Comments on: An Exchange on Cloning

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Brainless clone:

Modify the egg and sperm such that they are missing the genes necessary to form a brain. When the genes are combined, the result is not a human being, never was a human being, and never could become a human being. So nothing is ever withheld from a human.

Nature does this and more all the time. 4 out of 5 conceptions are aborted by the body naturally in response to genetic abnormalities that trigger some sort of genetic evaluation system.

(This and one other fact leads me to suspect that souls are not synonymous (sp? it's late) with conception. Take an embryo. If it splits before a certain time, you get two babies that are identical. On the other hand, if you have two eggs and they fuse, you only get one person.)

The above is not a clone, but then again, if you remove all the antigen markers, no one cares that it's not a clone. Worst case, you'd need about 32 different cell lines to account for antigens that can't be removed. (Latest estimate I remember, may have gone up or down since then, but it's probably a manageable number for most uses.)

If the particular genes that control brain formation aren't reused (there's a good bet that some aren't -- enough genes are involved in making a head and brain that something's bound to be unique) then the stem cells created this way could be used for medical purposes.

Another trick that's possible would be to remove one cell from a blastocyst at a stage where the one cell cannot be grown into a human being and can no longer become a human being. Most functions of stem cells would remain at this stage, although I'd wonder if they could be used as a source of brain cells. The blastocyst created would not miss one cell and could be implanted with no problem. This technique is already done all the time with Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD).

The only problem with this technique would be the accidental reactivation of cells such that they could be used to form an embryo. Well, that and the Catholic church opposes all forms of IVF, at least last time I checked.

Imagine what happens if we find a way to disable the body's rejection of embryos that are not genetically "good" enough. Some of those embryos would probably grow up fine. Some might turn into metastatic cancers, and some might have horrid, previously unknown birth defects.

Why is the body designed to abort so many fertilized embryos before nerve tissue develops?

Is natural law a guide?

And then there's the difficult questions that give me nightmares ...

By the way, if the duality is rejected, then why does the Catholic church permit the use of brain death as a criteria for death and organ donation?

By: dlw

dlw — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't cloning already occur naturally with the formation of identical twins? Isn't what makes us unique individuals, not our dna, but our dna and our life experiences, including those in the womb?

I am not saying that there wouldn't need to be strong regulations of cloning, but I don't see it as inherently wrong though, it shoudln't be done for the wrong reasons.

dlw

By: Jerry Nora

Jerry Nora — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

From Rob, with my comments interspersed.
"Modify the egg and sperm such that they are missing the genes necessary to form a brain. When the genes are combined, the result is not a human being, never was a human being, and never could become a human being. So nothing is ever withheld from a human."

Technically speaking, I very much doubt it's possible. Such a construct would probably have global developmental problems besides the brain, to say nothing of the neurological system.

"Nature does this and more all the time. 4 out of 5 conceptions are aborted by the body naturally in response to genetic abnormalities that trigger some sort of genetic evaluation system."

Genetic evaluation system? That's like saying cardiac tissue dies during a heart attack to due to some oxygenation evaluation system.

There are many miscarriages, though I think your 4 out of 5 citation is way higher than the usual estimates (I'll look that up if I can today). It's not because the body has some explicit proof-reading mechanism for badly damaged organisms, just that such an embryo's genome is sufficiently damaged that it cannot maintain a stable metabolism and coordinate with the placenta. Death then ensues.

"I would use the word 'designed.' The mechanism is quite robust. It's not something that could be the result of evolution after the fall. It's been there a long time."

Okay, so you're actually bringing some theology into this. How bitterly ironic, since I'm avoiding it for the purposes of the debate.

At any rate, read my point about heart attacks and so forth.

By: theomorph

theomorph — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Hmm.. I was going to make pretty much the same reply as Rob, but he did a much better job than I could ever hope to do.

I would add one thing regarding this comment:

"Cloning, however, requires clear intent and premeditation, and implicitly sets one class of humans above another. This would be a case of 'playing God', where the power assumed seems to me to be inherently corrupting."

Cloning does not implicitly set one class of humans above another, unless the cloner is intentionally pulling a Brave New World kind of thing, which is not at all required by cloning. It's just one possible use.

But then there is the question of whether cloners who create legitimately different classes of humans are doing anything particularly wrong. The problem we humans have always had with class differences is that we know we're all pretty much equal, biologically (along a bell curve, with some anomalies at either end). But what if we made "clones" that were a low grade version of the species who perhaps looked much like regular humans, but only had the capabilities of lower animals? I'm not saying I advocate that sort of thing (I don't), but just trying to suggest that before we go talking about humans in various classes, or human rights, or anything "human," it would be better to have a good definition of what it means to be human in the first place. (And on that question, I suspect I differ greatly from the Catholic church. But then again, I also differ greatly from the Secular Humanists.)

By: Jerry Nora

Jerry Nora — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Homicide is generally bad, even though it "naturally" happens. Rape happens within nature as well. I know you wouldn't approve of these things, either, dlw, but could you expand on that argumentum ab natura of yours? I've hitherto never found them very convicing, largely since they seem wide open to abuse (e.g.,my objections).

By: Jerry Nora

Jerry Nora — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I don't have a lot of time right now, but a couple quick responses to Rob:

"Why is the body designed to abort so many fertilized embryos before nerve tissue develops?"

