The Vast Potential of Human Cloning

Think of a world where infertile, childless couples can go to a medical clinic, purchase cell replacements for malfunctioning cells in the reproductive system and, thus, bear kids; a world where people afflicted with degenerative diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's Disease can replace their damaged cells and be cured again; a world where the crippled can get the much-needed cells to revive their spinal chord and walk again.

Those amazing medical and scientific feats are only the tip of the iceberg when the potential of human cloning is concerned. Developed to its extreme, human cloning can make disease and sickness, maybe even physical suffering altogether, a thing of the past.

There are two basic kinds of human cloning and, separately, each offers us a deeper insight as to the vast possibilities of this burgeoning new science. In reproductive cloning, a cloned embryo is implanted in a woman's uterus from where, theoretically, a normal baby develops that is genetically identical to the DNA donor. The second type of cloning, therapeutic cloning aims to provide replacement organs or tissue for people. The cloned embryo contains DNA taken from the transplant patient to ensure that the cloned organs are compatible with the person's immune system.

In the past decade, human cloning has taken great strides. To many, the biggest and most visible accomplishment in this arena was the successful cloning of two mammals: Dolly the Sheep in 1996 and Snuppy the dog in 2005. After six years, Dolly died in 2003 from non-cloning related conditions. Meanwhile, Snuppy, Time magazine's "Invention of the Year" in 2005, is alive and well.

In 2004 and 2005, Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk, who headed the team that created Snuppy, shocked the science world when he announced that he had successfully cloned human embryos in his laboratory in Seoul. However, it was discovered that Hwang had fabricated evidence to back his scientific research. Following a thorough investigation, through, a panel of scientists pronounced that Snuppy was a legitimate clone and this achievement stands.

Jonathon Hardcastle writes articles on many topics including Science [http://yoursciencesource.com/], Computers [http://computerinformationsource.com/], and Health [http://allaboutourhealth.net/]

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Human Cloning 'Is This Going to Be the New Moral Battleground Between West and East?'

On April 3, 2002, Dr. Severino Antinori announced he had successfully implanted a cloned embryo into a woman and that she was eight weeks pregnant. Dr. Antinori made his announcement while speaking at a conference on Healthcare Ethics in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Sharing the stage with Dr. Antinori was Dr. Haris Silajdzic, a former Bosnian Prime Minister and Hisham Yousuf, a representative of the Cairo-based Arab League. Dr. Antinori refused to disclose either the location or the nationality of his pregnant patient. He admitted that there was 'risk involved' but said he had pursued screening to reduce the risk of any deformity before the embryo was implanted and that the outcomes of cloning differed widely between species. Dr. Antinori also insisted that he was interested in therapeutic cloning and had to pursue his work in that area in other countries as it is outlawed in Italy.

In 1998, Dr Antinori announced plans to use cloning technology to help infertile couples have children. British scientists to produce Dolly the sheep, the world's first vertebrate clone made from an adult mammalian cell, had pioneered the technology. In 2001, he predicted that he would complete the first human cloning operation within 18 months. The 56-year-old was previously best known for his work in in vitro fertilisation, and in particular for enabling women in their 50s and 60s to give birth. He shot to prominence in 1994 when he helped a 63-year-old woman to have a baby by implanting a donor's fertilised egg in her uterus, making her the oldest known women in the world to give birth. Dr Antinori told an Italian newspaper recently that more than 1,500 couples had volunteered as candidates for his research programme, and it is known that he is working in close co-operation with Dr Panos Zavos, an American fertility expert.

