Artificial Cloning

11 Key excerpts on "Artificial Cloning"

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  GMO Sapiens

  The Life-Changing Science of Designer Babies

  • Paul Knoepfler(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • WSPC

    (Publisher)

  Keep in mind that, as will be discussed later in this chapter, cloning can also refer to making cell lines that are genetically identical to people, so cloning does not always involve making a new person. The cloning of ESCs, for example, is called “therapeutic cloning,” while the cloning of actual animals is referred to as “reproductive cloning.”

  The birth of cloning

  Asexual cloning in the world of botany and agriculture has been a longtime observation and practice. Plants can create clones of themselves naturally via budding or underground sprouting of new cloned individual copies. For instance, strawberry plants can create identical clones of themselves, called plantlets, on their runner stems.iii

  Some animals also perform a type of natural cloning via a process called parthenogenesis , where a female animal can produce offspring without a male. In parthenogenesis, an egg starts dividing even without having been fertilized and in some cases can form a healthy female offspring without the involvement of sperm.

  Parthenogenesis is not known to naturally occur in humans, but can be triggered to occur in a laboratory with an artificial stimulus, such as an electric shock to the egg. Parthenogenesis has sometimes been used to make early human embryos and then in turn human ESCs independent of IVF. Otherwise, naturally occurring parthenogenesis is limited to only a few species, including some lizards, insects, and fish, to name just three.

  Scientists studying cells had also observed that individual cells often essentially clone themselves every time they divide to produce two identical, or nearly identical, cells. However, as it turns out, sometimes cells divide to produce two so-called “daughter cells” that are very different from each other. In some stem cells, this process is called asymmetric division.

  We all have two kinds of cells: somatic cells (everyday ordinary cells) and reproductive cells (also confusingly known as germ cells). Germ cells can give rise, via fertilization or through parthenogenesis as mentioned above for eggs, to new organisms. Somatic cells normally cannot.

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  The Naked Clone

  How Cloning Bans Threaten Our Personal Rights

  • John Charles Kunich(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  8 Moreover, in light of the quasi-official find- ings and recommendations of blue-ribbon panels such as the President’s Council on Bioethics, that field has largely been mooted. 2 Cloning in Science and Science Fiction Rather, my goal in this book is to explore the legal issues implicated by the impulse to ban cloning. The constitutional collateral damage that could be caused by the more extreme bans is the primary concern of this book—that in the process of prohibiting human reproductive and/or ther- apeutic cloning, we may also inadvertently undermine our most personal constitutional rights. The law, especially constitutional law, is an aspect of the cloning controversy that has never been fully analyzed until now. THE HISTORY AND FACTS OF CLONING Popular misconceptions abound concerning cloning. 9 Among the most common fallacious notions are that cloning produces exact copies of an original organism; children of cloning are in some sense less genuine or less worthy than their parents; and cloning is capable of mass-producing legions of superpowered transgenics or superevil menaces, such as an army of Hitlers. Let us dispatch these fallacies as swiftly and painlessly as possible, with the aid of a brief historical and scientific overview. We need a working definition of cloning for purposes of this book, preferably one that will not cause our eyes to glaze over. Any simple defi- nition is vulnerable to charges of oversimplification and incompleteness, but if it aids our understanding, it is at least a good place to begin. Here is one that with a solid scientific pedigree that will work for us: Reproductive cloning is defined as the deliberate production of genetically identi- cal individuals. Each newly produced individual is a clone of the original. Monozygotic (identical) twins are natural clones. Clones contain identical sets of genetic material in the nucleus—the compartment that contains the chromo- somes—of every cell in their bodies.

