From: Brett Paatsch (paatschb@ocean.com.au)
Date: Fri Dec 27 2002 - 23:36:14 MST
Eugen Leitl wrote:
> Even if it's true, why is cloning a just another animal
> in a long series newsworthy? Even if the baby was
> healthy (which it's not), what's the point?
Its newsworthy because its possible that they have
actually done it. If an organisation is willing to put
aside such ethical considerations as the health of the
baby and the number of attempts that are likely
to be required to get success the degree of technical
difficulty is not that great. The degree of technical
difficulty *may* not even be beyond Clonaid and the
Raelians.
Its also relatively easy to check if it has been successfully
done by getting independent DNA samples from the baby
and from the DNA donor source. If this doesn't happen in
a reasonable timeframe (eight days or so is something thats
been bandied about) then we're seeing just an irritating
and politically quite a harmful hoax. Harmful to the roll out
time of stem cell therapies for those that could use them.
Therapeutic cloning *would be* an accelerant to the
understanding of cellular biology that leads on to cures
even if it was not itself ultimately used in a commercial
contexts to provide cures.
For 8 months of the last year I have been acting as a
lobbyist to the stem cell industry which involves keeping a
finger on the political pulse not just here in Australia but
to some extent around the world.
Responsible researchers and patient advocacy groups
around the world that are in favour of somatic cell
nuclear transfer (usually termed "therapeutic cloning")
have adopted a near unified political position that reproductive
cloning should not be supported whilst "therapeutic cloning"
should be. The public often failed to see the distinction
between the two types of cloning and indeed there isn't so
much a difference in technique as there is a difference in
application of the technique. Both involve the process of
somatic cell nuclear transfer and are essentially identical up
until the point where the 4 or 5 day old "embryo" (scientist's
wouldn't call it an embryo but the term will do) is either
implanted (for reproductive cloning) or destroyed in order
to obtain the embryonic stem cells from the inner cell
mass to be used for therapeutic purposes (as the cells can
be grown indefinitely in culture and would not be rejected by
the body from which the cloned tissue was originally derived).
Hoax or not the period of time up until the cloned child's
existence or otherwise is proven will be extremely interesting
and there will be political repercussions for therapeutic cloning
around the world. Clearly it will not be possible for laws
to be put in place in the time to prevent the birth of a child
already alive and it will not take long to confirm if the child
really is a clone. Certainly less time than it would take to
put legislation in place in the US or in the UN to oppose
reproductive cloning.
If there really is a cloned child its health rather than the
validity of its existence will become the pressing political
question. (I haven't read anything yet about its health). In my
opinion, a healthy child would be a great boon for medicine
generally (it would demystify cloning) but an unhealthy one
(as seems far more likely based on the track record of non-
human clones) is likely to become a strong argument against
both reproductive and therapeutic cloning.
Regardless of the outcome, for the record, in my opinion, this
procedure should not have been tried based on what was
commonly known of the risks to the child and the extreme
difficulty of the mother giving genuinely informed consent. But
for the particular child, and for the political situation the ethics
of its derivation are now largely moot. What matter politically
now is the outcome. The health of a lot of people may now be
linked politically to the health of this clone (or non-clone), as
the media will now "become" the political message.
Even a well publicised hoax feeds into a negative political
climate for somatic cell nuclear transfer or "therapeutic
cloning".
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:55 MST