Dr Antinori faces the outrage of those who oppose the procedure on ethical and moral grounds. The practice of human cloning is banned in Europe and formal legislation is now going through Congress in the United States. It is because of this reason that it is of more than passing interest that the 'world breaking' announcement was made at the Zayed Centre in Abu Dhabi, as I feel this underscores a subtle continuing shift of the centre of cloning research from the western World to Middle Eastern and Asian localities. The United States has recently placed a five-year moratorium and ban on human cloning describing it as 'a violation of human rights'. It has also allowed countries such as India and Singapore to pursue stem cell technology on its behalf. It is widely rumoured that China has already cloned many human embryos to use in therapeutic cloning and stem cell research. It now appears that the United Arab Emirates is interested in promoting the Zayed Centre in Abu Dhabi in a new role of encouraging evolving scientific research within the Arab World. It is also acknowledged that officials such as the UAE Minister of Health Under-secretary Dr. Abdul Rahim Jaafar has more than a passing interest in making his nation the centre of cloning research. He already has stated that he intends to group other Arab League countries, the East Mediterranean Region Office of the World Health Organization, the Islamic Organization for Medical Services and the International Association of Bioethics together for the 2004 Congress of Bioethics, with the UAE as a possible venue for the event. He stated recently that we should explore how to preserve our fundamental human values and 'adhere to our respective religious teaching in channelling new scientific knowledge to benefit our fellow man'.

Dr. Antinori spoke to the conference and reiterated his view that everyone had the right to pass on his or her individual characteristics to their offspring or to use cloning as a means to treat infertility. As doctors, we should also be aware that while Asian Muslims, Buddhists, and some Asian governments also oppose reproductive cloning, they apparently are not constrained by the ethical embryo debate, which has halted most cloning research in the Western World with the exception of Great Britain. Of more importance is the fact that the UAE, now appears to be challenging the Western World by staging the conference on 'The Future of Genetic Engineering and Cloning' in the Zayed Centre in Abu Dhabi. Many scientists attending the conference noted accusations that Western (it would probably not be unfair to read Christian) thought and ethics is fundamentalist, rigid and ultimately destructive to science, medicine and the pursuit of knowledge. This is almost the antithesis of the fundamentalist Islamic belief recently seen in Iran that said that Western petrochemical research was ultimately antireligious. There is little doubt that the great cultural interface that exists between Christianity and the Islamic faith, which presently holds centre stage in our news, echoes through the debate about human cloning and human cloning technology.

Dr. Patrick Treacy is a cosmetic expert. He is Medical Director of Ailesbury Clinics Ltd and the global Cosmetic Medical Group. He is Chairman of the Irish Association of Cosmetic Doctors and is Irish Regional Representative of the British Association of Cosmetic Doctors. He is European Medical Advisor to Network Lipolysis and the UK's largest cosmetic website Consulting Rooms. He practices cosmetic medicine in his clinics in Dublin, Cork, London and the Middle East. Dr. Treacy is an advanced aesthetic trainer and has trained over 300 doctors and nurses from around the world. He is also a renowned international guest speaker and features regularly on national television and radio programmes. He was invited to speak about stem cells and cosmetic medicine at the World Aesthetic Conference in Moscow this year.

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The Well Being of The Dog Species Cannot Be Maintained If People Are Replicating Them

Wow, have you heard the news about Dolly the sheep that was cloned, amazing thing isn't it? No I did not find out about it and I am sure most of you heard about it back in 1996 as it was all over the news back then.

However, I asked the question simple to jog your memories for a lead up to my other question. Do you know that since Dolly was cloned that a number of others animals were cloned as well?

Didn't know that did you? As a matter of fact including Dolly there were plenty more animals cloned and those are the ones that we have been told about.

Just to name a few here from the biggest animal ever cloned that we know about is a horse or depending on how you look at them there were also cows.

Going down in size we get pigs and going down even further we get cat and even further down we come to rats and then mice. Notice that I used that I used the plural tense for all these animals. However, in that great age of technology the scientists of the day could not cloned a dog.

The problem at the time was, getting a bit technical here, the process used for maturing the ovum of the dog in an environment that was artificial to the body of a dog.

However, the procedure was soon overcome by a scientist and professor of the national University of Seoul, a Mr Woo-Suk Hwang, he successfully used tissues from the ear of and Afgan Hound who was three years old at the time.

He was over one thousand implantation on surrogate mothers, (dogs) of the embryos. As a result out of the thousand or so only three of them took and resulted in pregnancies.

