[Jabberwocky]

For Humanities we have to read "Brave New World" and "Brave New World Revisited" Then my constitution class recieved our last project... It has to do about Bills being reviewed now in Congress. Anyways I'm doing mine over the banning of human cloning, which is the way humans reproduce in the books above. I can see from both sides of this matter. So I'm a tad stuck with which way to go with it. There's really good points on both sides.

I respect your guys opionion (there are a few I wonder about), and was wondering if you can give me your side to how you feel about human cloning.

If you've read either of the books I had mentioned do you think cloning would just bring us another step closer to a society like in the book?

[Staff Sarge]

Cloning?

I thought this was an Iron Maiden thread. The album simply rocks.

[Jabberwocky]

How come anytime I post something someone thinks it's some kind of music related or new release?

[Jezebel]

Personally I completely disagree with cloning humans. I feel like that is the sort of technology that eventually turns up in the wrong hands and ends up causing MAJOR problems. I've heard stories that they will clone "soulless" human bodies simply to harvest their organs for transplants. Basically that they will grow living bodies that can't do anything except grow organs. I just don't believe that a human body, even if produced in a lab isn't a human body. It's sort of disturbing to me that scientists feel that can take a potential living person and use them for nothing more than a vessel. *shudders* And of course with cloning comes the whole issue of people suddenly being able to choose what their children look/act like before they are born. How fun... I get to pick my child out of a catalog. Gee, this is better than the mall! Technology is getting stronger by the minute but morals and common sense are going down the drain if you ask me

That's not to say I don't agree with cloning individual organs, I think that would be wonderful. But honestly, what's the point in cloning a person? Just cause you always wanted a twin sister or something? I feel like people should always have the basic right of being conceived naturally. If they are cloned then they are nothing more than an experiment in a petri dish. What a depressing background.

My thoughts anyway!

Beth

[Chris]

I don't think cloning humans is the point of harvest the organs. I think the point is if we can clone a human, we can clone ANYTHING. Which means cloning JUST hearts or just legs or fingers or skin. Wouldn't it be great if you lost your leg in accident and the doctors said, no problem, we'll have a leg cloned for you in 48 hours and you'll be walking in a week?

That is where I see cloning going. Plus we will be able to clone animals, plants, etc. To be able not worry about world hunger anymore will be worth it all together.

It will help us explore outer regions of the solar systems, to cloan animals in a space craft and send people hundreds of years away from earth with generations and generations of years with them, just because of cloning their food.

I don't think it will be like "Soldier" where the army just cloned people for army purposes. I read an article where the army don't even want humans in combat anymore. They make mistakes and get confused, and get scared. They are already at AI stages that could boggle your mind, and would rather have robotics in combat and searching, because they don't have those emotions to confuse them.

[Chris]

If we can clone at DNA level though, we can weed out defects, from the strand level. Plus it will be all trial and error on that level till we get it right of course. Them cloning a leg (for example) and it having a defect, then taking one strand of DNA out and cloning it again and seeing if the defect is corrected. It will take time to learn more and more about DNA, but DNA is the beginning of life and defects, so in time the "Cure" for all diseases will be here.

So I don't see a problem there.

I don't think EVERY time we acted God like it has been disasterious. Weapon wise yes, but we have hospitals every day reviving people that have been dead for 1 - 2 - 3 minutes, ask the family members if they regret that the doctor acted god like to bring son, mother, father, daughter back to life...

And if you think cloning boggles your mind, what if your wife just gave birth and the baby dies 2 minutes afterwards? What could that baby have achieved in her/his lifetime. What if the doctor said he could take a tissue sample and revive it in cloning? Would you agree or wait another 9months? A male might not agree, but the female? After all that nurturing, weight gain, pain? It makes you think.

[Affected]

http://www.spectator.org/archives/0104TAS/bethell0104.htm

An interesting read, that.

[quote]One gene leads to many different protein products that can change dramatically once they are produced. We know that some of the regions that are not genes may be some of the keys to the complexity that we see in ourselves. We now know that the environment acting on our biological steps may be as important in making us what we are as our genetic code.[/quote}

[ April 27, 2001: Message edited by: Affected ]

[aquamire]

Like or not folks, the genie is out of the bottle. We can make it illegal, but that doesnt make it impossible. I think we need to start focussing on what if someone does clone a human, and how to deal with that. Because it will happen.

