When Clones Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Clones

Sierra Times ^ | April 24, 2003 | J. Neil Schulman

[J. Neil Schulman]

phroebe wrote:

"If a child with natural musical gifts is adopted by a family that sees no value in spending money on violin lessons for a four-year-old, we could lose the next Joshua Bell. Likewise, if a family of violin virtuosos adopts a child from a non-musical family, forcing a musical education on a child without the natural gifts to benefit from it may prove both frustrating for the parents and psychologically damaging to the child, whose true gifts may reside elsewhere, undiscovered.

"Funny, and I think futile, argument. In the first sentence, try substituting the words 'adopted by' with 'born to.' In the second, replace 'adopts' with 'produces,' and 'a child from a non-musical family' with 'a non-musical child.'"

Genetic traits, or clusters of them, can be dominant or recessive. If you breed racehorses, it doesn't mean every foal is a sure Triple Crown champion. But without that selective breeding, you're extremely unlikely to get one.

Traits run in families. I suggest you look up in musical catalogs the compositions from the children of J.S. Bach. Or look up the Barrymore family, or the Fondas.

If Grandpa was a virtuoso violinist, you're much likelier to get those crucial violin lessons before age five, when the muscles and bones of the fingers are most malleable and the neural pathways are most easily canalized, than if through mischance you find yourself growing up in a family of electrical engineers with no institutional memory of your violinist grandfather.

[MHGinTN]

Poor syllogistic flow. You asserted: With this definition, you've ruled out any multiplication of any human cells at all, including adult stem cells, adult organ cells, and the cells from underneath your toenails - any experiment that involves replicating any human cells in any sort of artificial way is rendered out of bounds by your sweepingly broad definition here.... I did not rule out 'any manipulations of ANY human cells at all'. If you go back and read what I posted originally, I happened to mention: 'Science may one day be able to reproduce a part of the whole organism, as in growing only a kidney that is a perfect tissue match for the individual from whom the genetic nuclear material is taken; that would be an embraceable medical miracle.'

Perhaps the confusion is over when I define an individual human being as existing, and the differentiation of organ and organism. I attempted to explain that an embryo is already an individual human being, else the many tests performed prior to birth would be too generic if not done on the assumption that the organism being tested is already the oirganism to be presented at birth. The organism is being tested for anomalies. The organism that is you was already you when you implanted your life in the uterine lining of your Mother. You did that. You sent the chemical messages out that manipulated your Mother's womb environment, to accomplish your implantation. You have gone through many changes during your lifetime, but you were always you during those many changes.

Stem cells are the organs of the embryo. Toenails are tissue of the organism. A kidney is an organ within the organism. The embryo is an organism. The stem cell of an embryo is an organ of the embryonic organism.

[phroebe]

Traits run in families. I suggest you look up in musical catalogs the compositions from the children of J.S. Bach.

That being my line, I already know all about the Bachs. However, I thought you'd be at least somewhat interested in hearing the personal observations of a jaded old unspectacular working stiff musician who has been around the Bach, er, Bloch, a few times, rather than pointing to a noteworthy famous example we've all heard of.

If Grandpa was a virtuoso violinist, you're much likelier to get those crucial violin lessons before age five, when the muscles and bones of the fingers are most malleable and the neural pathways are most easily canalized, than if through mischance you find yourself growing up in a family of electrical engineers with no institutional memory of your violinist grandfather.

Ditto my previous comments. I grew up around all four of my grandparents, who all told us kids about life in their respective families while growing up. As it happens, even today, my "engineer father" is still the self-appointed proud family historian, and has made it his hobby and passion to draw up detailed genealogies and histories going back at least 5 generations. If anyone would know of any "virtuoso anybody anything" in the family tree, he would. There just aren't any. Yet despite the mutation, I got to be pretty decent; good enough to make a living. ;)

[J. Neil Schulman]

Motherbear wrote, "Ummmm.....excuse me, but you are the one who brought up the early church fathers. 'Many?'"

Aquinas and Augustine good enough for you?

You wrote, "And it's a BIG stretch to say that God knew my soul before my soul entered my flesh."

You can find that debated in the Summa Theologica by Saint Thomas Aquinas. It's on the web at http://www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/FP/FP090.html .

You continued, "Tell me, are there just billions of souls just sitting up there waiting to enter flesh? I don't think so! While my flesh was soul-less, my soul was somewhere else for God to know? He just didn't get around to putting my soul inside my body. Me thinks that argument is a bit of a stretch because you don't want to read the plain sense of the words. I don't know of any major Christian religion that teaches that my soul is waiting somewhere else before I take my first breath."

Fine, I'm a heretic. Put me on the rack, why don't you?

[J. Neil Schulman]

phroebe wrote: "I thought you'd be at least somewhat interested in hearing the personal observations of a jaded old unspectacular working stiff musician who has been around the Bach, er, Bloch, a few times, rather than pointing to a noteworthy famous example we've all heard of."

Well, likewise, I know something about this from personal experience, too. Check out http://www.pulpless.com/jneil/memoriam.html on my website.