Out of the three the first was a miscarriage, a second was born but died three weeks later and the third was carried by a Labrador Retriever.

You might be wandering at this point how is something like that even possible or how would someone go about doing something like that or even where would even start?

Well I think that I might be able to shed some light on the process and no I have not cloned an animal, but I had researched the topic not to long ago while at College.

As far as a I remember the process was very technical and complicated to me at that time, I am not even sure if I understand it myself.

However, although I might not understand the technical aspects of it I do understand the process enough to explain it to you here briefly.

The eggs of a female dog is only be fertilized for a certain length of time, which is at a certain phase during the time of the Estrous cycle and can only be harvested during the three weeks period.

Then the eggs are taken from the oviduct because of the intricate nature of removing the eggs. After the eggs have been taken out this is where they take out the nucleus from the eggs and replace it with the cell from the dog's ear as mentioned above.

Then they use a chemical reaction to bound them together, that is the egg and the cell from the dog's ear. After this was successfully done the eggs would be placed in the female dogs that will become surrogates.

This particular process took three years to complete and the result was that the female Labrador gave birth to the first ever cloned dog who was named Snuppy.

The cloning process has generated a lot on interest even more so than the result of the process, which was the cloned dog Snuppy.

In 2005 Time Magazine ran article in which Snuppy was named the most amazing invention of the year, this was no doubt an implication to human cloning.

The scientist behind the cloning of Snuppy Dolly is against the idea and have stated that they should be banned on human cloning.

The whole idea of cloning was rejected by the Kennel club sighting the well being of dogs species cannot be maintained if people are replicating them.

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Reproductive Cloning - Identifying the Research Obstacles to Success

Reproductive cloning in humans will not happen anytime soon. The birth of Dolly the sheep proved adult cells can be reprogrammed all the way back to an original totipotent state. Dr. Ian Wilmut's team reprogrammed a cell from the udder of an adult sheep, placed the nucleus of that now-totipotent cell into an enucleated sheep egg, and provided an electric shock which caused the egg cytoplasm to respond as if it had been fertilized. Months later, Dolly was born and created a worldwide sensation.

Performing the same feat in humans will require years of additional research and experimentation. At present, the rate of successful fertilizations in animal experiments is very low. Vast numbers of human eggs would be required to move reproductive cloning forward. However, significantly improving the rate of successful fertilization is merely the first hurdle. The overarching meta-question relates to whether the early embryo produced in a cloning procedure is developmentally equivalent to an early embryo produced in a woman's womb.

For example, following physiological fertilization unknown factors in the egg cytoplasm reset all the epigenetic marks on the sperm DNA. Are these mechanisms intact in the cloned zygote? Is epigenetic reprogramming done in exactly the same manner as is done physiologically? Are there errors and what are the consequences for normal development?

Relative telomere length may also be a factor in potentially abnormal development of the clone. A telomere is a region of repetitive nucleotide sequences at the end of a strand of chromosomal DNA. A telomere-shortening mechanism creates a limit to the number of divisions a cell may undergo - effectively limiting the life of the cell. In physiological fertilization an enzymatic telomere elongation program restores optimal telomere length to every cell's set of chromosomes.1 It is hypothesized that this genetic program acts to ensure sufficient telomere reserves to ensure integrity of the species. Is such telomere restoration intact in a cloned human early embryo? The answer is completely unknown.

The potential for genetic abnormalities and increased susceptibility to various diseases in cloned humans is also a matter for conjecture. Dolly the sheep was healthy throughout her lifetime. Of course we have many more concerns regarding human health and many more regulations regarding experimentation on humans. How can research on reproductive cloning proceed if experimentation itself is the only way to identify potential harms and mechanisms for avoiding them? This is a very difficult question. At present it seems that the best way to increase knowledge is to encourage extensive work in animal cloning.

