In the Monash Bioethics Review [2000; 19(2): 34-45.] DR Richard Ashcroft and PROF UDO SCHÜKLEN wrote:
We have shown that reproductive cloning, therapeutic cloning, stem cell research and stem cell technologies present “no harms and many benefits”. We believe that a lot of the so-called debate in this area is merely hysteria, because on closer examination these technical advances represent no new issues. We can translate all of them back into issues arising in more familiar, ethically well-understood, and well-regulated contexts...we believe that our common interests in liberty, respect for persons, and medical advance require us to promote these new technologies rather than preventing them on what we have shown are entirely spurious grounds.
The debate over theraputic and reproductive cloning in humans is often presented in the media as a classical confrontation between religion and science.
Do you consider this to be misleading?
Do you support or oppose cloning due to your religious beliefs or other ethical considerations?
Could the cloning of humans ever be justified - if so in what context?
I love this topic. I have done a lot of reading in the area and the best I can say is no. The reasoning for my stance is this: In order to produce a viable Clone, the limits of Science will inevitably require that embryos will have to be created for desctruction or that mishaps will happen that require temination. This creates a new definition of life based on genetic characteristics, i.e. a clone is not a human. Thus if we start saying that certain genetic characteristics produce lesser quality humans, then that opens grounds for saying that good genes = right to life, this is to close to the gentetic paradigm that the Nazi Eugenics experiments were trying to establish. We would inevitably open a whole new area of ethics that in my opinion just isn't worth it based on the lack of practical medical progress this area of research has provided.
youngborean wrote:The reasoning for my stance is this: In order to produce a viable Clone, the limits of Science will inevitably require that embryos will have to be created for desctruction or that mishaps will happen that require temination. This creates a new definition of life based on genetic characteristics, i.e. a clone is not a human. Thus if we start saying that certain genetic characteristics produce lesser quality humans, then that opens grounds for saying that good genes = right to life, this is to close to the gentetic paradigm that the Nazi Eugenics experiments were trying to establish.
Aren't we already in this situation? We have screening for certain genetic diseases like Down Syndrome and Sickle-cell anemia, sometimes with the parents and sometimes with amniocentesis or other in-utero tests. We also have fertility clinics who do not use all fertilized embryos for implantation, and then "destroy" them.
What would be ethically wrong with choosing the sex of a child, for example, before fertilization? Or with choosing for the embryo to not have spina bifida before fertilization? Your term "lesser quality" is a bit of a misnomer in this case.
My point is in the process of ensuring a healthy clone to adult. This process would not only require the creation of embryos specifically for destruction but would also require a definition for these "test-people"since they would have to be monitored to ensure the safety of the process. What if something goes wrong? Statistically this is more than probable considering the number of mutations an adult cell will undergo. The post was not about genetic screening, or genetic modification, the post asked about a situation where Human Cloning would be acceptable. The clone is different the random embryo selection in a fertility clinic, which I am also against for similar reasons. The clone is a specific set of genetic characteristics that at some point would have to be considered as a special case, due to the fact that the safety of the process would have to be ensured to avoid liability. Because it would be a mistake that you would have to live with or be guilty of murder. None of the examples you listed require human cloning, and therefore are not part of the discussion.
I think I am slowly beginning to understand your concerns, youngborean, but since I don't consider embryos human beings, and doubt there would be a point where differentiating between the value of an embryo and the value of a grown human would be a difficult task, except when one becomes the other, I can't really follow the argument. I see cloning as just a form of reproduction. In normal reproduction, faulty genetic material is normally aborted by the body anyway if it is not reabsorbed by the uterus, so though we may be reluctant to devise standards, the human body certainly is not.
When considering this question, it is helpful to ask how often pregnancy occurs on average each cycle. Studies looking at very sensitive pregnancy tests suggest that pregnancy will occur in at least 60% of natural cycles in fertile couples.
The risk of miscarriage decreases as pregnancy progresses. It is possible that as many as 50% of pregnancies miscarry before implantation in the womb occurs. Early after implantation, pregnancy loss rate is about 30% (ie this is still before a pregnancy is clinically recognised). After a pregnancy may be clinically recognised (between days 35-50), about 25% will end in miscarriage. The risk of miscarriage decreases dramatically after the 8th week as the weeks go by.
