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In its biological aspects as a form of
artificial
reproduction, cloning is achieved without the contribution of two
gametes
; therefore it is an asexual and agamic reproduction. Fertilization
properly
so-called is replaced by the "fusion" of a nucleus taken from a somatic
cell
of the individual one wishes to clone, or of the somatic cell itself,
with
an oocyte from which the nucleus has been removed, that is, an oocyte
lacking
the maternal genome.
[The genetically modified egg is then stimulated into embryonic growth
using
an electrical charge. Once that is done successfully -- whether the
resulting
embryo is used for reproductive or research purposes -- the act of
cloning
is complete.Whether used for reproductive or research cloning, the
cloning
procedure is exactly the same.Biologically, an individual human life
created
through fertilization commences as soon as sperm has merged with egg,
OR
THE CLONED CELL STARTS TO GROW AND DIVIDE. This is true whether the
"conception"
occurs in a woman's Fallopian tube or a lab petri dish. Once the embryo
exists,
it is a new member of the human species, possessing a unique genetic
makeup
and its own gender. ]
Since the nucleus of the somatic cell contains
the
whole genetic inheritance, the individual obtained possesses—except for
possible
alterations—the genetic identity of the nucleus' donor. It is this
essential
genetic correspondence with the donor that produces in the new
individual
the somatic replica or copy of the donor itself.
The Edinburgh event occurred after 277 oocyte-donor nucleus fusions:
only
eight were successful, that is, only eight of the 277 started to
develop as
embryos and only one of these eight embryos reached birth: the lamb
called
Dolly. There is a high level of mortality and deformity in the mammal
embryos
which are being created in the cloning experiments.
[Explanation of how Dolly was created by cloning
http://www.time.com/time/cloning/cloning1.html ]
This new observation may put the brakes on attempts to clone humans,
adding
to the already significant ethical problems associated any proposal.
Considerable
health risks, coupled with the possibility of early aging of clones
derived
from mature adults, could tip the scales for even the most ardent
pro-cloners.
(Source: British Medical Journal, 8 May 1999, 318:1230
**) Gregory K Pike, PhD
....the thought of human cloning has already led
to
the imagining of hypothetical cases inspired by the desire for
omnipotence: duplicating individuals endowed with exceptional talent
and beauty; reproducing the image of departed loved ones; selecting
healthy individuals immune from
genetic diseases; the possibility of choosing a person's sex; producing
selected
frozen embryos to be transferred in utero at a later time to provide
spare
organs, etc.
By regarding these hypothetical cases as science
fiction,
proposals can soon be advanced for cloning considered "reasonable" or
"compassionate":
the procreation of a child in a family whose father suffers from
aspermia
or to replace the dying child of a widowed mother; one could say that
these
cases have nothing to do with the fantasies of science fiction
In the cloning process the basic relationships of
the
human person are perverted: filiation, consanguinity, kinship,
parenthood. A woman can be the twin sister of her mother, lack a
biological father and
be the daughter of her grandfather. In vitro fertilization has already
led
to the confusion of parentage, but cloning will mean the radical
rupture of
these bonds. If the human cloning project intends to stop "before"
implantation in the womb, trying to avoid at least some of the
consequences we have just
indicated, it appears equally unjust from the moral standpoint....
A prohibition of cloning which would be limited
to
preventing the birth of a cloned child, but which would still permit
the
cloning of an embryo-foetus, would involve experimentation on embryos
and
foetuses and would require their suppression before birth—a cruel,
exploitative
way of treating human beings. In any case, such experimentation is
immoral
because it involves the arbitrary use of the human body (by now
decidedly
regarded as a machine composed of parts) as a mere research tool.
The
human body is an integral part of every individual's dignity and
personal
identity, and it is not permissible to use women as a source of ova for
conducting
cloning experiments.....
It is immoral because even in the case of a
clone, we
are in the presence of a "man", although in the embryonic stage.
All the moral reasons which led to the
condemnation of in vitro fertilization as such and to the radical
censure of in vitro fertilization
for merely experimental purposes must also be applied to human
cloning....
The difference should again be pointed out
between the
conception of life as a gift of love and the view of the human being as
an
industrial product....
Halting the human cloning project is a moral
duty which must also be translated into cultural, social and
legislative terms. The progress of scientific research is not the
same as the rise of scientific
despotism , which today seems to be replacing the old ideologies.
