Caine

The topic of True Debate #2 will be: "Bioethical Standards of Human Cloning"

This debate will be between Jallman and Billo_Really

As decided by the participants, the debate will be structured as follows:

Mon 1/15: Opening Statements by both Parties (please limit these to 1 post)
Tue 1/16 - Thu 1/8: Rebuttals/Counter-Rebuttals (please limit to 1 post per day)
Fri 1/19: Final Statements (please limit these to 1 post)

As decided, please use only sources which are available to the public for free when providing sourced material to support your arguments.

Good luck to you both!

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I voted for Bob Barr.

jallman

One of the most widely discussed political hot topics of today is human cloning and the production of stem cell lines through recombinant dna technology. The technology has the potentital to eradicate many genetic diseases, eliminate organ donor lists, and make genetic birth defects a thing of the past. However, there is a loud, uninformed, and contentious voice in our society that is strongly opposed to the progressing development of this technology. Through an aggressive campaign of misinformation incitement of hysteria, the issue of cloning has gotten muddied.

Before any serious conversation about cloning can take place, we must dispell the myths about human cloning by discussing what it actually is. Cloning is simply the replication of biological material. There are three types of cloning: recombinant dna cloning, reproductive cloning, and therapeutic cloning. Recombinant DNA cloning utilizes technology that has been in use since the 1970's to replicate genetic material of interest for further study. Reproductive cloning actually takes genetic material from one organism to make a near identical replica. Therapeutic cloning involves the replication of embryonic stem cell lines to grow entire organs or to replace material that degenerates due to diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.

Rarely, when discussing human cloning, is reproductive cloning at the center of the debate. The current pursuit is therapeutic cloning and for good reasons. However, the pro-life lobby has raised serious issues with the use of embryonic stem cell material. With its typical hysteria and misinformation campaign, they have hindered the advancement of a viable medical technology that could one day help millions and change the quality of life for every human being.

With proper oversight...that is to maintain the same quality of ethics that every other medical practice maintains, the advancement of therapeutic cloning in human beings can be a great tool for our society. The pro-life lobby has no place forcing its agenda into our public policy and hindering such valuable research. By allowing medical professionals and ethicists to apply the same standards of research to this achievment, we are in no more danger than when medicine was being pushed through the examination of cadavers in the 1800's. If we sort through the hysteria and the wildly contentious "what-ifs" proposed by the uninformed fear peddlers, it is evident that human cloning is not a danger, but a gift to our society.

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Billo_Really

Our society and culture has become technology junkies. When a new technology has been discovered , rarely in our haste to make that technology commercially viable, do we ever have discussions on whether we should develop the technology . And nowhere is this more apparent than the field of genetic engineering. Aside from the religious and spiritual implications one must way if they are so disposed, it is the shear arrogance that convinces us we can face mother nature on her causal level and expect the the design to be better than the designer [the Creator]. However, just like the designers of the Titanic found out, we see that we are still way over our head. When it comes to replicating nature, you would think we would get the hint after our attempts at cloning trees resulted in sterile forests.

My opponent conveniently omits the magnitude of what we are dealing with. Instead, he argues that “Cloning is simply the replication of biological material”. However, when talking about issues in the field of genetic engineering, there is nothing simple about it. Trying to tweak and fine tune the basic building blocks of life cannot be viewed and treated in the same vain as giving your car a tune-up. Especially, since the science has not progressed to the point of figuring out how the engine runs. According to Ian Wilmut, one of the scientists who produced Dolly the sheep, the first adult mammalian clone, warned recently that attempts to clone human beings at the current time were "dangerous and irresponsible".

My opponent argues that “Reproductive cloning actually takes genetic material from one organism to make a near identical replica” and that “Therapeutic cloning involves the replication of embryonic stem cell lines to grow entire organs…”, but on closer inspection, those conclusions have yet to pass the muster. According to Rudolph Jaenisch, of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ryuzo Yanagimachi's laboratory at the University of Hawaii, the team that produced mice clones from embryonic stem cells - the "master" cells that go on to form all the different tissues in the body, found that the mice clones had subtle differences in their genetic make-up that indicated something was going wrong in the regulatory process that controls whether certain genes are switched on or off in the cells used for cloning and have said, "This suggests that even apparently normal clones may have subtle aberrations of gene expression that are not easily detected in the animal clone". Which indicates things are a little more complex than simple replicating.

