[vjsc]

What I am looking forward to is when someone tries to start cloning process on a human being.

When I was a kid, in 1990s, there was a lot of fuss around cloning. Most people rejected it as unethical. I wonder how far the state of the art has come since then in cloning technology.

I am guessing that cloning maybe a real chance for humans to become immortal or atleast live longer lives.

[anonytrary]

> [In the 90s] most people rejected it as unethical.

I don't understand this. If a clone is given the same rights as a non-clone, I can't see how cloning is unethical. It's not like non-clones get a choice in whether or not they want to exist. Why would we treat clones differently, anyway?

> I am guessing that cloning maybe a real chance for humans to become immortal

Sounds like you are confusing classes with instances. If every human is a different class, the class gets to potentially live forever, but each instance of the class still goes through the lifecycle. It's not like the consciousness of a previous instance is copied to a later instance. Each instance presumably gets its own state.

[Bartweiss]

> If a clone is given the same rights as a non-clone, I can't see how cloning is unethical.

I've seen three popular takes on this, leaving aside religious objections and confused "cloning is a matter replicator" opinions. Two were practical, and so are probably settled, and one is, um, stupid.

- A major concern in the 90s was that clones would have serious health problems which wouldn't be obvious until later in life. That was based on health problems in Dolly and some other large mammal clones, plus concerns about telomere shortening when replicating from adult cells. I don't know if the telomere issue was ever settled, but with more evidence large-mammal clones seem to have normal health outcomes and lifespans, so I think the debate is largely dead.

- The next was that living clones would be placed in untenable positions, being judged by their genetic predecessor or being brought into existence "for a purpose" like donating bone marrow to a sibling or even 'recreating' a deceased child. All of which seems true, but no more applicable to clones than twins or younger siblings.

- The last was that creating life in unnatural ways is inherently immoral. Which I find laughable from anyone who isn't appealing to a religious prohibition (or similarly concrete ethic, Kant would have opposed it), but which was absolutely a major point of debate. By 2001, Leon Kass was heading up the President's Council on Bioethics and advocating this position. He variously argued against the inherently unnatural nature of cloning, its possible effects on overpopulation, its ability to create true "single parent children", and its dissociation of sex from procreation. He also opposed in vitro fertilization and intentional life extension, so he was an internally-consistent idiot, but I'm still convinced it's just the naturalistic fallacy redefined as a moral code.

(A final fear I've seen more recently is that extremely widespread cloning opens the door to monoculture disease risks and Muller's ratchet from mutation load. Which is again probably true, but not at all an inherent issue.)

[anonytrary]

> That was based on health problems in Dolly and some other large mammal clones.

This is the only potentially viable argument IMHO.

> brought into existence "for a purpose" like donating bone marrow to a sibling

This is untenable! Are people really stupid enough to consider slavery 2.0? At best, this sounds like some science fiction movie where people have 1800s education. "Growing a human to steal its organs" is laughable.

[dragonwriter]

> If a clone is given the same rights as a non-clone, I can't see how cloning is unethical.

A child of rape has the same rights as someone who isn't a child of rape, but rape is still unethical. The equality of the rights granted to a person who is a product of an act indicate nothing about the ethics of the act.

[anonytrary]

> A child of rape has the same rights as someone who isn't a child of rape, but rape is still unethical

Cute, but irrelevant. Please tell me how something not too different from in-vitro fertilization is comparable to someone forcing themselves onto another person and giving them PTSD.

> The equality of the rights granted to a person who is a product of an act indicate nothing about the ethics of the act.

I'll clarify: Combining inanimate objects in a way that leads to the birth of a child, who has the same rights, is not unethical. Sexual reproduction utilizes biological pathways to achieve the exact same result. Why is an "artificial" (whatever that means) pathway unethical, exactly?

[paxy]

In people's minds, cloning = a person walks into a machine and two exact copies walk out. If you instead framed it as birthing a child who was exactly like you, I'm sure the perception would be a lot different.

[anonytrary]

> In people's minds, cloning = a person walks into a machine and two exact copies walk out.

I highly doubt this is even close to true. Most people are smart enough to know that cloning has something to do with "modifying the egg and sperm and growing the baby". That's literally all they have to know to not think the absurd thing you mentioned. What you've described is "teleportation gone wrong" which is complete and utter science-fiction, and most people know that. I would even go further and say that most people are familiar with Dolly and already know cloning to be possible.

Plus, they are already familiar with twins (about two pairs per high-school) which is natural cloning. You'd have to be living under a rock to think twins share the same mind.

[Bartweiss]

At the very most, I think people expect clones to look like identical twins (correcting for age difference), and perhaps share that same level of average personality similarity. That's still an overestimate, since identical twins get very similar epigenetic and usually environmental pressures. But it's a pretty reasonable thought, and very different from "cloning is what they showed in Star Wars".