In
a democratic, pluralistic system, the first guarantee of each
individual's
freedom is established by unconditionally respecting human dignity at
every
phase of life, regardless of the intellectual or physical abilities one
possesses
or lacks.
Since 1983 the European Parliament and all the laws passed to
legalize artificial procreation, even the most permissive, have always
forbidden human
cloning. But on January 22, 2001, Britain's House of Lords voted
overwhelmingly
to permit the cloning and maintenance of human embryos up to 14 days
old
for the purposes of medical experimentation and stem cell research,
thereby
taking the first terrible step toward the legalization of full-blown
human
cloning.
However, scientists will not be able to carry out such work for nine
months
as the ministers agreed to temporarily postpone research licences and
to
set up a committee to investigate the issues in more detail. Meanwhile,
pro-life
groups, such as ProLife Alliance, are mounting legal challenges to this
legislation.
Plans to clone the first human being have been blasted by one of the
world's
top experts in animal cloning, who warned of a high risk that the child
may
die prematurely or endure life as a cripple.
"People who suggest that they can copy humans basically have no real
understanding
of all the processes that can occur in an embryo to make cloning work,"
says
Lorraine Young, a researcher at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh.
Given
the huge failure rate (quoted above) involved in trying to clone
Dolly,
there is also the ethical issue of most attempts to clone a human
resulting
in death for an embryo which fails to survive until birth,deformities,
stillborns
and health problems, and possibly premature ageing.
It should be recalled that the Church's
Magisterium has condemned the possibility of human cloning, twin
fission and parthenogenesis in the 1987 Instruction Donum Vitae.
The basic reasons for the inhuman nature of possible human cloning are
not because it is an extreme form of
artificial procreation in comparison to other legally approved forms,
such
as in vitro fertilization, etc.
As we have said, the reason for its rejection
is
that it denies the dignity of the person subjected to cloning and the
dignity
of human procreation.
11/11/1997 UNESCO "Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and
Human
Rights" article 11:
"Practices which are contrary to human dignity, such as reproductive
cloning
of human beings, shall never be permitted."
Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer urges that cloned embryos be allowed
to
develop into advanced foetuses, from whom whole organs may be
harvested. To
make it palatable, he suggests that cloned embryos may be genetically
modified
to be headless or,
at least, brainless, to render them 'not really persons'.The reason for
all
this effort would be that embryonic stem cells culled from surplus or
aborted
foetuses, morality aside, may be rejected by the recipient without
anti-rejection
drugs.
Embryos cloned from the patient himself or herself will, in contrast
--theoretically,
at least -- be a source of genetically almost perfectly matched
embryonic
stem cells, thus potentially overcoming the rejection problem.
Opponents argue, however, that therapeutic cloning is barbarous since
it
involves the deliberate creation and sacrifice of human embryos. They
say
it is like 'cannibalising one's twin', twinning being nature's way of
cloning
a human being.
Those who want human cloning legalised are working on the premise that
"good"
is what the adult wants, rather than what is in the best interests of
the
child.
New York, NY The United Nations on Friday adopted a resolution asking all governments around the world to ban all forms of human cloning. The decision is a victory for pro-life countries who want a complete cloning ban and a defeat for nations that favor using human cloning to create human embryos to kill for their stem cells.
The
international group's legal committee voted 71 to 35 with 43
abstentions to adopt the non-binding proposal sponsored by Honduras and
backed by the United States. The measure now goes to the full 191
nation assembly, which is expected to approve it
2004 Australia
NovemberThe government of
recently re-elected Prime Minister John Howard quietly changed its
position to support a coalition of 60 nations, led by the United States
and Costa Rica, seeking to get the UN to adopt a treaty banning all
human cloning. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Australia was
just taking a stand backing up national law currently prohibiting all
forms of cloning.The treaty would also prohibit the use of cloning to
create and kill human embryos for their stem cells for research.
Australian head of international biotech firm Stem Cell Sciences David
Newton said it was "just unbelievable" that the government would change
its position.The quiet change has also angered NSW Labor Premier Bob
Carr, who backs human cloning, and federal Labor science spokeswoman
Jenny Macklin."The Howard Government should not be making such
radically significant decisions behind closed doors," she told the
Australian.
