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Scientists Clone Human Embryo for the First Time

Scientists have managed to overcome an incredible hurdle that has confounded researchers since Dolly 15 years ago. But researchers from Oregon seem to have finally confirmed (it's not a South Korean hoax this time!) that they have advanced a cloned cell past the stymied 6-12 stage into a 150 cell blastocyst which is enough to serve as a source/reservoir for embryonic stem cells. This is an extraordinary development, and I for one am excited!

Scientists Clone Human Embryos To Make Stem Cells : Shots - Health News : NPR
BBC News - Home

Yeah, "excited." You and Dr. Frankenstein.

Sooner or later, this sort of thinking is going to lead somebody with power to reason that "since a grown human is merely a more complex collection of cells, there is no ethical bar to whatever we choose to do with it as a society." (Note the impersonal pronoun.) I sort of hope that you live to see it.
 
There is no such ultimate law of nature, and I quite explicitly said that we probably can't alter already living people. I'm talking about optimizing the next generation. And of course we'll still be human. Carrots were still carrots back when they were purple, right? But even if we're not, why is that bad? We'll be evolving past human into something even better. No more homo sapiens, hello homo superior. Why wouldn't that be preferable to statically remaining in this specific evolutionary niche? What would that have to do with the "essence of our existence", which could use a definition if we're going to talk about.



Since this kind of experimentation has never happened yet, you don't know how it will end.



Then we fix them, of course.

Ot, but "the time ships" from Baxter asks some really cool questions about what ultimately constitutes 'human evolution"
 
My understanding is there are already nearly 100 non-embyronic stem cell therapies proven to work, and Zero embryonic stem cell therapies at present... and it can't all be blamed on lack of gov't funding.

My understanding based on my admittedly amateur passion for the subject is that it comes down to two overarching reasons:

1. It is more technically difficult to work with embryonic stem cells because of the bottlenecks in producing enough for comprehensive study let alone practical application. They are also more unstable with regard to rejection and tumor formation in large part due to their coming from donors. Hence the interest in this breakthrough.

2. The kinds of therapies one would probably want to develop with embryonic stem cells are more 'ambitious' than for adult stem cells. It's been much easier to cross the application threshold with adult stem cells. But I'm not precisely sure why.
 
Yeah, "excited." You and Dr. Frankenstein.

Sooner or later, this sort of thinking is going to lead somebody with power to reason that "since a grown human is merely a more complex collection of cells, there is no ethical bar to whatever we choose to do with it as a society." (Note the impersonal pronoun.) I sort of hope that you live to see it.

That seems unlikely. The ethical leap from embryo to human is rather large. In the 15 years since Dolly I've never once heard a single scientist advocate for the killing of humans to use as resources for medical applications. I'm not sure what else I could say on that count.
 
Yeah, "excited." You and Dr. Frankenstein.

Do you recall what Dr. Frankenstein did? He brought someone back to life with electricity. We call it defibrillation. Doctors do it all the time in hospitals.

Sooner or later, this sort of thinking is going to lead somebody with power to reason that "since a grown human is merely a more complex collection of cells, there is no ethical bar to whatever we choose to do with it as a society." (Note the impersonal pronoun.) I sort of hope that you live to see it.

Because no one did this with things that we evolved with already, right? Nobody ever enslaved a group of people because their skin color made them less than human, or tried to wipe out one ethnicity or another, because those things didn't make people complex because of genetic modification.

All of these fears have nothing to do with science, cloning, or genetic technology. It has to do with evil people abusing power, the same way they've done for thousands of years. Though it might be harder to do if we were all smarter through modification of the genome.

I say again, WE COULD ALL BE HERCULES. Actually, we could all be Steven Hawking in Hercules' body. That sounds pretty freaking awesome to me.
 
That seems unlikely. The ethical leap from embryo to human is rather large. In the 15 years since Dolly I've never once heard a single scientist advocate for the killing of humans to use as resources for medical applications. I'm not sure what else I could say on that count.

The leap isn't large at all. I just made it. I don't accept of adopt it however because of other things i accept, like unfashionable religion. In a purely mechanistic view of the universe, there really isn't much difference between am embryo and a mature human, they merely represent different points on a continuum to which people are conditioned to appoint wholly arbitrary values which are subject to revision.

If you want to lean about scientists advocating for "for the killing of humans to use as resources for medical applications," a perusal pf the histories of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union will be most instructive.
 
This is the most frustrating line of reasoning I hear from people. It is childish that based on closely held political convictions people will broadly dismiss entire fields of research and effort as nothing more than a part of some grand corporate chicanery that will never benefit the average person. It's all in "their" hands, you know, the 'drug companies'.

