
Scientists Make First Embryo Clones From Adults - zcase
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303626804579507593658361428
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jakobe
I find it odd that the only moral issue people seem to find with procedures
like this is whether it is okay to kill an egg cell, or an early stage embryo.

These egg cells don't grow on trees. They must be harvested from human beings.
Egg cell harvesting is a complex process, requiring the donors (young women)
to take experimental drugs with possibly harmful long term sideeffects.

If we are using human egg cells for experiments, or at some point in the
future, for curing old people, aren't we exploiting the young woman we take
those egg cells from?

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pygy_
AFAIK, they use the embryos left after a successful IVF (if the parents
agree).

The sucess rate of an IVF is relatively low, and the procedure to extract the
ova is complex, inconvenient and not risk-free.

Ovaries are overstimulated to produce more than one egg. They are all
collected and fertilized, but, usually, only two or three are implanted at a
time, to balance the low success rate and the non-null chance of multiple
pregnancy (that's how octuplets are made :\\).

If a successfull pregnancy occurs before running out of embryos, the
mother/couple may donate the remaining embryos for research (that's how it
works in Belgium, at least).

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Serow225
Current practice from the doctors I've talked to in North America is to
encourage people to implant one egg per attempt, with two eggs being allowed
if the couple insists.

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cliveowen
Not completely related since "the embryos created in these recent experiments
may have certain limitations that would prevent them from giving rise to a
human clone", I was thinking how would a clone embryo differ from a twin? We
know that environmental factors physically change twins, and that also applies
to clones. So if we consider twins to be different people, we should also
consider a clone to be a different person.Then why all the pushback and "laws
explicitly banning human reproductive cloning"?

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hyp0
You'll likely produce many deformed babies before you get it right. Horrific.

Note that they haven't managed it yet on monkeys (surprised me).

Prediction: when it's been working perfectly on all primates for quite a
while, these laws may start to change... perhaps at first for special cases,
such as infertile couples (or a clone of an infant who died of non-congential
causes - I don't know what to make of that, it's simultanesouly creepy and
tugs at my heart-strings). IVF programs have similar restrictions.

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riggins
Here's a prediction I've heard that I actually thought was kind of
interesting.

China will be the first to clone humans because they don't have our ethical
restraints. Since China already is interested in eugenics, its easy to infer
that they'll be interested in cloning geniuses.

It will get interesting if a large population of geniuses in China starts to
tip the technological and military balance and whether other countries would
feel compelled to respond.

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hackuser
Why China, which has an over-population problem. Why not countries who want to
solve their declining population problems such as Russia, Japan, many Western
European countries, or Israel (whose Jewish population is declining quickly
relative to other groups)? Those with popular biases in favor of specific
ethnic groups might see this as the alternative to immigration or national
decline.

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joeclark77
The problem for Japan and most Western nations is not that their young people
are infertile, it's that their young people are _unwilling_ to marry and have
children. (And even those who are willing, are only willing to have one or two
children, and only at age 35+.) Cloning can't solve that problem!

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caustic
How does it relate to this discovery: [https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-
smashes-barrier-growin...](https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-smashes-
barrier-growing-organs-stem-cells) ("By manipulating the appropriate
signaling, the U.Va. researchers have turned embryonic stem cells into a fish
embryo, essentially controlling embryonic development.")

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hyp0
Just wanted to clarify that these were fish stem cells. It's not _ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny_ or anything.

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dbcooper
The WSJ article is pretty damn light, and is just an update of a May 2013
article.

Original source publication:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1934590914...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1934590914001374)

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Lanz
This is wonderful news for the many women who are currently forced to carry
someone else's child via in-vitro fertilization if they want a child.
Hopefully they'll be able to have a child that is biologically theirs in a
reasonable timeframe as further developments occur.

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acjohnson55
By "theirs" do you mean a clone of themself? That's a pretty weird prospect to
me. I don't see how cloning could be used to create an embryo that shares only
one set of chromosomes. If the woman's eggs are still viable, it seems like
regular IVF could be used. Or am I misunderstanding your point?

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throwaway7808
An identical twin is a clone. Do you have anything against identical twins?

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DougWebb
Not many sets of identical twins have one of the twins be the mother of the
other twin. That's the weird part.

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3rd3
Damn, we will very likely see illegal clones of superstars within the next
couple of decades.

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3rd3
Why the down-votes? It is actually pretty easy to get some tissue from pretty
much everyone. And knowing there are perverted, rich individuals out there
it's quite conceivable this will happen.

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acjohnson55
Impressive from a perspective of science, but also deeply unsettling to me.
It's clearly only a matter of time before a human clone is created.

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Snail_Commando
> Impressive from a perspective of science, but also deeply unsettling to me.
> It's clearly only a matter of time before a human clone is created.

