Saber Marionette Real-life Tangent: Cloning

Discussion in 'Manga and Anime' started by BakaMattSu, Nov 26, 2001.

  1. BakaMattSu

    BakaMattSu ^__^
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    You're quite good at spinning topics yourself, Mamiya! ;)

    But for the sake of clarifying things for me...just how was cloning related to genetic disease?
     
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  2. Bloodberry

    Bloodberry Bloody Berry
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    when you clone someone with a genetic disease, you can tinker with the genetics first, before it's ready, and then see what effect it has on the genetic disease when it became apparent in the original. there are great many things one can do with this kind of research, the only thing i would fear would be the government getting their wicked hands on it and using it to make life into a bad sci fi flick. and what's to say that you would even have to clone the whole person? maybe you can clone just an organ...and then, all you'd need would be just a sample of a healthy one. say you needed a new liver. they find someone with a healthy working one, take a sample of the tissue and reproduce it(kinda like what they want stem cells to do, only not that contriversial, least in the same way) altreing the genes a bit so that it matches the rest of you...that way you don't reject it. could be quite the revolution there.
     
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  3. luvweaver

    luvweaver Ad Jesum per Mariam

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    Nature knows best

    One thing I've noticed...

    man is always imperfect regarding his inventions. For example, machines like motors have a high degree of inefficiency. God, thru the evolution, has guaranteed a maximum efficiency in all things.

    Including reproduction. I read somewhere (nature magazine? Discovery? can't remember) that children conceived with artificial insemination have been found to be more propense to contract certain diseases...

    Think about this. If a man is infertile for some reasons, it means that his reproductive system is faulty. This is, we cannot guarantee if the sperm cells are healthy and can produce a healthy baby.

    The act of sexual reproduction ensures the "survival of the fittest", this is, a sperm cell strong enough to reach the egg.

    And then thru artificial insemination we break this barrier and we interfere with nature. Have we thought about that?

    What about cloning? We're playing with something we have NO FREAKING IDEA of how it works. Are there any side effects? Will the clone be born with 0 years age (or 9 months exactly), or will be 9 months + age of original?

    Humans are not immortal. We die, the genetical material gets corrupted, and so we become older and stop functioning properly. Death is part of our biological nature. Cloning is a VERY VERY VERY NEW field.

    I'm sure that the first cloned baby will die young for "UNKNOWN CAUSES".

    Now - regarding the use of cloning for "therapeutical purposes", yes, we're dealing with life here.

    Does the cell have a soul or not? This is religion, and the dilemma cannot be solved without religion. If the cell has a soul, then we are KILLING a human being to save the life of another. Much worse, we are CREATING a human being to destroy him or her... we deny a WHOLE LIFE to give A BIT MORE of life of someone who has lived many years.

    It's not fair. It simply isn't.

    What is more. Let's just suppose that future reproduction will be done by standard cloning. Does that guarantee survival? Will we have to depend on technology for the survival of our species? Certainly, this is going down on the evolution scale. Instead of doing things naturally, we will have to rely on machines and technology (which can be lost after ONE SINGLE generation) to survive.

    The ethical implications of cloning are much more greater than just "is it good for the people NOW"? We're jeopardizing our very existence, of us, and all our children with these "technology advancements".
     
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  4. Bloodberry

    Bloodberry Bloody Berry
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    be warned...hostility may ensue...

    i would personally like to know how this would jeperdize our existance. unless we start killing ourselves for tissue samples, that isn;t going to happen and is just fear talking. and i know it sounds cruel, but if a cloned person dies for unknown reasons, well...it will take some time to examine the individual and figure out why. there are scientific ways to remove the unknown status from most things. i personally dono't like to think that everything should be left up to the decision of religious sects. if we weren't intended to do this, then the ppl doing it would have been struck down long ago. and obviously they know what they're doing if they have managed to create clones...now they are expanding the research. i personally, have no probs with this and wish them the best of luck. i think it all comes down to whether we can help save some livese or not. and i'm all for that. but the only way to see how we can is to conduct experiments...and this won't work the same way as rats. they have diff genetic maps...

    and i still think this is really neat.
     
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  5. BakaMattSu

    BakaMattSu ^__^
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    Please try to keep constructive and not flaming, though..! :p

    The only jeopardy I can see us in is if we somehow come to rely on cloning and the technology goes faulty...but I'm not going into that with this particular post.

    I have no problems with saving lives - BUT, there's a difference between savings lives, and sacrificing lives. Religious implications aside, there is still something very wrong with morals if we find it justifiable to create an artificial life to save a natural one...a living thing is a living thing no matter how it came about.

    With your aforementioned "tinkering", it's almost like a game...you're changing your strategy with each clone in an attempt to get the ultimate score - or a disease-free clone. But what of the tinkers that didn't work? Do you flush all that away and pretend it was never there?

    Not that I find tinkering with lab rats very moral either...
     
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  6. luvweaver

    luvweaver Ad Jesum per Mariam

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    Well when i meant jeopardizing our existance, i meant long term. I'm talking many generations from now. If faulty genetic code is duplicated, there's a chance (if cloning is done in mass, that is) that the original code is lost for good. I know, it's far-fetched but it could be.

    And what about children of clones? Will they be genetically healthy? And their children? Boy, this is getting scarier.
     
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  7. MamiyaOtaru

    MamiyaOtaru President Bushman

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    Curing genetic diseases was brought up by Stardust Phox as an example of something we should perhaps not do, as it may be against God's will. I was responding to that in part. And i see your point about the differences between cloning and artificial insemination.

    So my opinion as of now: human cloning? Too many unkowns, should be avoided. It just isn't necessary.

    But, back to some earlier posts:
    I can't think of any.. And why not clone animals? Creating a clone can't be any more cruel to the animal than eating it..
     
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  8. Lady Aoi

    Lady Aoi Princess of Shirataki

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    My big question about cloning is... "why?" What good will cloning a human being do for human kind other than making his or her 'engineers' look smart and cool and get into the history books?

    Just because we *can* do something doesn't mean we *should*. Not to open the floodgates here, but I think Dr. Josef Mengele's experiments on Jewish prisoners during World War Two taught an important lesson to the world about scientific experimentation for it's own sake.
     
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  9. NiGHTS

    NiGHTS New Member

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    The only other options after genetic research/alteration for eliminating genetic defects are preventing affected people from breeding (not going to happen), and mass genocide (also not going to happen).

    Besides, I'd love to have a clone of myself. :cool: :cool:
     
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