Designed to abort? That's a little stronger than I'd word it. Put it this way: we're all designed to die at some point or another. Does that give me permission to kill someone else?

"By the way, if the duality is rejected, then why does the Catholic church permit the use of brain death as a criteria for death and organ donation?"

I said "hard dualism". There is a much more robust dualism that is descended from Aristotle.

We can talk about this more, but right right check out:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05169a.htm

By: theomorph

theomorph — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I really didn't expect that a goofy little blog post that was mainly just supposed to get a couple laughs (and perhaps a few eye-rolls or dismissive groans) would be the grist for such a technical conversation. The medical folks are out of my league with the wet specifics.

What is cloning good for? I dunno. Might be good for something, might not. But I can't say I find it particularly objectionable as a line of research. There are plenty of tragic scenarios I can imagine—for instance, a clone that's intended to be a normal person but who experiences a massive failure of some sort after a few years of life, as has happened with clones of some other mammals—but there are tragic possibilities with almost anything. Shoot, even the relatively uncontroversial field of structural engineering has had its share of mortal tragedies. Should we stop building bridges because they might collapse and kill lots of people? Not likely. Rather, the solution has always been to maintain the ends (making impassable land features into passable ones) while shoring up the means with improved design and testing techniques.

Clones aren't bridges, you might say. Fair enough. But the techniques used and learned in cloning might be plenty useful. Assume that technical facility overcomes the potential for massive, mortal failure in a cloning operation, and no procedure need be undertaken that needlessly destroys something living, valuable, and human. I don't think that's overly fanciful; people really do want this thing to work out, and they're probably tenacious enough to do it. Furthermore, even if the United States government decides to ban cloning research, someone else is going to take up the slack (like South Korea), because, for some reason, people really, really want to do this cloning thing.

But for some reason, I haven't heard any discussion anywhere about that impulse to experiment with cloning. Instead, people are discussing the possible outcomes of cloning which, in my opinion, is almost pointless because we can't know all the possible outcomes, or even know whether the favorable possibilities outnumber the unfavorable ones. But we can talk about why people are interested in cloning to begin with, and examine those motivations to see if we can't learn to keep them on an ethical course.

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I would use the word "designed." The mechanism is quite robust. It's not something that could be the result of evolution after the fall. It's been there a long time.

By: dlw

dlw — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I'm just saying that if we are cloned "naturally" then it would not be a mortal sin to clone someone so long as the clone was not being treated as a nonperson.

I don't know what I think on this, but I am much less up in arms about it when I consider it a replication of something that happens natural that does not deprives anyone of their inherent uniqueness.

It simply is not true that we are unique individuals at conception. It is our experiences within and outside the womb and our dna that make us unique.
dlw

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Jerry,

There appear to be actual tests for the presence or absence of certain chromosomes, or at least sections of certain chromosomes (or their overabundance). This mechanism is far more than simply "the organism dies because the genes are bad" although that, too occurs.

The "4 out of 5" was based on a close study of women using special techniques to determine whether fertilization had actually occurred, and yes, there's some estimating involved. Still, the number's pretty robust. It includes all fertilizations, not simply the ones where pregnancy was known to have occurred. We don't see numbers quite this extreme in other animals, but then again, compared to most species, humanity is incredibly inbred.

As for the headless clones, we know that it's possible because anencephallic pregnancies occur naturally. Most of the time, the anencephally (there I go, trying to spell words like that before morning coffee) isn't complete, and the likelihood of the child coming to term is proportional to how much brain stem and lower brain is present.

The brain is needed to regulate the beating of the heart and other functions. True anencephallics die before birth, and the ones that do survive have some brain tissue and thus cannot be used for most organ donations. A friend decided to carry such a pregnancy to term so that some good could come out of the tragedy. The heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and other major organs were unusable except for skin, bone, and corneas. They weren't usable because the child did not meet current brain death criteria at birth.

We're not talking about carrying a true anencephallic being to term; we're talking about creating cell lines. The lack of brain shouldn't be a problem for that.

Given the number of genes that control formation of the head, the probability that some are "single use" (genes that are never activated again in the lifetime of an organism) is high.

Of course, there is one problem. How do you ethically test such a gene deletion? If you're wrong, the results may be fatal...or worse.

As for my "understanding of biology and humanity," most of that is the combination of being a double major in biology and chemistry in undergrad and trying to figure out how it relates to Christianity.

My Dad (an engineer and CCD teacher) discussed these things and more with me. When he was dying, he was the one who decided to not go on the transplant list while I was the one pushing for the liver transplant. To him, living with the transplant would have been burdensome. Me? I was selfish. I wanted my Dad, no matter what. It wasn't one of my better moments.

My wife and friends are also continuously challenging me from a variety of Christian perspectives.

I'd say a science fiction and fantasy author had the most influence on my thinking. For some reason, I'm thinking that C.S. Lewis did not consider himself a theologian, though I don't remember why.

Oh, yeah, I was also a paramedic for over 11 years. A lot of my beliefs are the result of having many years to contemplate many split-second decisions of life, death, and morality.

How many people do you know for certain you've killed?

In all my cases that I know of, I did the appropriate medical thing and the patient died as a direct result.

That's actually easier to live with than the converse. I brought some people "back to life" that should have been allowed to complete the process of dying.