1Schaetzlein S, et al: Telomere length is reset during early mammalian embryogenesis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 101(21):8034-8038, 2004

David Lemberg, M.S. in Bioethics, Albany Medical College, May 2010
Consultant, Author, Speaker. Research interests - health care and health care policy, reproductive technologies, genetics and genomics, K-12 science education Executive Producer, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY, http://scienceandsociety.net Twitter - http://twitter.com/david_lemberg Visit SCIENCE AND SOCIETY for cutting-edge interviews with Nobel Laureates, trendsetting industry executives, and best-selling authors in the fields of cancer research, genetics, health care policy, nanotechnology, and space exploration.

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Religion and Cloning

Cloning is becoming an increasingly important subject in the modern world. The biggest breakthrough in cloning was when Dolly the sheep was cloned. After the success of cloning sheep, more effort was put into human cloning. The United States banned the cloning of humans, but there are other countries that have laws that are more lax on the issue of human cloning. Humans are separated from other mammals not only because of the superior intelligence but also because they have souls. A soul, "the actuating cause of an individual life" (Webster) is what makes humans what they are. The soul is the eternal essence of a person, and without it humans are no more than animals. This brings up very interesting issues on the human cloning. If clones have souls then it would not be right for humanity to create them and then use them for their own purpose, such as using them for medical transplants. However if clones do not have souls it would seem appropriate for people to use clones for their own purposes, because these clones would be no better than animals. Even if clones have no souls, this does not make the use of them in medical research immediately appropriate. God is the great creator, and many believe that human cloning is an area of life that humanity should not delve into. Certainly a clone would not have the same soul as the original, yet the very nature of the soul suggests that it cannot be created by man.

Human cloning is still in its infant stage, but the technology is progressing at a blinding rate. Originally cloning ran into a few problems with aging. When the Dolly the sheep was cloned, its cells were older than they were supposed to be. Hence Dolly has a shorter life span than other sheep. This problem was claimed to be fixed by scientists in Russia, but there is no real example of a true human clone that is being allowed to live and grow. Parents who lose their baby's in child birth, could save some of the cells in the hope that they could pay scientists to clone their baby. However if their baby was cloned, its personality would develop differently than their original child, due to different exposure. What is the point in cloning a baby who has never been born. Since there is no way of telling what the baby would have been like, why would parents spend money on the cloning? This question is impossible to answer fully without being placed in a similar situation.

In the future humans will be cloned, but it is not known how they will be treated. According to all of the biological aspects they will be living human beings, but it does not seem like humanity will treat them that way. Since it costs money to clone people it is logical to conclude that the people who pay for the clone will want some kind of return on their investment such as the use of their clone as a slave. Slaves are still a problem even in today's world. People in America often think that slavery disappeared after Lincoln abolished it. However, that is not the case; slavery has taken on a different form, although it is the same in principal. If human cloning is developed these clones could be used as slaves for life; they would not have an identity of their own. Therefore, slaves could be bought and used for whatever purpose the owner wanted. It is doubtful that they would even be able to get a citizenship from a country even if they were freed, because they could be mistaken for their cellular donor. Since clones would not be seen as humans, they could be beaten, killed, or forced into hard labor, and no one would see any problem with this. Although they may not have souls, they are still capable of the same emotions, and thoughts that other humans are. It is not hard to imagine cloning factories in third world countries that churn out clones to sell into prostitution, or bondage of some other kind. However cloning could be used in good ways such as "serving as a new, unusual but perhaps efficacious treatment for infertility" (McGee).

If humans are allowed to be cloned then doubtless these clones will bear their own children. The question is will these children have souls? Furthermore if a clone and a non-clone have a child will the child have a soul? These questions seem impossible to answer. Colin B. Donovan claims that if the processes, no matter how artificial and unnatural, result in a being that is materially human in makeup and can live and develop into a child, then that child will have a soul. The bible says the God knew each person that would be born, before the world was created. It is possible that God predestined clones to be formed as well. Sex and child birth is sacred in the eyes of God, and this fact leads to the conclusion that God does not want people to manipulate this process. Furthermore, God calls all people to inhabit the earth and subdue it. With this commandment God gave people the responsibility and permission to use animals as slaves. Many animals are slaves and yet because they have no soul and do not possess a high intelligence we do not consider them slaves. Is it only the soul that makes us human or is it just the ability to think logically? Mentally ill people do not have the ability of logical thought and yet people still consider them humans, and they have all the rights and more that other people possess. Therefore the ability does think logically is not the thing that makes us human. Clones do not have souls because they were not created by God as Adam and Eve were, but rather they were created by men.