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"With neocons, it just goes to show, when the
bar is low enough, you can never be too wrong!"

jallman

If we stop every project with the fear of failure, then we never accomplish anything. Of course the process is incomplete thus far; that's why it is called research. It is not uncommon for a new medical procedure to fail many, many times before it is perfected. Consider Kidney transplants and the failures leading up to the technique. While the surgery itself was a success, there was the unintended consequence of having the immune system eventually kill the recipient. What would have happened had we stopped research for fear of the unknown consequneces? Nine thousand patients a year, starting in 1986, would be out of luck. Currently, there are 91,000 patients awaiting donated organs for transplant . The wait for these organs is 4 to 5 years, currently. By 2010, that wait is expected to double. The benefits of researching stem cell lines for organ farming are clear to anyone waiting on that list. Trepidation and fear of "unknown effects" are hardly luxuries for those facing death because currently the organs just simply are not there.

With proper oversight and constant ethical analysis of the research procedures, human stem cells can make a huge impact on our medicine. My opponent obfuscates the real issue with hysteria and scare tactics about "sterile forests" and irrelevant reference to full cloning of human beings. They are irrelevant because it is already agreed upon by medical ethicists that cloning a full human being is a bad idea at best. Legislation has already been passed that stops the reproductive cloning of human beings. However, the current administration has severely limited the advancement of stem cell technology by confining government research to only 11 existing stem cell lines. Further, it is widely agreed that the existing stem cell lines used for government research cannot be used for human testing because they were grown on mouse cells which could expose humans to animal viruses indefensible to our immune system.

So now, I ask the question to my opponent: Knowing that legislation is already in place to stop reproductive cloning, and knowing from the past that the development of medical techniques is subject to a process of refinement through failures and research; what is the objection to developing further human stem cell lines to continue research that could possibly save millions of lives?

Billo_Really

" Adult rat brain cells", that's my answer!

Funding research and development for an open-ended program with no projected time line for success takes away resources from other areas that have more obvious and immediate success. While embryonic stem cell research may be a popular idea and sounds real good on paper and in theory, we live in a real world with other real world problems that also require scientific attention and funding. Relevent to this debate, are the other exciting therapies that are much further along in development and that do not require the destruction of embryonic human beings. To cite a few recent examples: adult rat brain cells successfully generated rat muscle tissue; stems cells from umbilical cord blood became "brain tissue [when injected into rats' brains], maturing into the type of cell appropriate for that area of the brain"; cow skin tissue was reprogrammed to its stem cell state and then transformed into heart tissue; human thigh muscle from a patient has been turned into contracting heart muscle cells; and researchers have converted human fat cells obtained through liposuction into bone, muscle and cartilage cells.

More funding to stem cell research takes funding away from more successful and promising programs. In addition to the alternative technology's of producing spare body parts, are other methods that help maintain the body against diseases. Like Homeopathy and more education on the benefits of nutrition. There are many other programs that saves lives as well that deserve funding, but I think the reader gets the idea.

One thing we must never lose sight of is the fact that these embryo's would develop into human beings if their development wasn't interrupted. And it is only human for those who work on these programs for any length of time and repetition, do not really think of embryos as children to be kept or given up for adoption. They think of them instead as special property, the destiny of which should be in their hands unless and until the property actually becomes persons.

For those who embrace the view that embryos are persons, this common intuition about the status of embryos presents a challenge. They may describe stem cell research as homicide, but they must recognize that doing so entails a description of current fertility treatments as homicide as well, albeit homicide that is intimately linked to creating other lives. They would have to insist that all unutilized frozen embryos be preserved and made available to interested couples, regardless of the original couples' respective wishes. After all, one could not give up a child after birth but insist that the child be discarded or used for research.

Without getting into the afore-mentioned hysteria regarding religious arguments from those that are more faith based, there is the ethical issue of the status of the human embryo.This country is based on believing all people (humans) have inalienable rights. These rights come in the form of positive rights and negative rights.

