Cloning. Human cloning. Why is it so taboo? The following quote is what sparked this thought train:
"Ever since Scottish scientists made the cloned sheep Dolly, there's been a nagging question: Could you clone a Human Being? No one has done so, and there is virtually universal agreement that it would be wrong even to try"
I'm not sure I really digested the rest of the piece. I mean, I know it went on to talk about the benefits of personally customized stem cells for use in post surgical patients. I remember something about they take an egg cell, strip its DNA out, and then take the genetic material from a skin cell, reprogram the egg, grow it and through the "magic" of modern science, they are able to harvest stem cells tailored to a specific person... anyway, I got the jist of it, and I'm all for stem cell research.
But I was hung up on the first thing he said: "there is virtually universal agreement that it [human cloning] would be wrong even to try"
Why? I'm not saying it is right, but I don't see why it is wrong? I'm an incredibly devout christian, so it may seem strange that I would encourage what has normally been forbidden by churchy folks. I think many see cloning as tampering with "God's territory" or something... but isn't that what ancient man thought of fire? Wasn't there similar reluctance to electricity?
I find it ridiculous in this day and age that we limit our scientific research by fear of what might be. Think of the lives that are saved by blood transfusions, organ transplants, and fertility treatments - all once thought to be heretical.
I suppose there is a chance that there is an ethical question about what would happen to a cloned human - like, how many times would we get it wrong and cause pain to a human being, even if it were cloned.
I also know that it is incredibly complicated science, and that cloning stem cells like they are doing now, and cloning an entire humans are orders of magnitude apart. but "wrong?"
EDIT: As a religious person, the god I believe in is a god that wants us to push and pull and fight and work and advance and be as successful as possible. But I may be in an empty church on this issue.
The vicodin has clouded my ability to develop these thoughts any further. I just ask why? why is there "universal agreement" that cloning a human is "wrong". Maybe I'm just hung up on the word "wrong". If he would have said something like "unsafe at this time" or "ethically gray area due to the limits of our technology" I might have not given it a second thought. I think the word "wrong" just has a connotation that seemed too morally relative for me to understand.
I intentionally didn't put the url in above, because I wanted to air the question more than just direct you to the NPR piece.
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/05/141073036/researchers-advance-...
Cloning taboo speaks to the same innate feelings as the abortion debate - you're "interrupting the miracle" to coin a phrase. Many people would say "playing God." Otto von Bismarck had a phrase: "Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made." The cloning taboo strips away the miracle, strips away the blood and strips away the pain and illustrates that we are not made of stardust, we are made of water, trace minerals, lipids and starch, arranged by an information-rich organic molecule. Any sort of genetic engineering, no matter how rudimentary, essentially screams "there is no God." Through simple anthropomorphism, Dolly the Sheep becomes a Death's Head: "If a bespectacled nerd with a brogue can build a sheep, how miraculous can your existence be?" Darwin was controversial. So was Galileo. Discontinuity is always painful and the notion that people could be designed and replicated is abhorrent to anyone with a gnostic sensibility about their origins. Percentage of Americans who believe there is no god: 7. http://www.gallup.com/poll/147887/americans-continue-believe... Percentage of Americans who believe Elvis is alive and walking the earth: 8. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,60353,00.html You get all GATTACA on these guys, you're gonna get grief.
Consider this, we take an adult nucleus, and insert it into an embryonic cell. Why does it revert? We have ideas, but very little actual understanding. It was only several years ago now that we even discovered the existence of microRNAs, a fundamental nucleic acid that has ramifications that can far outstrip the effects of protein expression. I do this type of work, and it is humbling and bewildering, and not on a metaphysical level. There is a lot of shit going on in the cell that we just aren't yet privy to. But, heck, even what we do know can give us pause against cloning humans. These animals often suffer from shortened telomeres (repeating ends of their DNA), and this has been correlated to advanced declined in cloned animals. Basically we are sticking old DNA in a new embryo and running with that. Not good enough, IMHO. But, like I said, I do foresee a point in the not-too-distance future that these obstacles will be overcome, and I will be much more receptive to the idea. I'd just hesitate to ascribe too much of the hesitation to taboo. Some of the hesitation is scientifically-minded and based on evidence.