[Zanni]

Yes. The word "clone" has been so abused by popular media that people have wild misconceptions and objections. We should call them "elective identical twins."

[jobigoud]

They won't be twins as they won't necessarily be carried by the same mother/womb and won't have the same age. (In the "cloning an adult" scenario).

[vjsc]

Hey ... Thanks for clarifying. Yes I guess without the mind, cloning wouldn't really be what I supposed it to be.

I am still curious whether some rogue scientist has tried to clone humans.

[yipbub]

Said rogue scientist would need funding and infrastructure. Rogue government department or billionaire maybe.

[huntie]

I'm by no means an expert, but I really don't think it would take much. Cloning is being used in polo[1], which suggests that it isn't terribly difficult. Once you have the egg cell you just use in vitro fertilization, which has been possible for decades.

It's also worth noting that in the U.S. neither therapeutic nor reproductive cloning are banned at the Federal level, although reproductive cloning is banned in ~15 states. So any scientist participating would not be breaking any laws.

Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if some wealthy people have cloned themselves in secret. I imagine that there are a decent number of scientists who wouldn't find it unethical.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Cambiaso#Cloning

[Nasrudith]

Part of ethics also has to do with the resources. With our current state of the art cloning frankly sucks. Cloning Steven Hawkings just gets you a baby who will certainly get very sick. Even cloning livestock becomes unethical because of the sheer pointless indulgence. You are basically better off with sexual reproduction unless you want to attempt resurrection of dead species incubated by their nearest kin which adds further complications to get one let alone sustainable numbers.

A vaccine with a 10% chance to kill someone but protect from a widespread disease killing 99.99999% of the infected and exposes it to 20 other people under even strictest quarantine measures it becomes ethical to dose everyone against their will at the risk of literal decimation because the alternative is so much worse. A vaccine against the common cold with a 1% chance of death becomes a no for everyone and a maybe for immunocompromised if the chance of a lethal cold is higher and if it works for them in the first place.

[rqs]

I think as far as current tech goes, even if somebody gets 100% cloned, their mind (data in the brain) would still be different. That of course is when The 6th Day[0] (Brain data copy + clone) will never become a reality.

Here is a video about cloning dogs you may interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmHYUvmiXQI

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0216216/

[jacobolus]

i.e. via cloning yourself and then harvesting organs / injecting blood from your clone? Transplanting your brain into the clone body? Or ...?

[magduf]

Cloning people for harvesting organs doesn't really make that much sense: it'll take many years to grow the organs to the size needed to be useful as replacements.

We're already working on growing (or even 3D-printing) replacement organs without the human; that avoids ethical problems, but it also doesn't require the huge investment in time and resources needed to grow clones of yourself and raise them to adulthood. They'll probably have this technology ready for prime-time before they could have human cloning working plus have those clones grow to late adolescence.

[grecy]

Surely if we're cloning people it won't be too hard to accelerate growth as well.

If not, just stick all the clones somewhere and have them sit around waiting until their organs are needed. ie. the movie "The Island"

[magduf]

That's my point. We don't need "the island"; when we've worked out the genetic issues with cloning, we'll already know how to just grow organs on-demand. The whole clone thing doesn't make that much sense when you look at it that way; it would cost a fortune to raise a human to adulthood just for organ harvesting, plus garner all kinds of ethical problems and controversy and protesters etc. No one's going to protest organ-growing or 3D-organ-printing except maybe a few religious nuts.

And with the clone, what happens when you harvest its heart (killing it), and now you need a lung? Or you harvest one thing, and then get injured and need that same part, but you didn't have multiple clones lined up? With organ-printing, you just make the organ you need when you need it.

We still don't have truly 100% working clones; we tried with a sheep a while ago and it wasn't 100% and died early. However, we're already experimenting with 3D-printing organs.

[beerlord]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_transplant

I don't think its outside of the realms of possibility for the mega-rich. Grow a clone for 20 years, and transplant your brain into a fresh body.

[anonytrary]

It would take extreme idiocy to think that this is morally sound. There is no defensible argument for treating a human clone as anything less than human.

[a_imho]

What if we don't call it a human | engineer it just so it does not meet some agreed criteria for human | offers their organs voluntarily* | ... ?

[anonytrary]

That's not how cloning works. Clones aren't empty husks full of free organs ripe for the taking, any more than non-clones are. Even if you could create a clone without a brain, it's still hard to condone. If an anencephalic fetus miraculously grew to 24 years of age, would people post a "free organs" sign on him and lay him down on their lawn? Gonna have to say... probably not.