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  Gmo Sapiens: The Life-changing Science Of Designer Babies

  The Life-Changing Science of Designer Babies

  • Paul Knoepfler(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • World Scientific

    (Publisher)

  The cloning of ESCs, for example, is called “ therapeutic cloning,” while the cloning of actual animals is referred to as “reproductive cloning.” The birth of cloning Asexual cloning in the world of botany and agriculture has been a long-time observation and practice. Plants can create clones of themselves naturally via budding or underground sprouting of new cloned individual copies. For instance, strawberry plants can create identical clones of themselves, called plantlets, on their runner stems. iii Some animals also perform a type of natural cloning via a process called parthenogenesis, where a female animal can produce offspring without a male. In parthenogenesis, an egg starts dividing even without having been fertilized and in some cases can form a healthy female offspring without the involvement of sperm. Parthenogenesis is not known to naturally occur in humans, but can be triggered to occur in a laboratory with an artificial stimulus, such as an electric shock to the egg. Parthenogenesis has sometimes been used to make early human embryos and then in turn human ESCs independent of IVF. Otherwise, naturally occurring parthenogenesis is limited to only a few species, including some lizards, insects, and fish, to name just three. Scientists studying cells had also observed that individual cells often essentially clone themselves every time they divide to produce two identical, or nearly identical, cells. However, as it turns out, sometimes cells divide to produce two so-called “daughter cells” that are very different from each other. In some stem cells, this process is called asymmetric division. We all have two kinds of cells: somatic cells (everyday ordinary cells) and reproductive cells (also confusingly known as germ cells). Germ cells can give rise, via fertilization or through parthenogenesis as mentioned above for eggs, to new organisms. Somatic cells normally cannot. iii http://bbc.in/1liVdqv

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  On Cloning

  • John Harris(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  More importantly perhaps, Dolly, or the technology by which she was created, raises many different sorts of important questions for us all. Some of these questions concern human rights and how we are to understand the idea of respect for these rights and for human dignity. Others direct our attention to the ways in which we attempt to pursue scientific research and bring that research to the point at which it is safe to offer therapies or products to the public. Other questions make us reflect upon the ways in which we attempt to regulate or control both science and indeed personal and public access to the fruits of science. Finally there are fundamental issues about the standards of evidence and argument that we do or should demand before we attempt to control or limit human freedom. All of these questions and issues are of the first importance and all of them come together and are engaged when we consider the ethical, legal and regulatory issues presented by human cloning. It is these questions and issues that are the subject and object of this book.

  Before investigating these issues, however, we should be clear about just what cloning means and how it came about.

  WHAT IS CLONING?1

  Cloning refers to asexual reproduction, reproduction without ‘fertilisation’. A cloned individual (clone from the Greek Klon, ‘twig’, ‘slip’) may result from two different processes: (1) Embryo splitting: this sometimes gives rise to monozygotic twins but can also result in identical triplets or even quadruplets. 2 (2) Cell Nuclear Replacement (CNR) or Cell Nuclear Transfer (CNT). This was the procedure that produced Dolly. CNR involves two cells: a recipient, which is generally an egg (oocyte), and a donor cell. Early experiments mainly made use of embryonic cells, which were expected to behave similarly to the cells of a fertilised egg, in order to promote normal development after the nuclear replacement. In more recent experiments, the donor cells were taken from either fetal or adult tissues. The nucleus of the donor cell is introduced into the egg (either by cell fusion or by injection). With appropriate stimulation – electric pulses or exposure to chemicals – the egg is induced to develop. The embryo thus created may be implanted in a viable womb, and then develops in the normal way to term, although the failure rate has so far been high.

  It is clear then that cloning did not start with the birth of Dolly nor yet did artificially produced clones start with the birth of Dolly. The first type of cloning was, as we have noted, the creation, through sexual reproduction, of so-called identical (monozygotic) twins. These sorts of clones have always been with us and, confining ourselves to humans for the moment, humankind has a vast, and on the whole successful, experience with them.

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  Human Cloning in the Media

  From Science Fiction to Science Practice

  • Joan Haran, Jenny Kitzinger, Maureen McNeil, Kate O'Riordan(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 What is cloning?

  We should not see cloning as an isolated technology, single-mindedly directed at replication of livestock or of people. It is the third player in a trio of modern biotechnologies that have arisen since the early 1970s. Each of the three, taken alone, is striking; but taken together, they propel humanity into a new age – as significant, as time will tell, as our forebear’s transition into the age of steam, or of radio, or of nuclear power (Wilmut et al. 2000a: 6).

