From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Mar 03 2002 - 09:47:44 MST
On Sat, 2 Mar 2002, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> In short, cloning a person's DNA with today's techniques will not produce
> the same result that their parents' conception did.
Nor may it ever.
> In the future, when these various other factors are better known and better
> duplicated, we will see clones that are better copies of the originals.
As we know over time the DNA accumulates point mutations, the mutational
load has to increase with the age of the organism. So your comment about
DNA damage is very important. In contrast the telomere problem appears
at be to correcttable by at least some methods (as was pointed out).
I don't see an easy way around this. We don't have the technology currently
to return a genome to its "pristine" state. Nor do we seem likely to have it
in the next 10 years. It seems more likely that we will have whole genome
synthesis capabilities before we have the ability to tweek, thousands or
more erroneous bases in preexisting genomes.
To be fair about this, the correct comparison is presumably defect free
births from cloning methods vs defect free births from natural fertilizations.
Success rates of 1 in 150 (0.6%) for cloning look somewhat better when compared
with say 45 in 150 (30%) for natural fertilizations. But I would guess that
one would need to get the success rate up to 10-50% of the natural methods
for people to begin to consider it seriously for anything other than pet
or livestock cloning.
Robert
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