<i>'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'</i>
-John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Corvus wrote:I think I am slowly beginning to understand your concerns, youngborean, but since I don't consider embryos human beings, and doubt there would be a point where differentiating between the value of an embryo and the value of a grown human would be a difficult task, except when one becomes the other, I can't really follow the argument. I see cloning as just a form of reproduction. In normal reproduction, faulty genetic material is normally aborted by the body anyway if it is not reabsorbed by the uterus, so though we may be reluctant to devise standards, the human body certainly is not.
I think that you are missing my point. There is no way to ensure the saftey and viability of cloning without trying it. So assuming there is a desire to try it, we find test parents. We get them to sign a waiver to say "this is your child". Now after that we make a clone that ends up having no arms and no legs, a weak and failing heart and every autoimmune disease imaginable. Plus, severe deformities and retardation. Or even worse, it is a heart and a nevous system covered in skin, a blob of life. Is this human? Should it be kept alive through medical means like any other human? Will the parents still take care of it? Now we all understand that this was a test-baby, and mistakes will happen in test-runs. But where to we draw the line between a blob of life and a human?
The silliest part about it is we would be doing this out of our affinty to consumerism. This is not a car, where you pick the color and features. It is a human, or is it? Why bother with this question? Clones are only a product of our vanity. I don't want a copy of me, I think I would annoy myself too much. I believe you may be missing the point on what a clone or cloning is. It is not just a pregnancy, it's a copy. I believe the real benefit is a crazy idea that we can speed up the process, and make our organs readily available to us once one fails. The fountain of youth, with out the tissue rejection that happens in transplants. You have your body and you keep a spare on ice.
So, suppose your 8-year-old son--and only child--is dying. There is no cure in traditional medicine. But there is a cure if you take one of his cheek cells, and fuse it with an enucleated egg cell, thereby creating an "embryo" with his genotype. From this cell, you can get stem cells that you can guide to form the tissue type that is failing. You can implant this tissue into your dying son, and save him. Do you do it? Or do you say that human cloning (which begins with the egg-somatic cell fusion) is wrong, because you must kill human embryos to get successful clones. Is it wrong to use your son's DNA to save your son?
Your argument assumes that this radical technique is safe and effective. It assumes it is a cure. You are also arguing from a position that an embryo is not a human, yet you are calling that process human cloning. You are just playing on the emotion of a hypothetical situation without looking at the reality of a process. Which is very unscientific for you. My contention is this. Ensuring the saftey of using these cells would require that these cells were tested to their limits, from an embryo to a living human. (This seems to be a scienctific approach to ensuring safety) The alternative is that we try radical procedures attempting to modify embryonic stem cells and implementing in people which have had little sucess to begin with. Which seems to be what you are suggesting. But you can't call an embryo a human in calling it human cloning and then not treat it as a human by letting it die. But if you want to discuss when life begins I believe that is a seperate argument. I ask you this should not human cloning be called human cloning when a human is produced? Therefore we can take your position a bit further? What if we find out that after modifying these cells we need them at a certain point of maturity that can only be recovered from a 1 year old infant clone? Then what do we do?
I still would say that creating embryos for destruction is wrong and draw the line there. You are not really making a line because you do not distinguish what human cloning means. If you just consider an embryo a cell line of DNA then that is not human cloning. But I will push the embryo thing a little further. When is an embryo invirto no longer an embryo? I think this question is pertinent considering many definitions seem to imply once it is out of the uterus.
Gee whiz, youngborean. You take a simple-sounding scenario and make it all complicated! Of course, that's what all simple-sounding things are, once you actually look at 'em.
I think you are arguing that human cloning is "producing a human baby, potentially an adult." Based on what we know so far from animal studies, this is probably achievable, but with a moderate frequency of abnormalities. I bet the abnormalities result from imperfect re-programming of the genes that are imprinted during gametogenesis, which we don't know much about. Ceratinly, we don't dare do this under these conditions. Whew.