  The point is that the three technologies together – genetic engineering, genomics and our method of cloning from cultured cells – are a very powerful combination (ibid.: 9).

  Introduction

  Ian Wilmut and his colleagues make dramatic claims for cloning as a technology. However, cloning captured popular attention long before news of the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1997 and before the announcement of the ‘completion’ of the Human Genome Project in 2000. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of these two announcements there has been a renewed and intensified interest in cloning. This chapter brings the contemporary concern with human cloning under scrutiny both by locating it in a set of genealogies and by analysing the distinctive features of its recent manifestations. (See Appendix I for a timeline that attempts to consolidate these genealogies to provide an overview of key events.) In this chapter, we draw on a range of accounts by scientists and social commentators on the development of the technology of cloning and provide a brief review of some of its key representations in Western popular culture. This sets the context for our analysis of the particular configurations of cloning discourses that have become dominant in the early twenty-first century.

  It is tempting at this point to offer a dictionary definition of cloning as our starting point. For example, the Chambers Dictionary

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  Human Cloning

  Four Fallacies and their Legal Consequences

  • Kerry Lynn Macintosh(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  THE SCIENCE OF CLONING 44 the manufacture of babies to predetermined genetic specifications via cloning. 5 Such arguments are reminiscent of the artifact fallacy dis- cussed in Chapter 1. Many years have passed since these concerns were first raised. Genetics research continues, but the hot new science is epigenetics. The first genome-wide maps of DNA methylation in human embryonic stem cells and fetal fibroblasts were published in 2009, 6 and the International Human Epigenome Consortium plans to map 1,000 reference epige- nomes within the coming decade. 7 Awareness of the importance of epi- genetics is seeping into the public consciousness thanks to popularizing books and articles written for lay persons. 8 We also have hundreds of cloning experiments to draw upon in evaluating the characteristics of animals born through cloning. Thus, this is a good time to reexamine arguments against cloning. Building on prior chapters, this chapter will evaluate humans born through cloning in light of everything scientists have learned from the time Dolly was born. A. The Science of Human Cloning Chapters 1 and 2 presented the results of experiments in animal cloning. Have we learned anything from human cloning experiments? Despite occasional false reports, no cloned humans have been born yet. 9 We do not have direct evidence of the phenotypes, personalities, or health that humans born through cloning will have. However, scientists around the world have cloned human embryos for research. Their hope is that human research cloning will make it possible to create stem cells for research and medical treatment. For example, suppose John Doe has a disease. Scientists would take a skin cell from him and use it to clone an embryo that carried his nuclear DNA. Next, they would create a stem cell line from that embryo. The scientists could test a new medicine for John’s disease on the DNA-matched cells in the Petri dish. Or if John needs new tissues,

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  God, Science, and Designer Genes

  An Exploration of Emerging Genetic Technologies

  • Spencer S. Stober, Donna Yarri(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Cloning methods used in biomedi- cal research to create and develop cell-based therapies are frequently called therapeutic cloning, a topic closely related to stem-cell research we discussed in the last chapter. In contrast, cloning methods used in research to clone children (and other organisms) are frequently called reproductive cloning. God, Science, and Designer Genes 136 Therapeutic Cloning The President’s Council on Bioethics describes therapeutic cloning for biomedical research as the “production of a cloned human embryo, formed for the (proximate) purpose of using it in research or for extracting its stem cells, with the (ultimate) goals of gaining scientific knowledge of normal and abnormal development and of developing cures for human diseases.” 10 A primary goal for this research is the de- velopment of regenerative therapies with the potential to heal or replace all types of cells, tissues, and even organs. Thus the intent of therapeutic cloning is to heal, not to clone embryos. More specifically, the intent is to clone pluripotent cells from blastomere cells. There is no effort to ensure that these cells are totipotent and therefore capable of implantation for subsequent development into a human clone. Even so, some believe that therapeutic cloning is a slippery slope to- ward the cloning of humans. Others believe that these therapies are sorely needed to improve the human condition, and that a careful walk along the slope is therefore justified. This difference in beliefs, and in concerns for the embryo, continues to influence the direction of therapeutic cloning research. Both adult and embryonic cells can be collected and cloned for biomedical research. Adult cells are obtained by tissue biopsy and are then induced to regain the potency they once had as embryonic cells. These cells are clones of the adult from which the biopsy was obtained. Embryonic cells are obtained directly from IVF embryos by blastomere separation or biopsy.

