Actual human cloning, folks

RadicalEd0 · Post by **RadicalEd0** » Tue Dec 31, 2002 12:45 pm

I hear roke looks like a hot chick

longview606 · Post by **longview606** » Tue Dec 31, 2002 1:17 pm

MCWagner wrote:Some of the clone defects (which no one has a good explanation for yet) are: Severe obesity, premature aging, and premature arthritis.

I don't have a clue on severe obesity but premature aging is because you are making the clone at whatever age the person getting cloned is. So if they are 50, the clone will be born and its body will think it is 50. That is the same with arthritis.

MistyCaldwell · Post by **MistyCaldwell** » Tue Dec 31, 2002 1:22 pm

God, that's gotta be hard on the woman giving birth

Those cult women got what they deserved, and now their 40 year old babies are going to be living at home in their basements the rest of their lives

MCWagner · Post by **MCWagner** » Tue Dec 31, 2002 1:31 pm

I don't have a clue on severe obesity but premature aging is because you are making the clone at whatever age the person getting cloned is. So if they are 50, the clone will be born and its body will think it is 50. That is the same with arthritis.

Uh...no, that's not really how it works. The aging issue I was thinking of had more to do with tissue apoptosis and encountering age-related system breakdowns that shouldn't become an issue until much later. (Working without notes here, or I'd be a lot more specific. I think I recall the arthritis being of the immune-defect type.) DNA as such doesn't register age except in the wear and tear of oxidative damage and replication errors and the like which slowly renders the tissue useless. If a strand of damaged DNA were used in cloning, it's doubtful that the embryo would survive gestation.

SSJVegita0609 · Post by **SSJVegita0609** » Tue Dec 31, 2002 1:51 pm

MCWagner wrote: If a strand of damaged DNA were used in cloning, it's doubtful that the embryo would survive gestation.

That depends on how its damaged though, most DNA is either not expressed in the pheonotype or just a place holder. DNA doesn't become severely damaged over time, if it did we'd be in a bad situation.

In any event, you're right, age is meaningless. Longview you don't seem to know what you're talking about (no offense). Your DNA remains the same for your entire life (outside of mutations and MCWagner's "Wear and Tear"), therefore no matter what age you take the DNA from it won't have any affect on the clone. Your sperm contains one chromosome of your DNA which is used to create a child along with one chromosome from a female partner, and whether you're 20 or 40 when you fertalize, it wont change your child's Phenotype or Genotype.

RadicalEd0 · Post by **RadicalEd0** » Tue Dec 31, 2002 2:07 pm

this reminds me of my horrible biology class last year @_@
CG AT, RNA strands blahblahblah etc

SSJVegita0609 · Post by **SSJVegita0609** » Tue Dec 31, 2002 2:09 pm

RadicalEd0 wrote:this reminds me of my horrible biology class last year @_@
CG AT, RNA strands blahblahblah etc

AP Bio 0wnz

Alucard_FoN · Post by **Alucard_FoN** » Tue Dec 31, 2002 2:17 pm

MCWagner wrote:First off, it's not an infertility cure, as the process for cloning animals is INCREDIBLY wasteful. You have to waste hundreds of egg cells for a successful implantaion. If anything, it practically requires excessive fertility on the part of the mother. Second, it's STUPIDLY expensive, as demonstrated by their fee.

Which is why it needs government funding so we can refine the technique and make it cheaper and more effective. Of course it's stupidly expensive and hard to do now, it's a brand new technology. When computers were first invented, they were stupidly expensive, huge, and difficult to build and maintain. But look where we are now, we both have one in our homes that we can use to access the internet and post on forums to discuss human cloning.

MCWagner · Post by **MCWagner** » Tue Dec 31, 2002 2:44 pm

But that's sorta missing the point. It's NEVER gonna get cheaper than the traditional manner... Yeah, the infertility bit would be a better argument, but by the time cloning techniques have become cheap and effective, artificial insemination techniques would be even moreso.

Alucard_FoN · Post by **Alucard_FoN** » Tue Dec 31, 2002 3:06 pm

Oh, but that is the point. As someone else stated, it's not about cloning a full human, it's about cloning individual organs whenever you need one. For that to be practical, though, we need the technology to be far more refined than it is now.