Unfortunately, the animal-cloning folks will figure out how to make it more reliable, in which case there is bound to be someone who wants to do it with humans. Probably some rich guy who wants to clone himself, and has the money to pay for it. I think that's inappropriate.
For many, though, the point at which cloning has been started, and the point at which the anti-abortion folks say humanity begins, is the diploid egg (either right after fertilization, or right after introduction of the diploid nucleus). I don't consider that to be a "person," because I think that requires additional biological complexity, not just DNA and cytoplasm.
In essence, my scenario is more germane to the embryonic stem cell issue. Still, to be genetically compatible, stem cells should be from the person who needs them--hence therapeutic cloning. Your worry that we'd have to grow a sacrificial child is, I hope, unwarranted. That's so horrendous I doubt that anyone will actually suggest it. Instead, the goal is to take the stem cells, in culture, and encourage them to differentiate into various tissues and organs. We can only sort of do this now, but there are reasons to be optimistic that we will figure out how. There are also reasons to be pessimistic that we can do so with adult stem cells, which are greatly restricted in their differentiative capacity.
It doubt that we will attempt to do things with actual humans without a pretty darned good expectation that they will work. This means lots of animal testing to work out conditions. Still, as with any medical procedure, we'll need to prove that it is "safe and effective" before it is deemed usable. If we get to the clinical trials, there probably will be some unfortunate results. If I were terminally ill, and this were a chance, I'd grab at it--so I'm sure there would be people willing to risk the unfortunate results, since the alternative is just as unfortunate.
You ponder the question of when an in vitro embryo is no longer an embryo. Well, let's see here. It's an embryo as soon as the egg divides. That's the definition. It's just a ball of cells for quite some time, and must implant into the uterine wall very soon or it won't be able to induce the formation of a placenta. I think (but don't know--maybe someone can correct me) that if we get past that window in time, the blob of cells is unable to go much further. It needs the placenta, so it needs to invade Mom.
I won't call it a fetus until it's much more advanced. Up until it gets that far, it really is still a blob of cells, without sufficient complexity to be any different from any other blob of cells, whether from a shark or a chicken. Still, my scenario requires allowing the embryo to advance only a little bit, to where the inner cell mass is available for culturing. At this point, the only definition the cells have undergone is which ones will be placenta, and which ones will be embryo--and even in a normal fertilization, there is much that can go wrong before this blob achieves the status of fetus.
As for your accusation of playing on the emotion of the situation, well, sure! That's what most people do--witness the last election. In these kinds of situations, we have to balance technical capability with emotional need. I find hypothetical situations like this to be very helpful in figuring out what I actually think about things. The reasons to save human embryos at all costs, just because they are human, is also primarily an emotional stance. So, what if we balance the two emotional issues, that pull in opposite directions, and see what happens?
Totally agree. But isn't that the problem with this mess? We have so many people out there saying what they want without really thinking about what that would look like or mean. I can see stem cell technology eventually being effective, but lets get some real data first and then make very specific denfintions about acceptable science. I fear that people get so excited about possibilities that they say things that they don't really mean. I am not implicating this thread, but when people say things like "Stem-Cell research will cure AIDS" or "If we support Stem Cell Research then crippled people will walk again" it makes me upset because it has yet to be seen what stem cells have done or can do.
Then you say cloning, and people will say, "I'm for it." But what does that mean? It's such an emerging idea that there doesn't seem to be clear definitions of its meaning. And that scares me. Because how can anyone then be held responsible for irresponsible actions? I don't think it's fair to assume that researchers will automatically be ethical. I hope they would, but clearer defintions of these practices are necessary in my opinion. I think the fetus / embryo distinction is important but lets set a point that you can't clone past (much like abortions) and make the rest illegal. But then what happens when we get the same argument, that we're limiting the progress of Science if we do this? It would be nice to have a back-up body somewhere. That would be the ultimate advancement of Health Science, but where exactly is the middle ground? Because in this area it seems like someone could always make the case that we are limiting progress until we allow cloning (grown-human form) this is why there has been a world wide movement against human cloning.
This is one of my favorite site on the net, which incidentally lists all campaign contributions to each presidential candidate. They posts a lot of articles on this issue. Enjoyed the debate.