That's what I was hoping to hear. I know I was just getting caught up in semantics. Nevertheless, I hope it is careful and methodical science that keeps us at a steady turtle pace rather than closed/narrow minded legislators yanking on the reins of science.
I share your hope, but I'm not optimistic about legislators. (see Anthropomorphic Climate Change) :)
In your own way, "there's stuff we don't know" is morally and logically equivalent to "we can't play God" albeit more diffuse in scale. That "near-universal opposition to human cloning" is shared by you - and while there are clearly many positions between "God says it's bad" and "shortened telomeres are detrimental and cruel to their inheritor" they come from the same basic place: "don't mess with what we don't understand." Note that I haven't put any of my own position into this. Note that I don't intend to. I'm simply illustrating that any drive against controversy often comes from the same animalistic place.
Heck no, I think we should continue to tamper. I'm all about tampering and messing with what we don't understand. I enjoy the scientific pursuit after all. But I think we can do a lot more tampering in animals before we do it in a human. I would never suggest that we need to have perfect knowledge before we do it. (Do you seriously think I'd be so unreasonable?) But our knowledge right now is piss poor. We can easily improve on it, and we will.
At what point, to you, is the "tampering with animals" aspect of things developed enough to warrant "tampering with people" and why? I'm not trying to make a point here and I'm not trying to create a right/wrong situation. I'm also not trying to paint you as unreasonable - there are a number of Ph. Ds in my family and in 10th grade I actually took the "pro human cloning" side of a debate in class (I lost, entirely on emotional grounds). My argument is that knowledge of the situation does not aid one in finding a different philosophical position on cloning, it allows one to find a different practical position on cloning. And while your position is certainly more nuanced than, say, the Catholic Church, there's still an inherent "we shouldn't muck about with things that have souls" in the discussion. I'm interested in having my argument disproven, however. Show me what you got.
So, like I said, I see the human cloning issue mostly through the perspective of technological limitations that I am aware of, rather than a fundamentally ethical one. Of course, there are ethical dimensions to most issues, so I’m not saying I have no ethical underpinnings. Like you point out, the notion of ‘not ready yet’ is rooted in a notion of what is and what is not ethical. The question that you put forward about which point is it ok to move from animal to human is an interesting one. There are established guidelines for animal testing for drugs and surgeries. I would guess that the point I would pick would fall on the conservative side of those guidelines. And yes, at some point, there would be a ‘good enough for me’. But, hell if I know enough about cloning right now to pick it. If I did, I’d be bullshitting you. I hate doing that. I can share my perspective, but I’m not the right guy if you’re looking for some good sparing on this issue, or to be moved from your own position. I’d be happy to read if someone else wants to grab the ball, but this just isn’t my game.
If the technology was there I would done whatever I could to prevent some of the nastier genetic problems lurking in my families background from being expressed in my daughters genes.
My personal feeling of the 'wrongness' of human cloning comes from our lack of understanding of the cloning process, and our lack of understanding and experience regarding the health of the clone, and importantly, their progeny. A very very different standard needs to be met when cloning a human as opposed to cloning a bull for meat. For example, if we later find that offspring of these bulls are susceptible to dementia, it is not so important. If we find that they are particularly susceptible to foot and mouth disease, we can cull the herd. The pitfalls and ramifications that might follow human cloning, and the suffering of the human clones themselves (and their children) remain very big unknowns. Aside from these major issues, I am pretty neutral on the topic. However, I work in cancer research, and cellular and molecular biology. I establish cellular clones, but not animals. I've done some work with genetically modified rodents. From my own personal experience, our unknowns regarding the cell are still greater than our knowns. My guess is that it will be 20-30 years before I am neutral to the idea of human cloning.