The change comes as the island nation is
expected to review a three year old law that prohibits the use of human
cloning for research ends. The Australian parliament is expected to
review the law and some lawmakers want to scrap it in favor of a law
allowing human cloning for research.
Health Minister Tony Abbott, an opponent of therapeutic cloning, is
expected to guide the review process.
The United Nations
on Friday essentially postponed a final decision on the issue of human
cloning in favor of taking three months to iron out a last-minute
declaration from Italy that would encourage the world to ban the grisly
practice.
2002
Subject: Bush
Administration Proposes
Human
Cloning Ban at the UN
Source: Washington
Post, Reuters;
February
26, 2002
Bush Administration Proposes Human Cloning
Ban
at
the UN
New York, NY -- The United
States on Tuesday
proposed
a "global and comprehensive ban" on human cloning and all
experimentation involving human embryos. The announcement marked an
expansion in the Bush administration's campaign to restrict the uses of
human embryos for scientific and medical purposes.
"Human cloning is an enormously
troubling
development in biotechnology,"U.S. delegate Carolyn L. Willson said at
a meeting of the
U.N.'s Committee on an International Convention Against the
Reproductive Cloning
of Human Beings. Such cloning, she said, could lead to a future in
which
"human beings are born for spare body parts, and children are
engineered
to fit eugenic specifications."
Scientists have not yet
demonstrated the ability
to
perfectly clone a human being, but one U.S. biotechnology company
claims to
have cloned human embryos. Although there is broad support at the
United Nations
for a ban on the cloning of babies, delegates from Europe to Asia today
claimed
that it would be unwise to stifle research on cloned embryos, a
promising
field that might yield medical breakthroughs.
"Once this technological genie
is out of the
bottle,
trying to control it will be extremely difficult," said Health Law
Professor
George Annas of the Boston University School of Public
Health."Governments urgently need to agree upon international policies
to ban human reproductive cloning and other technologies of genetic
manipulation that could undermine society and our common humanity,"
Annas said in a printed statement.
In August, France and Germany proposed a
global treaty
that would prohibit the cloning of babies but permit the production of
unborn
children for scientific research. But the United States said it did not
go
far enough and presented an alternative proposal today banning both.
The
General Assembly will decide in August whether to begin negotiations on
a
treaty.
The treaty drafting process is
expected to take
years,
and all 189 U.N. member-nations are free to participate in the special
committee's
deliberations.
March 7 2002
A Chinese scientist claims to have leapt ahead of western scientists by
cloning a human embryo in 1999.
Lu Guangxiu, of Xiangya medical
college in the
south-eastern
city of Changsha, says she and her team have since grown cloned human
embryos
to the stage where stem cells could be harvested and then cultured.
Professor
Lu's
work, reported in the Wall
Street Journal, has
not
been subject to peer review - the usual form of scientific scrutiny -
by
scientists outside China. However she has published a paper in a
Chinese journal.
Alongside her research, Prof Lu
runs an IVF
clinic. Access to human embryos and human eggs is a prerequisite of
stem cell and cloning research. Her aim is to use early stage cloned
embyros to create a
line of embryonic stem
cells. These would ultimately be
a resource from
which
to culture spare parts for transplant. The point of cloning in this
case
- therapeutic cloning, as it is sometimes called - is to avoid
rejection of
the transplant by cloning the cells from the host's own body.
Labs around the world have
produced human
embryonic stem cell lines from surplus IVF embryos, but none has yet
cloned a human embryo.
Prof Lu said that they had
achieved more success
with
a new technique: injecting the donor DNA into the egg, leaving it for a
time,
and then removing the egg DNA. The Chinese scientists speculated that
this
gave the
chemical signals in the egg a
better chance to
"reprogramme"
the adult DNA so that it reverted to its embryonic state.
As described, however, the
procedure remains
enormously
unreliable and wasteful with donated eggs. Only 5% of the embryos which
were
cloned in Prof Lu's lab develop to the blastocyst stage. Not only that,
the
cloned,
harvested stem cells die after
dividing for a
short
time, instead of dividing indefinitely.
