And now for something completely different (from the BBC):
“US fertility doctor Panos Zavos says he has created a cloned embryo using tissue from dead people.
Dr Zavos told a press conference in London he had successfully combined genetic material from three dead people with cow eggs to make embryos that were an identical copy of the deceased.”
Panos Zavos has previously claimed that he had implanted a cloned embryo into a woman, but had to retract that claim. There is, therefore, reason to be skeptical of this one.
For the record, the research community is (as best I can tell) nearly unanimously opposed to human reproductive cloning, even when it doesn’t involve either the dead or using cow eggs. Human reproductive cloning (the sort in which you implant a cloned embryo in a woman’s uterus and try to bring it to term), even if it worked, would produce not a replica of the cloned individual, but an infant with his or her DNA — sort of like an identical twin to that person, but born at a different time and to a different mother. Since the clone would have different uterine influences, different experiences, a different childhood in a different environment, etc., there is no reason at all to think that s/he would be a replica of the person from whom s/he was cloned. So worries about e.g. cloning Hitler are misplaced. And since there is no obvious reason to think that infants produced through cloning would not be protected by law in the same way as the rest of us, worries about e.g. keeping clones in your basement for spare parts are equally misguided: it is illegal to do this to people. Likewise, the idea of cloning armies, etc., is fanciful: leaving aside the fact that it’s a lot cheaper and faster to just recruit 18 year olds than to create infants and raise them to be soldiers, cloned children, once they reached 18, would have the same right to decide for themselves whether to join the army as anyone else, and in my experience nothing puts a teenager off the idea of something faster than the knowledge that other people expect them to do it, especially their parents, and double especially if they are not just expected to do it, but have actually been conceived and raised for that purpose.
The main reason most researchers oppose reproductive cloning is that it doesn’t work. The vast majority of cloned animals have had serious birth defects and health problems, even though they were cloned from healthy animals. (More evidence that cloning does not produce carbon copies.) They are very sick, and they tend to die young. There is no reason to think that humans will be any different. Nor is there any reason to think that this is just a temporary problem: I have great confidence in scientists’ ability to figure out how to do things, but trust me when I say that figuring out how to overcome the obstacles in this case by any means other than trial and error is very, very unlikely in the foreseeable future. (I would be happy to explain why if anyone wants to know.)
One might think that we could do the trial and error in animals, figure out how to do reproductive cloning without birth defects, and then apply our perfected technique to people. However, it turns out that different species require different techniques, so there’s no good reason to think that if we figured out how to do safely clone, say, mice, we would be able to safely clone humans. (This is why, while people have been cloning mice for some time, no one has yet cloned a dog, despite serious efforts and large sums of money.)
So we’d have to use trial and error on humans. What this would mean, of course, is creating human infants who we knew would have serious birth defects in order to try to figure out how to avoid those defects. This would be like giving thalidomide to mothers in order to try to figure out, through trial and error, whether there might be some way to prevent their kids from having birth defects. Except, of course, that thalidomide has a better safety profile than reproductive cloning. This is obviously totally unethical. Some scientists also worry about other moral problems with reproductive cloning, but the vast majority of them think that the issues I just outlined make it so obviously a moral non-starter that other issues are moot.
So here’s what cloning the dead would be: you take a grieving family, play on their inaccurate idea that cloning will give them back their loved one (when in fact it will produce a quite different child who will in all likelihood be diseased or deformed), and convince them to go for it. I deal with scientists who do stem cell work, and who regularly have to answer pleas from desperate families who hope against hope that there is some new development that will cure their loved ones. I think that this guy is irresponsible and abhorrent; imagine how the scientists feel.
“their inaccurate idea that cloning will give them back their loved one…”
I wonder how many people conceive of cloning in this way. If so, it bespeaks an odd, shallow, and ultimately dangerous view of what it is to be a human being. Being a raving liberal, I can also point out without damaging my argument that the cloned cat named Mitten over there is not my previous beloved cat Mitten, even though genes have transmitted spookily similar personality traits to new Mitten.
Thoughtful Christians and humanists, not the demagogic sort who inhabit that Party, might ask, as Catholic writer Walker Percy did, and I paraphrase, what lies at the end of the path for the human race when the individual human is viewed merely as a creature inhabiting an environment rather than an ensouled being on a pilgrimage through the cosmos?