Yes there are ethical problems and considerations that crop up with any of these big entities, and the most emotive among them is probably drug manufacturers. However! It is utterly unthinking to sweepingly throw up your hands and say that 'they' are going to stop this from happening or prevent it from having a positive impact.

Hasn't your life improved over the past 30 years? Was MRI halted in its tracks? What about new drug therapies? Other new technologies that you find value in?

I cannot stand our countries obsession with corporate and political conspiracy, it mindlessly hardens attitudes and numbs debate. It's also silly.

Do you honestly think society is ready to clone humans? To what end? The best possible scenario- that the science is only used to make people live longer and healthier- is just the lesser of evils.
If you think I'm some fringe type having a left-wing knee-jerk reaction, go ask a conservative, Republican soybean farmer who's been sued by Monsanto.
 
There is limited potential benefit of cloning humans, at least, ethically. Cloning is just an alternative means of making an new human. The new human will still possess the same human rights as you do, as any other human produced the conventional way.

I can only assume - hope, really - that talk of harvesting your own clone for organs was done only in jest...

It's rare to see science fiction do the concept justice, but ethically speaking, a clone is not property or raw materials to be exploited or harvested.
 
I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about this story is disturbing. Maybe it's because I can see the myriad of absues that will come of this technology, or maybe that I'm just noticing the obvious trend that technology creates problems that needs more technology to solve. Humanity is really caught in a progress trap right now, especially western nations. We jump head long into these discoveries and they almost always have dire, unforseen consequences. Then we need more technology to deal with it, and the progress trap deepens.

Based on our track record of what we're doing to this planet and each other, I doubt that humans have the collective emotional maturity to engineer ourselves responsibly. And that fact aside, most of our major diseases are caused by the imbalanced way humans are living in the modern world. We are turning to really complicated solutions to deal with things that could easily be solved in a generation or two with a change in priorities.

It's childlike to constantly seek escape from death. It's never going to happen. I don't want to see humans living to 200. The old vanguard needs to let go, and the longer they hold on, the less likely things are to change for the better. The human life cycle is fine where it is. We don't need millions of people living longer. It's not for the highest good of all life on this planet.
 
I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about this story is disturbing. Maybe it's because I can see the myriad of absues that will come of this technology, or maybe that I'm just noticing the obvious trend that technology creates problems that needs more technology to solve. Humanity is really caught in a progress trap right now, especially western nations. We jump head long into these discoveries and they almost always have dire, unforseen consequences. Then we need more technology to deal with it, and the progress trap deepens.

Based on our track record of what we're doing to this planet and each other, I doubt that humans have the collective emotional maturity to engineer ourselves responsibly. And that fact aside, most of our major diseases are caused by the imbalanced way humans are living in the modern world. We are turning to really complicated solutions to deal with things that could easily be solved in a generation or two with a change in priorities.

It's childlike to constantly seek escape from death. It's never going to happen. I don't want to see humans living to 200. The old vanguard needs to let go, and the longer they hold on, the less likely things are to change for the better. The human life cycle is fine where it is. We don't need millions of people living longer. It's not for the highest good of all life on this planet.

I agree.
I'd be all for this science becoming technology IF it was limited to stem-cell production but I'm absolutely sure that nothing could stop the ball once it was allowed to start rolling. In fact, it may be rolling right now.
 
Do you honestly think society is ready to clone humans? To what end? The best possible scenario- that the science is only used to make people live longer and healthier- is just the lesser of evils.
If you think I'm some fringe type having a left-wing knee-jerk reaction, go ask a conservative, Republican soybean farmer who's been sued by Monsanto.

No one is actually talking about cloning humans, especially not pharmaceutical companies. This is about a mechanism for harvesting embryonic stem cells. It would be counter-productive to actual clone an embryo to the point where you can implant it via IVF, let it gestate, be born, raise it, and then slaughter it just so you could get an organ. The whole goal is to just grow organs from scratch!

As a side note one of the biggest myths about GMO's is that Monsanto and other producers routinely fall upon hapless farmers and sue them for patent infringement. This is so rare its difficult to find cases: Top Five Myths Of Genetically Modified Seeds, Busted : The Salt : NPR

Edit: I think they've filed suit like 145 times for intentional infringement in the past 16 years which is extremely low, and the standard for intentional infringement is rather high.
 
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The leap isn't large at all. I just made it. I don't accept of adopt it however because of other things i accept, like unfashionable religion. In a purely mechanistic view of the universe, there really isn't much difference between am embryo and a mature human, they merely represent different points on a continuum to which people are conditioned to appoint wholly arbitrary values which are subject to revision.

If you want to lean about scientists advocating for "for the killing of humans to use as resources for medical applications," a perusal pf the histories of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union will be most instructive.

