[Skywalk]

Mr. Schulman,

Thank you for posting this. I wholeheartedly agree with you on this issue.

Never before have I seen such hatred for science and irrational fear dominate the mainstream. It seems like the only science fiction people are consulting is Attack of the Clones. Of course, we're nowhere near being able to breed and train thousands or millions of clones for an army and in a world where that is possible, we'll have other very important concerns. It also is quite obvious that if a Hitler or Stalin were in power and could deter an attack, they would breed such an army ANYWAY, despite silly international debates about the matter.

I am quite upset when I think of the millions of people that would be sentenced to die so that some politician can assuage his or the public's fear of a technological breakthrough. I see, it's OK to have weapons that can annihilate millions of people, but it's not OK to even research duplicating human genetic material.

Outlaws and rogue states will do as rogue states and outlaws do, banning cloning only helps them. I'm still trying to see where the fear is coming from on this issue. I think, sadly, it boils down to two things:

1)Fear of clone armies--really, I think this is the main fear, sadly.

2)People having too much "choice" with life. Just as there are people who don't think you should get plastic surgery EVER, even if you were born with a misshapen nose, there will be those who think we must "accept" whatever fate assigned to us by the Creator. This ignores the fact that nearly every aspect of modern civilization is a refusal to accept our original fates.

[playball0]

I agree that politicians score low in the thinking things out catagory. Cloning an adult to create a genetically exact person seems wrong and evolutionarily dangerous.

Cloning an organ when needed makes sense. Storing stem cells makes sense. Creating a cloned person to create an organ donor is not acceptable.

[IYAS9YAS]

In other countries, people are murdered to cannibalize their organs and sell them to the highest bidder on the black market.

BS meter on high...what about blood-typing, organ matching, transport, storage, operating facilities, willing doctors? If I have the bucks for this, am I really gonna have them kidnap a local and swipe his kidney?

[Poohbah]

The problem with "cloning organs" is that the only foreseeable technique for doing so is to create a human being solely for having a ready supply of spares.

What about that person's rights? "Sorry, X-110-56-3764, we need your liver. A real human being has priority over a spare parts bin."

[John Lenin]

It will be the beginning of the end. Put anything you want to in the middle, the ending will horrific.

[coydog]

Good to see you here! It's Monique, remember me? :-)

[proud American in Canada]

bump for later reading....

[mtbopfuyn]

I was with you until you dropped that adoption bs. I'm going out on a limb here and *assume* you don't know squat about adoptions (yeah, yeah, can't wait for the required reply that you come from a long line of adoptees). Getting the gene mix just right for the second generation Beethoven is not guaranteed through the natural process.

You stated, "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. Hogwash! The same could be said about bio parents. About all bio parents can hope for is the kid inherits some semblance of Aunt Gertie's petite button nose rather than grandpappy's honker.

In case you haven't suspected, we have an adopted child. We're thankful the great medical profession couldn't find the problem with the natural way, because we probably would have created who knows what and we wouldn't have found our child. Yes, OUR child. Call it a cosmic blip or her guardian angel was a doofus, but this child couldn't be a better product of our family tree. You tell me why she's the spitting image of my granny and has her likes and mannerisms to the point of humming the same little made up ditties never mind granny died before this child was born. Even the family naysayers are convinced there's been a reincarnation. I've seen other adoptive kids who have the same physical characteristics as their adoptive parents and bio kids who looked more like the mailman.

BTW, back to your musical genius scenario. Just throwing out suppositions, but I imagine adoptive parents are more willing to and encourage their children to explore their true gifts and potentials more than bio parents who have preconceived notions of which instrument little Johnny must play.

To add my .02 to the cloning issue: cloned organs - ok, cloned humans - ok since I agree with you that they wouldn't be any more alike than twins and even less so because the clone would be growing up in a new era.

[Mr. Silverback]

ProLife Ping! If anyone wants on or off my ProLife Ping List, please notify me here or by freepmail.

[Frapster]

so - if we make a clone for organ transplants how is that not cannibalism?

[G. Stolyarov II]

Dear Mr. Schulman,

This is one of the most ingenious works in defense of cloning I have ever read. It is even on par with my own essay on the matter at http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Morality_of_Cloning.html. As such, I would like to non-commercially reprint it on my online publication, The Rational Argumentator, a journal advocating the Western principles of Reason, Rights, and Progress, at http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/index.html.