Identical twins are "natural" clones. They are genetically identical. (Barring
mutation.)

People take issue with "artificial" or reproductive cloning.

If you reproductively cloned an identical twin, you would end up with three
genetically identical people. One is just born later, with a more certain
outcome.

[Edit: I am not advocating anything. This is a descriptive observation of
genetics, not a normative one.]

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tokenizer
Keyword is natural though. It's one thing to push science to it's limits. It's
another entirely to delve into eugenics.

It's pretty understandable and a default position to advocate for it, but it
could be a slippery slope, and will definitely push the politics towards
engineered babies over natural ones.

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mitochondrion
What about eliminating allergies, Alzheimer's, and cancer? How about
increasing the intelligence of the human species?

Do we want to give our children better opportunities? Forget superficial stuff
like blond hair and blue eyes, we're talking about the possibility of having
guaranteed super-healthy, super-happy, super-smart children.

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DougWebb
That's all been doable for a long time, using controlled breeding. We do it
all the time with animals; look what we've done to dogs. The only difference
genetic engineering brings is how quickly it can be done.

But that's eugenics, and it's been rejected as immoral by pretty much
everyone. A big part of the problem, I think, is that a custom-engineered
child is a lot more expensive to create than a natural random-chance child,
and therefore eugenics only produces super-humans for the rich and powerful,
who will become even more rich and powerful by breeding themselves into master
race that enslaves everyone else.

Eugenics can't upgrade all of humanity directly because natural breeding,
being cheaper, is also much more common. So the vast majority of inferior
humans will always outnumber the eugenics-produced super-humans. That's where
the enslavement comes in; the super-humans will have to use their inherited
wealth and power to make sure they retain control because they can't out-breed
everyone else.

The other possibility, and the only way the super-humans can replace the
normals, is to kill off all of the normals either directly or by making them
infertile. That's even worse than enslavement.

No matter how you look at it, eugenics has a bad outcome if it's not available
to everyone at the same time. And if it was available to everyone, we wouldn't
call it eugenics. We'd call it 'medicine', 'vaccination', 'pre- and post-natal
care', and 'preventative care'.

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Snail_Commando
> That's all been doable for a long time, using controlled breeding. We do it
> all the time with animals; look what we've done to dogs. The only difference
> genetic engineering brings is how quickly it can be done.

Selective sexual reproduction and genetic engineering are actually markedly
different. Genetic engineering involves precise splicing, insertion, or
rearrangement of an organism's genome (or subset of genes). Selective sexual
reproduction is a directed random rearrangement of genetic material over
successive generations based (on often poorly understood) "meta-
characteristics" or traits.

The critical distinction is that genetic engineering is the deliberate editing
of exact genetic information, whereas selective sexual reproduction is a
gradual, iterated, locally-random mixing of genetic information with imprecise
results.

Furthermore, genetic engineering enables genetic mixing that aren't possible
with selective sexual reproduction. For example, the insertion of genetic
information into E.coli in order to produce human insulin for diabetics. Or,
the modification of a particular cyanobacteria to secrete petroleum after
photosynthesis.

[http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/gc/c3gc42...](http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/gc/c3gc42591f#!divAbstract)

>> ...eliminating allergies, Alzheimer's, and cancer...

> That's all been doable for a long time, using controlled breeding...

This is incorrect. You may be surprised to learn that those deeply
complicated, diverse families of afflictions would not be effectively treated
via 'controlled breeding'.

A simple, naive disproof of the assertion that cancer can be eliminated in
domesticated or selectively selectively bred animals (via artificial
selection): pigs, huskies, and laboratory mice all get cancer at rates that
are more or less congruent with wild boar, wolves, and rats.

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dekhn
somatic cell nuclear transfer isn't really cloning because it doesn't include
the mitochondria.

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Snail_Commando
> somatic cell nuclear transfer isn't really cloning because it doesn't
> include the mitochondria.

That really depends on how you define "cloning". It absolutely can be
considered therapeutic cloning, and it would serve as an initial step in
reproductive cloning.

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msie
I believe the next season of Orphan Black starts this Saturday.

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smrtinsert
Genetics major here - I think I'm going to be sick. I have no problem using
genetics as a source code from which to print replacement parts if you will,
but the idea of creating life from an existing person terrifies me for some
reason. Is our future some version of an awful Bruckheimer movie (The Island)?

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mitochondrion
Are you, by any chance, terrified by the concept of having a child?

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adamdavis
I never really got this line of thought. While creating life in a laboratory
and creating life through sexually reproduction between a man and woman (or
however it is other organisms manage it) have the same end result, I think
it's fairly reasonable to recognize that they are two very distinctly
different things.

