From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Mar 10 2002 - 00:43:50 MST
On Sat, 9 Mar 2002, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> Yuck! This is the exact kind of irresponsible work that will get cloning
> outlawed world-wide.
To be honest Harvey, I've got a mixed position about whether this
would be a bad thing. The net result of a complete cloning ban
would be to refocus energies on circulating totiopotent stem cells.
That might not be a bad thing.
> Human DNA in a cow egg? Human nuclear DNA plus cow
> mitachondrial DNA? Nine-nine percent human (and presumably one percent
> cow)? A combination human-animal embryo?
Since human mitochondrial DNA is, I think, the smallest of all
mammals, presumably the cow mtDNA is a superset of the human mtDNA.
We would have to carefully examine the mtDNA genome sequences to
know for sure. So I don't see any "real" problems with this.
Certainly working with cow, pig or sheep eggs is less likely
to annoy the animal rights activists than dog, cat or primate
eggs -- particularly when one is still perfecting methods.
This is (perhaps) a much better path from a medical perspective
than human cloning using human eggs due to the side effects produced
by the drugs used in women to cause maturation of multiple human eggs
at the same time.
> This is exactly what scares the public.
They are going to have to get used to it sooner or later.
The parthenogenesis paths being pursued by ACT are similarly "foreign".
I think what might be most useful is transhumanists/extropians
contacting the scientists involved and making some suggestions
as to how they might frame the research [see below] so as to
minimize the public shock factor(!).
> Why would anyone do something like this and then brag about it
> publicly. I can't see anybody wanting to endorse making animal-human
> hybrids today.
I don't think it is a case of wanting to produce "hybrids" -- if
that were the goal, then one would produce embryos from intermixing
embryonic stem cells (chimeras). [I think I raised a query about the extent
of this type of work a few months back but it didn't draw any comments
{or perhaps I may have missed them }.]
I see this as simply a means to perfect the methods involved and a
way to decrease the expense of egg harvesting. Presumably cow eggs
are cheaper than human eggs.
It would remain to be seen whether organs derived from cloned cells
with "alien" mitochondrial proteins would be significantly more
immunoreactive than those from other humans. Simply from a protein
count perspective (thousands vs dozens) one would expect a "cloned"
organ based on "self" genetic sequences with foreign mtDNA to be
less immunoreactive than one based on a different human genome with
human mtDNA.
The transhumanist perspective is going to have to deal with the issue
of humans carrying other than OEM DNA sooner or later. [In fact
those infected with latent viruses, or those considering the odd
mixtures of bacterial types in the ~40 trillion bacteria we each
support would argue we are already "there".] So stirring up
the pot a little by creating intercell chimeras with human genomic DNA
and other mammalian mtDNA doesn't seem to be that much of a stretch
to me.
Robert
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