As a supplement to the article, I would also like to reprint Mr. Skywalk's insightful comment concerning cloning and the fear that "it might fall into the wrong hands." Mr. Skywalk, yours was a thought-provoking and absolutely logical response to what amounts today to a public scare. Please also grant your permission for this reprint.

I await your responses via Free Republic Mail, with any additional biographical and contact information that you may wish to include on The Rational Argumentator.

I am
G. Stolyarov II

[BearArms]

It’s a theologically debatable question whether embryos have souls. Some religious traditions maintain that a soul does not even enter a human body until the baby takes its first breath.

This is an ultimately irrelevant point, since the consequences of human cloning reach far beyond the embryonic stage. No one has the right to torture another living being. And that is exactly what you will do if you attempt to clone a human with current cloning technology. In the attempt to gestate a single clone successfully through to full term, for example, many fetuses will malform in utero and will probably be aborted - many at stages of development when they can experience pain.

Those deformed babies who are not aborted will most likely live shortened, incomplete lives in various forms of pain and anguish. To support allowing someone to perpetrate such a selfish, cruel act in the name of their "reproductive rights" is barbarism.

[boris]

Impossible to outlaw it; you can suppress it in the U.S.; it will move overseas. A technology whose time has come gets used. Period.

======================

I used to hang out on alt.sci.nanotech. Someone asked for the 'darkest possible uses' of nanotechnology the participants could imagine. I flippantly responded (thinking the moderator would prevent it):

"I plan to release a self-replicating nanobot that will convert every single human being on Earth (except me) into clones of Kathy Ireland. This may sound distressing to you but eventually you'll learn to accept it."

To my amazement he let it be posted.

There was this -shocked- silence for a few internet beats...

--Boris

[phroebe]

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".

Mother Nature is funny this way, and these things happen far more often than you probably think. This particular excerpt hit me rather personally. I am a musician, and have worked over the decades playing in orchestras which have included many musician couples. Sometimes, a child of such unions follows in the parental footsteps, but more often not. Of two couples I can think of who had 5 and 6 children respectively, not one of the 11 had more than a dabbling interest in music, let alone pursuing it as a career. Of all the offspring I can think of from some 25-odd couples I've known where both parents were musicians, only about three that I'm aware of are still actively musicians today, and a small handful of others stuck with music lessons beyond high school and sometimes still play at an amateur level. A wide range of occupations and diverse talents are represented by the rest. Two other musician couples I knew, incidentally, gave birth to deaf children.

I would bet that with musicians of as reknowned stature as Joshua Bell, a similar, seemingly random pattern is evident.

Oh yes, my "altered" version of your first sentence, by the way, describes me to a tee. My parents saw no value in music lessons for me at age four, because I had no exposure to any musical instrument till age eight, at school. But when that happened, there was absolutely no turning back. I brought music home and "introduced" it to my tin-ear parents, who were left wondering whose kid could have got switched with theirs at the hospital. (I look too much like them for that to be a possibility, though!)

[syriacus]

Some clones seem somewhat less than clonish. The outlaws might not get the results they intended.

---

April 2003 issue. Scientific American

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000DE213-6B0F-1E61-A98A809EC5880105&pageNumber=1&catID=2

Ma's Eyes, Not Her Ways

Clones can vary in behavioral--and physical--traits

By Carol Ezzell


One pig savors a ripe banana, whereas its cloned sister turns up its snout. Another always thrashes its trotters to get away when it is picked up, whereas the others nuzzle into a human embrace. Although clones have been described as identical twins, studies of the behavioral--and even physical--traits of cloned animals are showing that that is not necessarily the case.

Ted Friend and Greg Archer of Texas A&M University created the cloned piglets. They observed as much physical and behavioral variation among the members of two litters of cloned pigs (of four and five individuals, respectively) as among those of two litters of eight pigs bred naturally. Not only did the cloned siblings show distinct food preferences and temperaments, but they also varied in physical characteristics: some had more bristly coats or fewer teeth than others did.

The clones are "just like normal pigs," Friend concludes. "They're not at all like identical twins." Conditions in the uterus could play a role, he speculates. The two cloned litters were borne by different surrogate sows, and the dissimilarities are even more pronounced between the litters....[continued. Sorry. I read the article at the doctor's office the other day, but cannot access the entire digital version online without paying]