[J. Neil Schulman]

Motherbear wrote, "Seriously, though, do you know of any major Christian religion that teaches that our souls are just waiting, getting to know God somewhere out there, while our human bodies are growing inside our wombs?"

You bet. But I'm not going there.

[phroebe]

How very cool, thanks for that! A small part of me envies you, or at least wishes I had had someone similar in my family whom I could talk to when I was young, or who could understand me. I love my dad, but it was hard to have nothing but family members who were clueless, listening to me practice and trying to imitate my teacher and say "that is flat!" when I was sharp. Or worse, asking, "Don't you think you've been doing that enough today?"

But naaaah, if there'd been the pressure of an actual virtuoso in the family, I'd probably have rebelled and ended up being something boring, like a geologist... :-/

[MattAMiller]

I'm not really sure what the point of a clone army would be. You'd have to wait 18 years to have it, and you'd have to enlist hundreds of thousands of surrogate mothers. Even then you have no guarentee they're going to turn out any better than an non-clone army.

[phroebe]

God knows us before we are born (or even before we are conceived, or before our parents met) because God knows all things before they happen. Now, to this business about souls - I have always though it wrong to say people "have" souls; but rather we "are" souls. I don't think that a soul "floats around out there" at any time prior to our existence, but rather it is a part of the developmental continuum, sort of like the formation of organs and tissues, heartbeat, etc. We can't say with 100% certainty when the exact moment the soul is formed or becomes "alive", if you will, because it is an immaterial part of us that science cannot look at and put its finger on. But the Bible does tend to hint that drawing the first breath is intimately tied with the commencement of earthly life, starting from Adam.

[general_re]

Nah. You said something along the lines of stimulating mitosis in diploid cells was creating potential individuality, or something to that effect. Well, diploid cells are pretty much all we've got to work with, so by that definition, I'm essentially toying with human life by, say, causing skin cells to replicate in the lab. Needless to say, any definition of "human life" that stretches out that far is going to wind up creating some perverse effects - your tonsils have a full complement of diploid cells, some of which may even manage to replicate just after being removed from your throat. But if and when that happens, if it hasn't already, I don't really think you'll be planning a funeral for the tragic loss of potential human life that your tonsils represent.

Stem cells are the organs of the embryo. Toenails are tissue of the organism. A kidney is an organ within the organism.

Just because a thing is differentiated into various substructures and organs and parts doesn't make it an organism unto itself, and certainly doesn't make it an embryo. The front end of your large intestine is remarkably different from the back end, but that doesn't make your large intestine an organism unto itself. Every one of your cells is composed of specialized parts and structures and organelles - not one of them is capable of ever surviving on its own. The fact that parthenotes have undergone some differentiation from cells that are akin to stem cells does not make them embryos. Whether embryonic me was me all along is neither here nor there - with parthenotes, there's nobody at home, and there's never going to be anybody at home.

[Poohbah]

How do we get to the point where we can reliably produce only parts if this area of research is off-limits?

I was speaking of doing it with human beings. Animals are different.

[Poohbah]

That you can't foresee alternative techniques doesn't mean others also can not. Some people have more imagination than others. Look to the high end of the imagination bell curve.

Maybe I didn't make myself clear.

The "alternative techniques" you describe are on the same firm scientific footing as polywater, cold fusion, and unobtanium.

[J. Neil Schulman]

Poohbah wrote: "The 'alternative techniques' you describe are on the same firm scientific footing as polywater, cold fusion, and unobtanium."

If one can grow a human ear on a mouse, then one can eventually grow a cloned organ in a wide variety of environments, including on animals, within humans, and in vitro. If you have trouble imagining this, I suggest you look up the word "serendipity."

[Poohbah]

If one can stick a piece of cartilage on a mouse, that's a HELL of a long ways away from growing organs that do complex things.

[general_re]

Okay, gotcha - so we should push the research as far as we can with animal subjects, before trying techniques on human subjects. That seems reasonable enough, but the first time you try anything with human genes or human subjects, there's still going to be some risk, although hopefully a very small one.

[MHGinTN]

Just because a thing is differentiated into various substructures and organs and parts doesn't make it an organism unto itself, and certainly doesn't make it an embryo. Let me be very clear on this point, IT DOES MEAN THAT IS AN INDIVIDUAL, DUDE! IT differentiates those organs and substructures and parts of itself, of its self, its individual body. Taking a haploid cell and stimulating it to reproduce copies of the single cell isn't conceiving an embryonic individual human life. Taking a female ovum with the full complement of 46 chromosomes and electrically stimulating that cell to form an embryonic individual female duplicate of the parent donor is cloning a duplicate individual human life, albeit a likley severely handicapped individual being. That is the point over which we likely disagree: I don't define an embryo as a 'potential' individual, I define that embryo as THE individual in embryo age along the continuum of an individual human being's lifetime begun at the conception; I view any conceiving of an embryonic individual to be experimenting with an individual human being at embryo age for that individual human being.

[general_re]

So then if this is done via haploid parthenogenesis, which it very likely is, then you don't have a problem with it?