Cloning
Cloning
I went to see “The Island” with Jared on our anniversary and since have had some strange dreams. Last night I dreamed that Mr. Craft (a teacher/friend who passed away a couple of years ago) had bought a new cloned body and looked really great. He was thin and handsome and healthy. Weird. Cloning is a bizarre thought.
August 15th, 2005 at 9:50 pm
Cloning is a bizarre thought. But interesting to think about… but scary at the same time.
August 15th, 2005 at 10:49 pm
Cloning seriiously frightens me. I can’t even let myself think about it I get so creeped out.
August 16th, 2005 at 9:09 am
Medically, I heard that some seriously crazy things would happen (and wouldn’t happen) if someone was cloned. What messes with my mind the most is the new clone’s soul.
August 16th, 2005 at 10:36 am
Scientifically, I’d be interested in hearing what the problems would be. They’ve done it with animals already, so I don’t know what would be different about humans. Of course, it wouldn’t be like in the movie where their age is accelerated up to the “parent” person’s age, but other than that, it might work fine.
As for a soul, I would predict that they would still have one. The process that God uses to “insert” a soul into a regularly conceived body is impossible to scientifically explain, so why couldn’t he insert a soul into a clone body just as easily? It’s not like the soul itself would get copied along with the physical tissue, so they would each be unique individuals.
August 16th, 2005 at 1:11 pm
it would be so interesting to see how different someone with the exact genetic composition could be from their clone. personality-wise that is. i guess it’s like that with identical twins.
but i don’t really like the idea of experimenting with human life. there are bound to be alot of mistakes and failures along the way and that means a human life is created just so it can be messed up. and to what extent will it be messed up? we don’t know until we do it. kind of uncomfortable to think about, for me that is.
August 16th, 2005 at 4:11 pm
While there will probably be issues and complications, you can definitely mitigate a lot of those by doing animal testing beforehand. I don’t think that any attempt at creating a human clone would be done “just so it can be messed up”, even though that’s likely to be an unfortunate side effect.
Notice I’m saying “will”, as if it’s going to happen eventually, because I think it will. Even if the U.S. doesn’t fund or endorse it, I think it’s only a matter of time before someone does it.
August 16th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
Also, I think that there is definitely promise in cloning human tissue, much like they do in this movie, but without creating the whole person. If they could just make spare organs, etc. I wouldn’t see anything wrong with that.
August 16th, 2005 at 5:21 pm
“just so it can POSSIBLY be messed up”. the word “experiment” pretty much implies that you don’t know how it’s going to end up. it doesn’t really matter how many animals you experiment on, you don’t fully know how humans will respond until you “try” it with humans.
jared, your last comment answered my next question which was “and why do we want to create humans out of ones we already have when we already know how to create humans the old fashioned way? we don’t seem to have a shortage, that i know of” but maybe just the organs would be OK. but why whole human being? but then you would have another moral question. how many organs put together make a human worthy of a soul? is just a liver enough? or just a brain? or maybe a liver and a brain together. what about everything except a liver. or everything except a brain.
August 16th, 2005 at 5:45 pm
Cloning of human embryos is already happening in South Korea and Britian as far as I know.
August 16th, 2005 at 6:15 pm
Dolly the sheep died only 6 years after she was cloned.
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/antenna/dolly/index.asp
There was recently a dog cloned, in Japan I think.
August 16th, 2005 at 9:33 pm
I got this off of a cloning website:
“It took the scientists who created Dolly 277 tries before they got a healthy, viable lamb. Because cloning humans is more complicated, ‘even more deaths and lethal birth defects can be expected during experimentation’ (Fox, Technology)”
August 16th, 2005 at 9:36 pm
It took 2,000 empbryos for the Koreans to finally clone a viable dog.
August 17th, 2005 at 9:08 am
Once they work out the kinks, I think it would be a great opportunity to create extra organs, etc. I’m guessing that with genetic engineering just cloning a single organ (that doesn’t have to independantly sustain its life) would be a lot easier than a full clone, but I guess we won’t know until we try.
August 17th, 2005 at 1:08 pm
work out the kinks?
August 18th, 2005 at 7:49 am
Yeah, you know…get rid of the unwanted characteristics- blonde and blue eyed livers only, please.
August 18th, 2005 at 9:26 am
By “kinks” I was referring to the errors in the process that everyone was referring to above, and only in relation to cloning certain tissue / organs, not a complete person.