Cloning the Dead


Viable embryos have been created from dead people by fusing their cells with empty cow eggs, a controversial fertility scientist claimed on Tuesday.

Panayiotis Zavos, of the Kentucky Center for Reproductive Medicine, Lexington, US, say his team has shown that cells taken from humans after death could be used for cloning. This latest work is purely experimental and no embryos were implanted for cloning, said Zavos, announcing the results at his own press conference in London, UK.

However, the claims were immediately met with both revulsion and scepticism from the UK scientific community.

The work is “both scientifically questionable and ethically unacceptable�, says Richard Gardner of the UK Royal Society's working group on stem cell research and cloning. “It is grossly misleading to suggest that you can replicate a loved one by producing a cloned person with the same genetic material.�

“This man preys on the strong desires of the most vulnerable people in society - giving them false hopes,� says Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics at the UK's National Institute for Medical Research. Other scientists argue that, even if cloning a person were possible, the risk of major birth defects is huge.


Peer review


“We have yet to see any proper description of any of the procedures that Dr Zavos claims to be able to use. He should publish his research in a recognised journal to prove that he is not a charlatan," says Lovell-Badge.

The UK’s regulatory body, the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Authority, refused to comment on Zavos's latest work without it being peer-reviewed. Zavos says he has published a paper on earlier work in Reproductive Bio Medicine Online and that other papers are currently being reviewed.

In the latest work, Zavos claims to have taken live cells from the tissues of three dead people, injected them into cow eggs stripped of their nuclei and then fused them using electrical stimulation.

The successfully fused embryos begin to cleave after 48 hours, says Zavos, dividing into a small ball of cells. Two of the three human cells produced “viable embryos� which could have been implanted in an attempt to produce a pregnancy, he says. Several other groups have already created cloned embryos by fusing human cells with empty animal eggs, starting in 1996.


Car crash


Zavos used blood and other tissues from an 11-year-old girl who was killed in a car crash. Her parents kept the tissues in their home refrigerator until they were delivered in dry ice to Zavos’ group three days later.

Cells were also used from a dead 18-month-old boy, but the embryos produced survived until the four-cell stage only, Zavos says, and so were not viable.

The third case was that of a 33-year-old man. His tissues were harvested in the mortuary immediately after death, so the team was able to culture them “just like fresh cells�. These cells produced embryos which grew to the 64-cell stage - “definitely transferable embryos which can yield a viable pregnancy", says Zavos.

But both Gardner and Simon Fishel, director of fertility centre CARE in Nottingham, UK, say the results add little to research. Fishel told New Scientist: “One can’t conceive of any useful information that could come out of this at research level, let alone clinically.�

Gardner notes that merely culturing healthy cells would demonstrate their viability. And he adds that bovine eggs are particularly good for cloning techniques: “Interspecific combination may well work because it’s an egg recipient in which we know cloning works – it won’t inform you as to whether it works in humans.�

But hey folkes, why is cloning so bad? And if it is then is nature bad? Twins, triplets, etc etc (more so in animals). What about some scientific basis for the cloning is bad idea. Cloning essentially means an identical genotype. The phenotype can be very different. What is wrong with identical? Vegetative reporduction in many organisms seem to do OK. Binary fission in bacteria and yeasts, budding in yeasts, etc etc to name but a few. And thank goodness that cloning is happening all of the time in your body. Or where would the new blood cells come from etc etc?

I'm not saying whether I support cloning or not, but we need to look at what happenes in nature and give some scientific basis for opinions.

Hey Hey

To the extent that cloning brings and aids life, it is good, no? Then why do the so-called "pro-lifers" object to it? And why to they so love the death penalty?

The matter of science and ethics are not well-connected and science has a long history of being willing to give their bosses (funding people) a lot of weapons against the good of life on earth. The issue is not one that paradigm thinkers inside that funding loop have any credibility in - IMHO.

Again look at the thread on Transhumanism and the corruption already apparent in Bostrum's group.

But some of this is pure science to observe the beauty of nature. Yes, we need "science moderators" too but what is the job description? Bias can come from both sides.

When you're dead you're dead? But we have a forum full of ideas about the mind, soul, whatever, continuing because it's not as simple as brain=mind, or so some say. So the death penalty is not the ultimate price to pay?

Just to remind, bacteria clone each other (actually themselves) to reproduce; no choice. So what do we do, still reject cloning?

"Shoot them all now and let God sort them out." This kind of thinking is justified by monotheistic beliefs and the abhorrence of the ethics of this view is pain to see.

When one changes one's false monotheistic beliefs, life appears as precious as it really is.

Precious AND wondrous.

ps If I cloned you (anyone) it wouldn't turn into you. No memories, you see, amongst other differences.

Indeed, a clone is only like an identical twin. You would have to start over with toilet training and everything.

And, when it reached 50 years you would be 100 years=dead. So then no clone, only it?

No

There is indeed proof of genetic information transfer and the Director of the human Genome Project says we have a history book in our genes.

Look, my dad was an engine driver and my mum a secretary. They donated their genes to me (50% from each). I became a visionary pratt (alternative title - university professor). This is the way genes work. The genes you have in your genome are just part of the story. If you were Einstein's clone but were hit on the head by a large hammer you would probably not turn into a genius. You are moulded by which genes you inherit, which genes are expressed and what environment(s) you are exposed to, amongst other things. Genotype does not equal equal!

Dear Rick

That is one interpretation.

However, I have posed this question to those who work in genetics and they think the ancients may always have been right about the ability of DNA (mirrored in the caduceus) to contain much of the wisdom. It may even rise to the level of being the repository (or one such place) of the Akashic Record.

As I understand it they have a great deal more research to do on these matters.

To be convinced, I would have to be shown the mechanism by which human experience gets translated into junk DNA, and also to be shown that different experiences get translated into different junk DNA. As it stands now, I think that the human genome has a very large base of common junk DNA, without differentiation based on individual experience.

The deconstruction of a gene is one way (maybe the only way) to take the human memory or brain contents and put them on a computer chip as was done in 1999 at SRI.

Here is a dialogue at a conference on Genetics that touches on this from Raelians and Transhumanists as well as theologians.


http://phoenix.uwc-usa.org/index.php?shownews=26

RTB, when you say that the contents of a human brain have been fully encoded on a microchip, are you referring to the transcription of DNA information onto the chip with the implication that brain contents are encoded in that database?

Not according to Time Magazine's Millennium issue or the other things I have read such as in Bill Joy's warning from Mar/April 2001 in Wired Magazine.

Remember our long discourses about Gary Hillis and someone finding that is not his formal name - just what Bill Joy and his friends call him.

huh?