One need not be a literal-minded Christian to see that this is an important question and that one metaphor is more helpful than the other in the course of history.
If the truth of the matter is that we live in a purely mechanical universe, we may still require metaphors to buffer the cold truth.
Watch the original (the remake is not bad) version of the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” with Kevin McCarthy. It asks all the relevant questions.
If you think about it, the idea that if we cloned Hitler, we’d get, well, Hitler, or in general that if we cloned any dead person, we’d get a replica of that person, is even stranger than that. I mean: most people, in the course of their normal lives, believe that parenting and environment make a difference. They try to teach their kids to know the difference between right and wrong, they try to broaden and stimulate their kids’ minds, and in general to help them to become good people. But if it were true that just having the same genes as someone meant that you would become exactly like them, then this would all have to be false: you might as well just lock your kids in a closet, toss in food and water every so often, and take them out when they’re done.
For the record, I don’t think that living in a mechanistic universe necessarily threatens what we truly value about ourselves — at least, if what we value is the capacity to live lives of wonder and decency, in pursuit of things that are genuinely worth pursuing, and hoping at the end of it all to be able to look back and say: I devoted my life to what truly matters. So I don’t think that mechanism requires metaphors or anything else to buffer it. But that’s another story.
I don’t worry about humans being cloned for armies or replacements of the dead. I worry about humans being cloned because somebody decided that he, say, wanted a steady supply of healthy livers guaranteed to be accepted by his immune system. In that particular scenario birth defects may not be an automatic issue.
Yeah, I agree.
For the record, too, I’m an agnostic and believe the nature of the universe and man’s place in it is unknowable, pretty much. So, we resort to metaphors. Even if these things are knowable in purely scientific terms, the nature of me in the universe is still a mystery.
I have also concluded that those who believe their religious metaphors are literal truth, correct as they may be in certain particulars, and force them into the public sphere are prone to a mechanistic view of human nature as potentially damaging as, say, B.F. Skinner’s mechanistic view of human nature, correct as it may be in certain particulars.
But that is, as you say, another story.
Moe — hope you had a fun and apolitical evening 🙂 Three comments:
(1) Birth defects can, of course, affect livers. The nature of the safety issue is such that there’s absolutely no reason to feel confident that the liver (or any other organ) would be functional.
(2) Cloned children being human infants and thus subject to the law, no one could take a cloned child’s liver in any circumstances in which they couldn’t take a normal child’s liver. Those circumstances are basically nonexistent.
(3) Nonetheless, in my view, we should ban reproductive cloning immediately. The reason this hasn’t been done is, as I understand it, that people can’t reach agreement on whether to ban somatic cell nuclear transfer (a.k.a. “therapeutic cloning”), which raises totally different moral issues. (All of the problems people cite with reproductive cloning turn on the fact that the clone is brought to term and develops into a child; all the problems with SCNT come from the fact that the embryo is destroyed at about a week old.)
Oops, wasn’t clear: the circumstances in which one CAN take a child’s liver are nonexistent, whether or not that child is a clone.
Also, while one can detect some of the abnormalities produced by repro. cloning early on, one can’t detect anything like all of them, so testing to see if one is producing a clone whose liver (or whatever) is healthy won’t yield any assurance that it is.
Moe:
Your scenario gives me the creeps, too. But a scenario in which just livers, not walking, talking humans, are cloned, like the big celery in “Sleeper”, doesn’t bother me that much. Unless the technology is not available to those who can’t pay. Which will require government and taxpayer dollars. Which will require accomodation by those who are ideologically rigid.
But as a thought experiment, what if we shared the belief that the liver is the seat of the soul? Would we forego the technological advance and the resulting improvement in lives because of a mere, though strongly held, religious belief?
To put a finer point on my agreement with you, Hilzoy, if we live in a purely mechanistic universe and I am the product of mere reactions between enzymes and chemicals, my wonder and enchantment with the universe and my existence would not be lessened one jot.
Even if my wonder is merely my brain secreting a wonder chemical in physical reaction to a little chemical image relayed to it by my eyes. I think.