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  Life Liberty & the Defense of Dignity

  The Challenge for Bioethics

  • Leon Kass(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Encounter Books

    (Publisher)

  Asexual reproduction, which produces “single-parent” offspring, is indeed a radical departure from the natural human way, confounding all normal understandings of father, mother, sibling, grandparent and the like, and all moral relations tied thereto. It becomes even more of a radical departure when the resulting offspring is a clone derived not from an embryo but from a mature adult to whom it would be an identical twin; and when the process occurs not by natural accident (as in natural twinning) but by deliberate human design and manipulation; and when the child’s (or children’s) genetic constitution is preselected by the parent(s) (or scientists). Accordingly, as we will see, cloning is vulnerable to three kinds of concerns and objections, related to these three points: (1) cloning threatens confusion of identity and individuality, even in small-scale practice; (2) cloning represents a giant step (though not the first one) toward transforming procreation into manufacture, that is, toward the increasing depersonalization of the process of generation and toward the “production” of human children as artifacts, products of human will and design; and (3) cloning—like other forms of eugenic engineering of the next generation—represents a form of despotism of the cloners over the cloned, and thus (even in benevolent cases) a blatant violation of the inner meaning of parent-child relations, of what it means to have a child, of what it means to say “yes” to our own demise and “replacement.”

  Before turning to these specific ethical objections, let me test my claim of the profundity of the natural way by taking up a challenge posed to me by a friend. Why, he wanted to know, was I making such a fuss about “the natural human way”? Why treat our sexual mode of reproduction as anything more than the accident of evolutionary history, which, like all else produced in evolutionary history, is always subject to change? What if the given natural human way of reproduction were asexual (rather than sexual), and we now had to deal with a new technological innovation—artificially induced sexual dimorphism and the fusing of complementary gametes—whose inventors argued cogently that sexual reproduction promised all sorts of advantages, including hybrid vigor and the creation of greatly increased individuality? Would one then be forced to defend natural asexuality because it was natural? Could one claim that it carried deep human meaning?

  This is a most welcome challenge, the response to which broaches the ontological meaning of sexual reproduction and permits us to see exactly what is at stake. For it is, I submit, impossible for there to have been human life—or even higher forms of animal life—in the absence of sexuality and sexual reproduction. We find asexual reproduction only in the lowest forms of life: bacteria, algae, fungi and some lower invertebrates. Sexuality brings with it a new and enriched relationship to the world. Only sexual animals can seek and find complementary others with whom to pursue a goal that transcends their own existence. For a sexual being, the world is no longer an indifferent and largely homogeneous otherness,

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  Law, Politics, and Morality: European Perspectives III.

  Ethics and Social Justice.

  • Jordi Ferrer Beltrán, Susanna Pozzolo, Jordi Ferrer Beltrán, Susanna Pozzolo(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Duncker & Humblot

    (Publisher)

  Are they cer-tain that they apply to the cloning technique under discussion? 36 Paolo Donadoni 36 Vázquez, 2000, 717, note 11. Conclusion: The foregoing discussion prompts two considerations. First, clon-ing is not a technique in and of itself; rather, it interrelates significantly with other artificial reproduction techniques (e. g. surrogate motherhood). Second, aside from general objections regarding the concept itself of human cloning as the replication of the already existent (if the genitor is still alive when the clone is born), it seems ill-advised for ethical and/or legal debate to deal with cloning alone; rather, it should consider the various possible applications of cloning technique in their distinctive features, so that different situations are evaluated (and if necessary regulated) in different ways. Or if it is intended to argue that objectively different situations are ethically-legally equivalent, the relative proof should be adduced. There may, in fact, exist a sort of presumption (susceptible to proof to the contrary) that an objective difference corresponds to an ethical difference. The ethical irrelevance of the objective difference instead needs to be proved. 4. ‘Reproductive Cloning’ versus ‘Therapeutic Cloning’ – How can the Notion of Therapy be Extended? I now examine a number of expressions commonly employed in the bioethi-cal debate on human cloning. In general, from a purposive point of view, a distinction is usually drawn between ‘reproductive’ human cloning (RHC) and ‘therapeutic’ human cloning (THC), where by the former is meant a technique used to generate a human being, and by the latter an application designed to remedy specific pathologies in an already-existing human being (using stem cells). Consequently, reproductive cloning is not therapeutic cloning, or vice versa, in that therapy and reproduction are two distinct situations. A number of reservations have been expressed with regard to the notion of ‘therapeutic’ cloning’.

