cells back into the stem cells. for the tissue or organ transplantation you need to have pool of stem cells and that stem cell is produced by the Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) technique where you will fuse donar cell Nucleous into the enucleated egg and grow that zygote into the blastocyst stage of the embryonic development and during that stage you will get totipotent (cells that can give rise to almost all the cell types, i guess u have more than 240 cell types in our body) stem cells. Now you can recover these stem cells and differentiate them or directly transplant these cells (based on need and the feasibility of the technique) into the patient's body (donar nucleus is generally taken from the patient?s body so that that would not reject the transplant).

Yes, you are right VR that reproductive cloning will prove really a good tool to preserve endangered species of animals and I never meant those people that I listed as endangered anyway!! Hahaha I was here trying to give the political dimension to the misuse of reproductive cloning. No offence at all!!

Nut

Correction degressing=regressing

About the consequences of errors in cloning, this is something really a serious problem! As mentioned by MG you need a very large number of surrogate mother to transplant the embryos. Before that you need a really large number of eggs (this is really a big problem in human) and the rate of successful transfer by SCNT is about 20% reported in human. Again when you transplant fertilized egg back into the surrogate mother uterus there also you have chances of getting error. And at last, there is always probability of getting erroneous chromosomal make up the cloned child. One particularly interesting aspect is Telomere shortening. This phenomenon is responsible for the pre-mature ageing and this phenomenon is frequently encountered in the cloned animals. Do you know Dolly was euthanized last year to relieve her from the unbearable pain she was experiencing. SO you know the health related problem associated with the cloned individuals is really a serious problem that scientists have to deal with in this decade.

Nut

Well, that was a nice insight of Cloning, Nut....!!!

I am glad that you sensed some kind of scientific knowledge on me: kinda bingo...

I was being ironical regarding the "Politically Correct-Endangered Species": nothing beyond that!!! Hopefully no more additional Blue-Dress, Tora-Bora and Tongue-Twisting Speech in future, at least not so soon....

Pheri-Vaytaula...!!!

Yes, identical twins share the same DNA, but their phenotypes are different from each other. Clones, however, are supposed to share DNA and phenotypes, which will drastically help to improve our understanding of the brain and knowledge, because we'll have two perfectly identical beings, instead of two almost identical genetic beings, as is used now. Practicalities of mass cloning aside, I think that we should clone at least a few dozen people, so as to understand the nature of the brain, which still remains somewhat of a mystery to us. ;)

I have no problem cloning George Bush and Osama for the next showdown.

How about cloning Saddam Hussien ?

Hey Nut, thanks for an interesting topic.Good to read so many varied responses frm you guys.

Therapeutic cloning being a relatively new field in comparision to the other branches of medicine,there is certainly a vast amount of potential to be tapped frm .I guess, the most noticeable one being in treatment of many diseases that are incurable at the mo or in congenital anomalies.As much as we would like to see this regenerative medicine being used only for the good of the human race, there is no denying the fact that, once this techonology is given a free hand there will be so many other issues that will far outweigh the advantages.

The potential of gene technology is beyond the comprehension of most people today. Cloning may be a wonderful soultion for all those dreadful diseases and what nots, but there are tooo many social,moral,ethical issues that sooner or later will pose a huge problem.

Some of the things that comes to my mind right now ;

# Biological warfare !!! Mutant supergerms/superbugs/super viruses/superbacteria !! You sneeze and you get cancer. Wow ! Threat from chemical weapons and biological agents as weapons of mass destruction - war against terror and terrorism. How easily can terrorists get hold of biological weapons ?

# Should human cloning be legalized only for the sake of infertile parents who cannot have IVF (invitro fertilization) ?

# What should be done if more and more ppl want to clone themselves or ppl start wanting to have designer babies only?

# Scientists going crazy with their experiments, and producing subhumans and chimeras and what nots !
Worry forever if you are making a Frankenstine's monster or the Hulk or whatever.[ I knw this one is going a bit overboard, but who knws !]

# What abt the headless humans who are cloned only for the sake of their organs ? Unethical !!

# Health risks frm mutation of genes.Extremely risky technique.As the success rate is very little here it would mean cloning embryos, implanting them and then subsequently destroying the imperfect/ disfigured ones w/ severe abnormalities whether in the womb or after birth.Understanding these abnoramalities may take years, and it may be too late to undo things later.Theories do point in some tangible directions. Scientists believe that the resultant cloning abnormalities are not traceable to the donor nuclei, but more likely explanations involve failures in genomic reprogramming.

# Psychological risks of "Designer babies" living wiht a family that couldn't cope wiht the loss of their beloved one and thus had him/her cloned.I would go crazy thinkin' that I am cloned frm a dead person or your mom thinking you are her dead daughter or whatever !

# What abt the rights of the "cloned ones"? Draft a whole lotta new policies and rules and what not .

# The potential benefits of therapeutic cell cloning are enormous, and this research should not be jeopardized with human cloning activities.

[...tauko dukhyo aba samjhera.....aarrggh ]


Cloning of entire organisms has been in use for many years in horticulture, where identical plants can be propagated from cultured cells and this has provided a valuable method for producing plants with unique properties. But as far as cloning of humans or intercloning between animals and humans are concerned, I guess its not a very wise thing to take hold of the future. But then, ppl always find a way to do things either one way or the other !

Jai hos human intelligence !!

How about cloning billions or Aisworya Rai so that we all can own our own:).

This is the only Cloning i would approve of (human). And I dare any guys to oppose it. LOL... comon now... ur wife, gf doesn;t have to know.

( I can already see guys sayinnnn "hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" with mahadev ko tin netra kholera)

In jest,
IndisGUise:)

dammn, what was that movie with two guys..

one is a cloned baby and one is born thru natural process.(they have sex in the car during their summer holidayy :P )

and this natural baby wants to go to space, but he is not healthy enough, becoz of his dna..hahah and all those B.S.

At last, he does fly to space and also beats the cloned baby in the swimming race....