But I don’t know. Still, there is an impulse in human nature that we want the universe to buy us a little metaphorical dinner and bottle of wine and some metaphorical flowers before we head back to its place for some pure physicality. Surely there is something more than just pure physicality, though ending the night with it is just dandy with me.
What I’ve just written has to do with cloning momentarily escapes me, so, good night.
I’m reminded of the Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin constructs a machine to replicate himself. He proceeds to order the new Calvins to do his homework and chores. They, of course, ignore his demands and go off to make mischief, getting Calvin into trouble for crimes he didn’t even get the satisfaction of committing.
“Your scenario gives me the creeps, too. But a scenario in which just livers, not walking, talking humans, are cloned, like the big celery in “Sleeper”, doesn’t bother me that much.”
Well, I’m not intensely worried about it; in fact, I generally support cloning research. But my concern is that – unlike, say, the slave army scenario – with the right technology a sufficiently immoral and wealthy individual could actually do it. To be sure, it’d be illegal as all hell, but the advantage (tissue that the immune system wouldn’t have to be tricked into not rejecting) might be worth it, to some.
Moe — what’s far, far more likely is that, if stem cell research is allowed to proceed, people (at least, those who are well off enough) might have stem cell lines that could be used, if necessary, to grow various kinds of tissue which would match their DNA. Besides avoiding the moral problems of keeping a clone around (and avoiding these moral problems would have practical benefits: not just avoiding illegality, but also being able to get researchers who wouldn’t touch your proposal with a ten foot pole), this would have serious medical benefits.
Stem cell lines can be kept around indefinitely, and you can take some of the stem cells, use them for some purpose, and still have the very same line available to you. Thus, if you turn out to need, say, a number of transplants of the same type of tissue, you can do that. With a clone, by contrast, cells have already differentiated into the various tissue types normally found in the human body; if you need more of one than the clone has, too bad. If you need to modify the DNA in your stem cells for some reason (e.g., to boost production of a given protein), it’s fairly straightforward to do that (for most of the DNA) without altering immune compatibility; but it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to do this after the fact to your clone. Then, of course, there is the obvious savings in cost and convenience of having your medical solution take the form of some cells in a petri dish as opposed to an entire human being.
All of this (like your scenario) presupposes science we don’t have yet. But one of the benefits that stem cell science is most likely to yield is real insight into the means by which cells decide to differentiate themselves into, say, neurons or liver cells. A lot of the scientists I talk to think that stem cells might actually be just a sort of bridge technology: using stem cells, we figure out a lot of things about differentiation, and especially how to produce or retard it; possibly we will then be able to see how to induce, say, one of your skin cells to turn itself into a stem cell, or a neuron, thereby allowing us to get histocompatible cells for you without sacrificing embryos in the process. This is, in my view, a lot more likely than keeping clones for future transplants.
Moe’s scenario also ignores the fact that a number of types of tissue require an adult donor. An infant heart, or lung, or kidney isn’t going to do an adult recipient any good, since capacity is so critical to their function, and even if you have the fortitude and resources to wait around for 15+ years for the operation, I can’t imagine a scenario in which you would want to, particularly if more humane forms of therapy are allowed to advance in the meantime.
Way back in the dim and distant ’70s, the author Ira Levin explored the whole idea of “re-creating” Hitler, not just cloning him, in the novel The Boys From Brazil.
“Cloned children being human infants and thus subject to the law, no one could take a cloned child’s liver in any circumstances in which they couldn’t take a normal child’s liver. Those circumstances are basically nonexistent.”
Just clone the body and mess around during fetal development so that the child is born with severe anencephaly or a similar condition lacking a normal brain. With a little practice you could probably mess around with things in the 1-3 month zone (the no restrictions abortion zone) and get some functioning organs with a screwed-up-enough to brain.
If you are heartless but need bone marrow it should work with very little in the way of technology than we have already discovered.
Sebastian: It might be possible in theory, but as I said above, there are alternatives that are much less morally problematic, much more likely to produce what one actually needs in the way of transplantable tissues, cheaper and easier, and that moreover some remotely reputable scientist might be willing to do. So why is this thought experiment any more relevant to any actual question than, say, the possibility that I might be able, using tools available in Home Depot, to scramble your brains and keep you alive in my basement?
Because it isn’t just a thought experiment. Scientists have been experimenting with fetal brain tissue transplantation for more than five years.