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  Key Issues in Bioethics

  A Guide for Teachers

  • Ralph Levinson, Michael Reiss(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This appears to spring directly from the rule that mammals shall have one male parent and one female, and that reproduction shall occur through the union of haploid cells produced by meiosis. (These problems are the main, official, ethical barrier to cloning.) The rules of mammalian reproduction arise from the integrated character of biological processes, which have been tuned by billions of years of evolution. Faced with such a clear result of breaking natural laws, it is not surprising that people complain that cloning is unnatural and question scientists’ drive to dismantle all natural constraints, whatever the cost. Kass and others have argued convincingly that the new genetic uniqueness that results from the randomness of sexual reproduction is a crucially important and constitutive aspect of being human. (It should be noted that monozygotic twins do not refute this principle; they merely provide a minor exception to it identical twins’ genotypes arise randomly, not calculatedly and are new compared to any previous human genotypes, including their parents.) The fact that we are new, unknown and different from anyone who has gone before commands respect and equal treatment: it compels others to take us for what we are, and not to imagine they have the measure of us. This is an important part of the basis of human rights. A more important aspect of producing humans, rather than conceiving them, is objectification. Whereas sexual reproduction gives rise to human subjects, cloning produces objects: rather than arising from a random, natural process over which we have no control, clones are the products of human design (more strictly, selection). This can only put them in a subordinate position relative to their selector/designer, a position that corresponds to that of an object vis-a-vis a subject. The selector, who chooses which genome to replicate, assumes total control of another human being’s genetic essence

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  Advances in Assisted Reproduction Technologies

  • Islam M. Saadeldin(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Bentham Science Publishers

    (Publisher)

  As scientists and doctors could have the power to control a person's genetic makeup or to change it. Unfortunately, this opens the door for many setbacks and mistakes.

  Lack of Diversity

  Cloning duplicates the presence of an individual's genetic material by copying it into another individual without any change or even undergoing the natural evolution.

  A Faster Aging Process

  As the used cell in many cases is originally an adult cell, that already has its timeline, this enhances the speeding up of the aging process.

  Endangering People's Life

  Most of the reproductive cloning done faced the She faced the fate of life-threatening events such as miscarriage or stillbirth. Also, it is thought among the reproductive cloning experts that there is no fully healthy clone due to the need of an individual to complete the process, who can be put in danger.

  Interference with Nature

  This method disrupts nature because procreation cannot be tampered with, religious and other critics of this technology argue. They believe that it will have a dominant influence on the human race to interfere with how nature works. But one of the claims against Artificial Cloning that people have is that by producing life in unnatural forms, people are attempting to play God.

  Making Division Between People

  Some individuals could not consider cloned human beings to be humans. Division and unrest could cause this. Many are worried that this will only lead to more problems in the population.

  Problems with no Solutions

  DNA is something that people are not allowed to mess around with. If the process of cloning is not successful, there is a high likelihood that the host's DNA will be altered or, worse, harmed. If that happens, a whole new set of problems may be generated that we do not have any knowledge of.

  Abuse Toward Reproductive Cloning

  Many opponents believe that individuals with vested interests will misuse cloning technology. It may be used by others for criminal or illegal activities. Many individuals are also frightened that if reproductive cloning becomes commonplace, unscrupulous individuals could unwillingly clone individuals.

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