deep said:
Wake Up, Cloning's Day Has Come
By Michael Shermer
January 2 2003
In the interest of assuaging these and other fears, I propose the Three Laws of Cloning.
* A human clone is a human being no less unique in his or her personhood than an identical twin.
* A human clone is a human being with all the rights and privileges that accompany this legal and moral status.
* A human clone is a human being to be accorded the dignity and respect due any member of our species.
Instead of restricting or banning cloning, I propose that we adopt the Three Laws of Cloning.
The soul of science is found in courageous thought and creative experiment, not in restrictive fear and prohibitions. For science to progress it must be given the opportunity to succeed or fail.
Let's run the cloning experiment and see what happens.
Dolly Creator Denounces Sect's Clone Claims
LONDON (Reuters) - Human clones are likely to be unhealthy and such experiments should be banned, the head of the institute that created Dolly the sheep said on Saturday, hours after a cult said it had produced the second cloned baby.
Harry Griffin of the Roslin Institute in Scotland, which made history by cloning Dolly from an adult sheep in 1996, told Reuters the claims by Clonaid, a group linked to the UFO-obsessed Raelian religious sect, were probably bogus.
"Clonaid have made claims of two births, but of yet provided no evidence that either baby exists, no evidence from DNA tests, and as yet, therefore, there is no reason to believe this is anything other than a long, drawn out publicity stunt."
But if cloned babies have been produced, the experiments should be stopped, Griffin said.
"I think its entirely unacceptable for groups like Clonaid to be gambling with the health of children," he said.
Griffin said Clonaid's claim of a high success rate in its human cloning experiment flew in the face of years of research into cloning in other species.
"There is a lot about this story that doesn't ring true. Success rates in every other species that have been cloned have been low, with lots of problems for the fetus and newborn clone," he said.
"Attempts to clone monkeys have been entirely unsuccessful and the sort of successes claimed by Clonaid are totally at odds with all past history of cloning other species."
Dolly the sheep is still alive but suffers from severe arthritis. Griffin said scientists are unsure whether her health problems are a result of her being a clone, but countless other experiments have shown that clones are often unhealthy.
"There is a whole raft of serious physiological deformities reported in clones, and even in entirely healthy animals its not entirely clear they are normal," he said.
The process of cloning involves taking the genes of an adult -- the instructions for life that make every organism unique -- and transferring them into an embryo, turning it into a genetic twin of the original.
But Griffin said that although the clone has the same genes as the adult, there can be differences between the way genes behave, which often means the embryos of clones cannot grow to term, die shortly after birth or live crippled by disease.
"You've got to persuade the 40,000 genes in that cell to stop behaving as if they are in a mammary gland cell, or a skin cell or whatever, and start behaving as if they are in an embryo," he said.
"We don't know how this reprogramming takes place. One, several or more of the genes can be inappropriately expressed."
Often cloned embryos do not survive to produce a live birth. Sometimes clones die shortly after birth, and other times they develop serious health problems later in life, he said.
"All these things have been reported in the clones of cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, mice, rabbits. And there's no reason to believe that similar problems will not arise in the cloning of a child," he said.
and stick to fact and threads about U2.