Having one sentence follow another is not the same as having a logical closeness between them. There is a world of difference between raising a human being to the point of organ maturity so you can slaughter him for his organs, and using embryonic stem cells to create organs, repair damage, etc.
 
I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about this story is disturbing. Maybe it's because I can see the myriad of absues that will come of this technology, or maybe that I'm just noticing the obvious trend that technology creates problems that needs more technology to solve. Humanity is really caught in a progress trap right now, especially western nations. We jump head long into these discoveries and they almost always have dire, unforseen consequences. Then we need more technology to deal with it, and the progress trap deepens.

Based on our track record of what we're doing to this planet and each other, I doubt that humans have the collective emotional maturity to engineer ourselves responsibly. And that fact aside, most of our major diseases are caused by the imbalanced way humans are living in the modern world. We are turning to really complicated solutions to deal with things that could easily be solved in a generation or two with a change in priorities.

It's childlike to constantly seek escape from death. It's never going to happen. I don't want to see humans living to 200. The old vanguard needs to let go, and the longer they hold on, the less likely things are to change for the better. The human life cycle is fine where it is. We don't need millions of people living longer. It's not for the highest good of all life on this planet.

It isn't childlike, it's exciting. The possibility of escaping the terrible age restrictions that evolution foisted upon us is tantalizing. Death is bad because it kills people. The annihilation of a life is not something that causes me joy. Whether that life is the 90 year old suffering from heart failure or the 10 year old battling leukemia. Death is death and no matter how many euphemisms, aphorisms, or maxims we come up with to make us feel better about the finality of death (death makes life worth living!) it does not change the unmitigated tragedy of the extinguishing of a consciousness. Biotechnology in tandem with other advancing fields of science offer the very real possibility over the next few centuries (perhaps sooner) of finally allowing us to take control over our own fates and increasing our mastery over nature.
 
It doesn't excite you? It sounds pretty awesome to me. I don't want to turn this into an evolution vs creation argument at all, but one of the biggest arguments against intelligent design is that we're not really designed very well. Many living creatures have all kinds of redundancies and weaknesses as a result of the gradual change from evolution via natural election. Not having to rely on that kind of gradual change and overcoming those weaknesses could turn us into the superhuman beings that people have dreamed about for thousands of years. We could all be Hercules. We could delete the appendix from our genetic code. We could give ourselves a more robust immune system that could fight off HIV with ease. How awesome would it be just to fix our vulnerability to astigmatisms and give everyone 20/20 vision? Obviously, "we" refers to future generations. You can't really change a living creature's genetics for the better. At least we can't now.

We can create a human race that is much more protected against the natural dangers of the world, that lives in its physical and mental prime for two hundred years, doesn't suffer from cancers or diabetes, and never again is a child born with Down Syndrome. How can that be frightening and not fill you with hope and excitement?
Didnt Hitler try this?
 
No one is actually talking about cloning humans, especially not pharmaceutical companies. This is about a mechanism for harvesting embryonic stem cells. It would be counter-productive to actual clone an embryo to the point where you can implant it via IVF, let it gestate, be born, raise it, and then slaughter it just so you could get an organ. The whole goal is to just grow organs from scratch!

As a side note one of the biggest myths about GMO's is that Monsanto and other producers routinely fall upon hapless farmers and sue them for patent infringement. This is so rare its difficult to find cases: Top Five Myths Of Genetically Modified Seeds, Busted : The Salt : NPR

Edit: I think they've filed suit like 145 times for intentional infringement in the past 16 years which is extremely low, and the standard for intentional infringement is rather high.

I know the intention now is to produce stem cells- my concern is that it wouldn't stop there. Stem cells are so readily available from placentae that I doubt that was the motivation, and my references to cloning were replies to this, " Screw natural selection, we're going to intelligently design ourselves." from earlier in the thread.
As for Monsanto, they actively investigate hundreds of farmers a year and have brought hundreds, maybe thousands of actions that are settled out-of-court.b Those 145-or-whatever lawsuits their website admits to- does it say how much money they got from them?
 
Every clone is an innocent baby deserving of full legal, human and civil rights... I think that is how the argument goes. So accordingly they should find some unmarried teenager who had sex and put it in her because she knew the risk of pregnancy by having sex and therefore had consented to that being done to her against her will.

Palin and Colter come to mind.
 
Forgive my skepticism, but I saw that you referred to this theoretical baby as "it."
 
Any stem cell breakthrough is exciting to see, IMO. Fifty years from now, I'd be willing to bet that stem cell research has led to the elimination of dozens of diseases, including ALS, MS, Parkinson's, Juvenile diabetes, etc.

If true, this is great news! :)
 
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