Also, the public is hugely mislead as to how cloning actually works. So many people either think a clone will be exactly like its counterpart, or that a clone would have no soul. A clone is pretty much a twin.. only in all likeness, twins share more common dna than clones do.

Do you have any idea how messy cloning is today? They take the dna and fuse it with the egg (from my understanding, could be wrong) by shocking the two with electricity. It is only by CHANCE that you get something that even resembles the cloned subject, if it even lives! Now cloning animals is hard enough.. and so far most animals that have been cloned are suffering from a multitude of health inflictions.

To clone a human being you'd pretty much have to go through several hundred featus's before anything was born, and even then, think of the screw ups possible!! Jeez, you think anti-abortionists are pissed now, think about the losses of several hundred fetus's.

It's hard to clone now, but it wont be with time. All though laws may prohibit cloning, some company is going to do it for the right amount of cash and time. We need to learn how to deal with that.

[KrassOtti]

Well, the cloning in Brave New World isn't the major point in the book. Actually it's sorta minor. The main part of it is that society is conditioned into being an Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta or Epsilon.

The way Brave New World describes the future is actually pretty good. There are no problems in the world and due to the conditioning everyone is happy. Even the lowly Epsilon is as happy as the Alpha. But you would have to be born into that kinda society, I for one would not like to give up my individuality, but if I am born in that society and I don't know better, than who cares?

[KrassOtti]

Oh and on the topic of cloning: It could give as a way to test out drugs and stuff on actual humans rather than on rats and the likes. A cloned human couldn'nt really be considered a human being. It's just an unnatural replica of another one, and thus could be abused for medical purposes.

But I am sure there are enough people against that


Or we could clone humans for food! YUMMY!

[Jabberwocky]

aquamire: Sorry to point this out but you are a little late a clone (human) has been created already. 2 month old baby.

Next question. How do you feel about abortions? Dolly took over 277 tries to create? Humans are more complex what if they are born with a defect killed and tried again? Is that an abortion? The government (in some countries) will human clone until about 14 weeks then it has to be teminated... is that an abortion too?

KrassOtti - What about cruel and unusual punishment? How do we know they don't have a soul? We don't know what gives a soul so how can we say they don't have one? I know cloning wasn't a big part of the book, but it was part. Read Brave New World Revisited and he gets more into cloning. Two chapters worth.

Chris - "Human beings were created in the image of God, but in the Bible, every time they tried to overreach and to achieve equality with God or play God, it led to disaster (Genesis 3:5, 11:4 et al)... and I have similar statements for about 4 other religions. The Bible is even contradicting on the subject!

See I can see both sides. I have looked at the sides you guys have said and get just as good other side.

My freshman year in Debate one of my cases was that we should clone people have them run on big hamster wheels to create enegry. They die we create more! I won 3 times with that case.

[Ragnarok]

I agree with Chris here.

And about chosing how your son will be is related with the human genoma, not cloning, although in biology almost everything can be related.
But by cloning you will get a human looking the same as you, which is not chosing anything really =)
Unless you get someone else to do a clone for you, but one day he may want to get it back

[Jabberwocky]

So most of you are going for the partical cloning.
A full human cloning would cause the physical health of the general population will show no improvement, and may even deteriorate. With healthiness decline intelligence will decline too. Think about the poor child... how many of us really want to look like our parents?

On the other hand in the Bible God created Eve from Adam with no sexual reproduction. Then again maybe cloning is a God thing and every time in the Bible we've tried to be more God like we've met disater.

It's things like this I can see both sides. Partical will allow people to live longer cause death rate to decline - birth rate will rise, and the world's carrying capasity will be reached in about 60 years and poor genetics that should die out with survival of the fittest are living and being reproduced... Ummmm.

And if we clone parts from the same DNA as the person who's to say it won't have the same problems?

See where I'm stumped?

[aquamire]

Jabbewocky, where did you here there's a 2 month year old human clone? I haven't heard a thing about that.. I know they got as far as a human embryo, but thats about it.