They had initially based their
cloning on the
technique
described by Ian Wilmut and colleagues from the
Roslin Institute, near
Edinburgh, after those
scientists
cloned Dolly the sheep in 1997. This involves removing the DNA-carrying
nucleus
of an egg, injecting DNA from an adult cell into the hollowed-out
space,
and applying a
tiny jolt of electricity to fuse
cell and nucleus
together.
However this method produced few embryos living long enough to grow to
blastocysts,
the ball of a couple of hundred cells from which stem cells can be
harvested.
(Source: The Guardian, By James
Meek, March 7
2002)
A Melbourne company plans to
begin creating
cloned human
embryos as a source of stem cells for research later this year after
securing
exclusive worldwide rights to the controversial technology.
The announcement followed a
Chinese scientist's
claim
that she had created dozens of cloned human embryos and harvested stem
cells
using a technique the Melbourne company, Stem Cell Sciences, helped
develop
in animals. "We are delighted that the discoveries made here in
Australia
(in mice) appear to have now been validated in the human system," said
Peter
Mountford, Stem Cell Sciences' chief executive.
At the time of the Melbourne
research, all
existing human stem cells had been harvested from excess IVF embryos.
The Chinese team has not
published its results in
a
scientific journal. Professor Lu Guangxiu, who runs an IVF clinic, told
The
Wall Street Journal that only 5 per cent of the cloned embryos had
survived
to the 200-cell
stage, when stem cells could be
harvested.
(Source: The Age, By Deborah Smith, March 8 2002)
August
2002:The latest edition of the journal Cloning and
Stem Cells
documents deaths and deformities suffered by cloned pigs at the
University of Missouri and Texas A&M.
The University of Missouri study, entitled "Phenotyping of Transgenic
Cloned
Pigs," cites "a high mortality rate among cloned piglets." Out of 10
born,
five died or were destroyed by researchers due to defects such as heart
failure,
lameness, and anemia. The Texas A&M study, entitled"A Highly
Efficient
Method for Porcine Cloning by Nuclear Transfer Using In
Vitro - Matured Oocytes," documents a 94 percent failure rate. Out of
the
511 manipulated oocytes transferred, only 28 pigs came to term, one of
which
was still born. Additionally, "another of the 28 piglets was born
lacking
an anus and tail," a fatal condition called anal atresia. The study
suggests
that the deformity may have been introduced through the cloning
process.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/020813/180/214go.html
"Cc"
Cloned kitten - a cute PR item no doubt, but cats
reproduce readily anyway!
What has not been so readily reported in media is that the
two-month-old kitten
named Cc: is the only surviving animal of 87
kitten embryos created by cloning. The experiment by researchers at the
Texas
A & M University published in the Nature journal reports that the
87
cloned embryos were transferred into eight recipients, resulting in one
failed
pregnancy and one live clone. "This is comparable to the success rates
obtained
for other cloned species" says the report.
See the full report in Nature at:
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/vaop/ncurren
t/full/nature723_fs.html **
2001
Campaign for Responsible
Transplantation reports(8th Oct 2000) that researchers have put
human nucleii into pig cells,
and grown 2 living embryos to the 32 cell stage - what for, and what
would
the 3% of DNA from the animal do to the resulting human hybrid? See the
Sunday
Times pig/human
hybrid
report
The horror of such experiments even
being
allowed and
attempted shows the great need for bioethics and legislation
preventing
human cloning.
http://www.globalchange.com/clonenews.htm
Books
Kass, Leon R, and Wilson, James Q “Ethics of Cloning” ISBN
0844740500
Andrew Kimbrell, Bernard Nathanson “The Human Body Shop : The Cloning, Engineering, and Marketing of Life” Amazon Price: $11.96 Paperback - 349 pages 2nd edition (1998) Regnery Publishing, Inc.; ISBN: 0895264188
“The Human Cloning Debate,” edited by MSNBC.com Breaking Bioethics
columnist Glenn McGee, Ph.D.,
the first book to present Ian Wilmut's (the scientist who produced
"Dolly"
the sheep) thoughts on the troubling ramifications of this technology,
along
with essays by experts who explore the history of cloning, ethical
issues
and future possibilities
Keane, Eamonn "The Brave New World of Therapeutic Cloning" order from PERI PO Box 907 Broadway NSW 2007 $6
Quotable quotes:
"Usually, terrible things that are done with the
excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but
just terrible things." American philosopher Russell Baker