Maybe we're not quite ready for the Brave New World afterall.

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Scientists warn of the dangers of cloning humans

WASHINGTON, March 31 (AFP) - Yahoo

A group of well-known scientists has embarked on a crusade against human cloning, a procedure that had a staggeringly high failure rate when conducted on animals and which, even if it were to overcome the incredible odds, would rear a race of severely deformed and mentally impaired children, they say.

Testifying this week before a congressional committee examining the human cloning issue, the experts sounded the alarm against their colleagues' quest to bring the first human clone into the world.

They said the myriad difficulties scientists encountered in trying to clone animals -- including miscarriages, premature delivery, physical deformities and still births -- illustrate that the chances of successfully cloning a human being are virtually nil.

"The many problems seen in cows and sheep that have been cloned, while unfortunate in animals, would be a disaster in human beings," insisted Michael Soules, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, adding that the medical community must not ignore a tenet integral to its Hippocratic oath: "First, do no harm."

Among the array of international scientists who have, to their counterparts' dismay, recently announced efforts to create the world's first human clone are Italian gynecologist Severino Antinori, a French scientist from a religious sect known as the Raeliens and a US physician from Chicago.

"The experience with animal cloning allows us to predict with a high degree of confidence that few cloned humans will survive to birth and, of those, the majority will be abnormal," warned Rudolf Jaenisch, a cloning specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

To date, five types of mammals -- sheep, mice, goats, cows and pigs -- have been cloned, with a rather unpromising success rate of three to five percent.

"The great majority of all clones (of all five species) die either at various stages of embryonic development, at birth or soon after birth," Jaenisch pointed out.

In fact, many of those that do survive end up dying days or weeks later from kidney failure, cardiopulmonary failure, immune system deficiencies or physical deformities.

"In cattle, approximately 90 percent of the fetuses produced by cloning die and abort between 35 and 90 days of gestation," noted Mark Westhusin, a veterinary physiology researcher at Texas A and M University.

Before attaining their goal in creating the ewe Dolly -- who in 1997 became the first successfully cloned animal -- scientists logged 276 failures.

And since sheep have a fertility rate three to four times that of humans, said Simon Best, one of the scientists involved in bringing the Scottish ewe into the world, it would take 1,000 potential mothers to produce one successfully cloned human infant.

"This would come at the cost of 999 miscarriages, still births and infants born with serious and unpredictable birth defects," pointed out Pennsylvania Representative James Greenwood, chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee in the US House of Representatives.

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-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), April 01, 2001

Answers

OK, suppose there were zero dangers in human cloning. Further, suppose the were no ethical or religious objections to cloning. I still don't get it---why is there any interest in cloning except perhaps as an ego trip for the scientist who achieves it or to produce test specimens that would allow us to once and for all resolve the nature v nurture debate.

Can anyone make a case for cloning?

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), April 01, 2001.

I don't know about entire humans, but I can certainly make a case for cloning individual organs. In fact, I don't think anyone would disagree with me on that point. I don't know much about cloning, but I imagine that cloning an entire individual would be the first step toward cloning a piece of the individual.

-- Tarzan the Ape Man (tarzan@swingingthroughthejunglewithouta.net), April 01, 2001.

Tarz--

If I follow you, it may be possible someday to just grow livers or hearts or dicks for that matter. I think most people would not have a problem with that whereas cloning entire humans in order to harvest organs would not fly IMO.

In a fascist state, organ harvesting might be a reason to clone people. Also, a fascist state might want to create ranks of identical warrior clones, laborer clones, slave clones, etc a la Huxley.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), April 02, 2001.

Lars-

I don't think anyone's suggested we clone human beings for organ harvesting. However, it stands to reason that cloning an entire individual is a precursor to cloning parts of that individual. It is through trial and error that we will learn to manipulate cloning to replicate parts of the whole. I'm opposed to human experimentation, but I think at this time, laws regulating cloning are based in fear and science fiction rather than fact.

-- Tarzan the Ape Man (tarzan@swingingthroughthejunglewithouta.net), April 02, 2001.