KrassOtti, okay, so lets say you were born as a twin. Twins and clones are pretty similar in terms of science. Would it be right for your clone, or perhaps even you to be tested on so the other one could be stronger and live a healthier life?

Also, the people in Brave New World may of thought they were happy, but they lacked free will not to mention were highly ignorant. Thats great until you discover your really a prisoner, and you realize that you have freedom of choice and a society is trying to suppress that freedom. It's the popular question of whether ignorance is bliss is better than knowing the truth.

[Jabberwocky]

aquamire I read it in an artical in a magazine (about the 2 month old) About Clonaid founder's clone child. One said it was on the way another said it had happened. And in Brave New World they were drugged to believe they were happy, but they didn't have to take the medication. So they had some choice (free will). Drugs make everything better!

This is a tad funny...

quote:

---

Clonaid, the first human cloning company in the world, was founded in February 1997 by RA�L and a group of investors who created the Valiant Venture Ltd corporation based in the Bahamas. RA�L is the leader of the Raelian Movement, an international religious organization which claims that life on Earth was created scientifically through DNA and genetic engineering by a human extraterrestrial race whose name, ELOHIM, is found in the Hebrew Bible and was mistranslated by the word "God". The Raelian Movement also claims that Jesus was resurrected through an advanced cloning technique performed by the ELOHIM.

---

I think that that might give enough reason not to clone...

[ April 28, 2001: Message edited by: Jabberwocky ]

[sacrelicious]

Finally I have a name for my religious beliefs! I am a Raelian!

[Ian]

OOh. I started one of these I while back. Not nearly as many replies though...
http://www.sijun.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=001317

[Chris]

This is exactly why I hate to bring religion into a conversation.

First off your quoting something that is over 2000 years old. Things change in that time, damn, things change in 10 years.

And it is like your didn't read my post. Do doctors alone not perform god duties when they help the injured and sick? Hmm....I forgot, what did jesus do? Oh yeah, help the injured and sick (in the fictional book)....wierd..

Plus it isn't like quoting the bible makes your point. I mean the bible isn't even a real thing, it is like me quoting a scene from a movie or tv show.

And if you really look at it, you can see that the bible started out with one sentence, then when someone proved that sentence wrong, the people writing it wrote another sentence to make the first sentence seem right again, and so on and so on. So here we are 2000 years later, with a book that has a comeback for everything and everybody who tries to prove it wrong.

BTW, Jesus was a real person, but he was a con-artist with people to trick other people just like in todays world. He made a blind man see again? heh...that is very easy to fake, it is just without the lights and stage like todays preachers have.

And when they found out he was conning them, they killed him, but people didn't want to believe that he was a fake, so they started a book to portray the belief of his miracles and that is your Jesus, and other characters just spawned off that when they got a hold of the book and added stories about them meeting this god and added it to the "Bible".

Don't mean to be blunt, but just wanted you to know the truth.....

[KrassOtti]

Aquamire: Well, I see it this way: The clone is not meant to be. It is an artificial produced product and not a natural twin.

I am not saying testing on anything, whether human or animal, is a good thing. But right now we breed rats to test on them. If we would breed humans to test on them, what's the difference?

The biggest problem for me with that kinda thing is that nobody knows what is going to happen after death. Will the clone that we abused after its death still remember what happened, or is everything erased? We don't know, but if the clone can indeed remember what happened, than that really sucks.

Though I believe that death is like a sleep with no dreams that you never awake from, but I can be wrong...


About that freedom in Brave New World. With proper conditioning they never realize that they are prisoners. I think there was only this one weirdo who was wrongly conditioned or something [he was left too long with too much alchohol or something in the cloning chamber or something like that] who realized that everybody is just a prisoner...

[Impaler]

The only problems i could see arising from it is:

If you have sex with your clone, is it masturbation? What if you have a child with a clone of yours that's of the opposite sex (it's possible)? You would be your own spouse, father and mother. It keeps going and going.

[the_monkey]

brave new world rocked.

the thing that is depressing about this whole tampering with a childs outcome is this; in brave new world, they pre-destined and assigned roles in society to kids. so if we start screwing around with genomes, and changing the natural outcome of a child then we are not that much different than huxleys society.