If an embryo is a human element, when does it get it's rights?

jallman

Pursuing the benefits of human stem cell cloning does not preclude the abandonment of other types of therapeutic cloning treatments. If adult rat brain cells provide a treatment currently, then by all means, it should be pursued with haste. However, let me remind you that the pursuit of that method also could have unintended consequences as it is still in development.

As to your charge of stem cell research being open ended with no projected time-line for success, I can only remind you of two other projects that share the same status:

The Future of the Space Program which is costing 16.8 Billion for 2007

The Human Genome Project for which analysis is still on-going with its last reported expenditure of $437 million.

Further, there have been successes in therapeutic human cloning. The time-line of cloning in general has produced a major success nearly every two years since 1952 with the experiments of Briggs and King, to the discovery of the DNA model by Watson and Crick, all the way up to the current cloning of human tissues on rat cells as you mentioned. All of these are steps towards a greater breakthrough.

As to your assertion that embryo's used for research would develop into human beings, I can only point you to the fact that currently, there are no restrictions on the destruction of human embryo's anyway. In fact, abortion is quite legal and serves no more purpose than a convenience. Reproductive therapies involving the use of fertilized embryos accounts for the destruction of thousands of embryos every year. These byproducts of "acceptable" treatment could be put to the use of creating new stem cell lines.

Finally, there are processes by which embryonic stem cell lines can be produced without ever destroying the embryo, thereby eliminating any reasonable moral objection to the cloning of human stem cell lines.

Basically, there is no excuse not to lift the bans on creating these stem cell lines considering the potential gain. As with all research, it is a process that takes time and resources. The only moral objection has been overcome so all we are left with is hysteria and misinformation as opposition to a valuable tool that can save millions eventually.

Billo_Really

There is one moral objection (or apprehension) that comes to mind. Since we have covered most of the scientific ground on this subject, I will close with a few points on the moral dilemma of "playing God!"

Without dipping into the hysteria that is prevelant with Big Religion, it is the notion that maybe the human species are taking life too far too the extremes by trying to re-create natural life through mechanical means. No matter how successful the technology becomes, the sense of duplicating life (Creation 101), doing God's work, matching God, topping God, then being God, there is that unknown variable that takes us down a road we don't want to be on.

What I mean by that is this, researchers are struggling with the way some cells react (turning off and on) which indicates, just maybe, the re-creation of life is so un-natural, that what we are trying to achieve is impossible. And as research develops, we might start losing our respect for humanity and the notion of life being very precious. Let's say they perfect the technology to the point of predicting with a high probability how the reactions in the body human will take place. Do we keep going with this until we get to the stage where we are regenerating so much that we rid the world of death by natural causes? Is that what we want? No one to die, ever? And if carried to this extreme, what would be the quality of life in that time?

Life is precious. There are reason's things are the way they are. There are natural mechanisms in place (ie, nutrition, exercize, oxygen 2 therapy's) that keep the human body free from disease and in optimum health if done correctly. And those do not conflict with any moral imperative from a higher power. For anyone not familiar with oxy 2 therapy's, it is based on the findings that bacteria cannot survive in highly oxygenated environments. Which is a big reason exercise is good for the human condition. The more you exercise, the more oxygenated your blood becomes, the less bacteria can survive in that blood. Ergo, the less bacteria you have in your system, the less disease you will have in your life.

With that being said, I'm done!

jallman

I appreciate my opponent's ardor and thoughtfulness with which he pursued his stance. However, despite his passion for the subject, the facts still remain: research is a work in progress and in the field of therapeutic cloning, there have been leaps every couple of years. The potential benefits of this research far outweigh the objections.

I understand that there are moral objections to embryonic stem cell research. However, holding up legitimate life saving research while an entirely different debate (abortion and the right to life) is hashed out is absurd. There are no restrictions on the destruction of embryos and, in fact, thousands are destroyed every year as a result of fertility treatments. Immeasurable potential is incinerated every time we let one of these already doomed embryos go to waste.

Further, as I have shown, there are ways to produce stem cell lines with oout harming the embryo. Therefore, any moral objection to the use of therapeutic cloning is a moot point. Ninety thousand people currently waiting for organs...and each has an expected 5 year wait. That wait doubles by 2010. Ninety thousand people are the reason we should move forward and advance this technology. Ninety thousand people a year don't have the luxury of philosophizing and issue when the answer is already so clear.