It all comes down to the soul. Things of this earth are temporary but the soul is eternal. Clones do not have souls and so logically they could be used as slaves, just as humanity has used animals as their slaves. However this does not mean that they can be used for sex, or physically abused. The UShas laws that protect animals from abuse, and these laws would also be applied to clones.

Written by John Severin,

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Pet Cloning - The State of the Industry

Whatever happened to pet cloning? As early as 2005, there were a number of news stories about dog cloning and cat cloning. Animal cloning had been old news for nearly a decade by then, with the revolutionary cloning of Dolly the sheep in Scotland, of course, but Snuppy was the first pet, a dog, to be cloned. Cloned by scientists at a Korean University, Snuppy would have seemed to be a harbinger of a new revolution in animal breeding. However, the pet cloning market has been quite cool in the five years since the Snuppy announcement. Here, we review the state of the pet cloning industry.

Since the cloning of Snuppy, there have been a number of very successful clonings of pets and other animals. Lou Hawthorne started BioArts while cloning his beloved mixed breed dog Missy. Hawthorne was very pleased with the results of the cloning, producing three successful clones that were very alike to the original in character and behavior. In January, 2009, a Florida couple, Ed and Nina Otto, announced that they had paid to have their Golden Retriever Lancelot cloned by BioArts. They also were very pleased with the results.

Still, response to the cloning has been cool. When Hawthorne ran a contest to have people clone their favorite pet, he was surprised to find that less than 250 people entered the contest. In addition, Hawthorne found that BioArts' prices were undercut by Korean competition. While the Ottos were very pleased with "Lancey," their pet clone, it was difficult for anyone not to note the prohibitive cost they paid: $155,000 USD. In addition, many people object to the idea of cloning pets when there are many animals being euthanized every day at animal shelters around the world. There are also issues with some abnormalities in the cloning process.

All of this is not to say that pet cloning is not very different from many other technologies that simply took a while to catch on. Some issues are outlined below, along with a discussion of how those issues might improve in the coming years.

• The price problem. All new technology is overpriced. For example, personal computers were not very affordable at first. Only after the manufacturing process was streamlined was it possible for every household to have a computer. How much room there will be for organizations to reduce the price point on pet cloning without broad demand is of course questionable.
• People resist change. This is especially true when it comes to tampering with living things, in this case beloved pets. Yet, we have "tampered" for a long time in breeding pets and domestic animals. In fact, controlling the genetics of domesticated animals and pets is accepted practice that people pay top dollar for. Organizations like PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) object to pet breeding. PETA claims that the American Kennel Club adds to the pet overpopulation problem by encouraging breeding pure bred dogs. Still, pet lovers pay for purebreds, and this is well accepted by mainstream society.
• Demand may always be an issue. There are many great dogs and cats that can be found at the local dog pound or given away for "free to good homes" in classified ads. However, there is no limit to the value people place on a beloved pet or even on a sure thing. The Ottos are a good example of that, as is the practice of buying purebreds. If people can purchase a dog or cat with predictable behaviours and characteristics there is implicit value in that. There is a predictable market here, though it may always be limited in size.

While pet cloning has not taken off as some had hoped, it's clear that it will become a bigger market in the future and it will be increasingly viable for people to try this out. With the inevitable successes that cloned pet owners will have, the practice will become more widely accepted and it seems inevitable that there is a future for cloned dogs and cats.

John Huinink is the owner of Dogscloned.com a resource with a variety of information about cloning including pet cloning controversies, pet cloning services, the first cloned dog and more.

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