11 replies to this topic

[manofsan]

I've been seeing quite a few postings on the net about this site:

http://savingsandclone.com

Is this some kind of joke? Or are these people for real??

Hmm, what IPod is doing for hard drive R&D, pets may do for cloning R&D.

Hahaha, this is reminding me of the corporation in that Schwarzennegger movie, The 7th Day.

It's been repeatedly pointed out that human epigenetics are sufficiently more complex than that of animals so as to make human cloning a no-go thusfar. But how long before the technical barriers are broken? What if things progress from cats and dogs and thoroughbred horses to chimpanzees and our close primate relatives??

We always hear about how chimps are 99.9% genetically identical to human beings, but what about on the epigenetic level? If researchers fully succeed with chimps, would that automatically mean it's possible for humans?

I'm not advocating the weirdness of human cloning, but I have to admit that this pet stuff is fascinating. Think of the implications -- everybody on your block might own the same championship dog. They'd all look alike, so you'd have to tag each with a chip implant. What about the disease implications? All those identical genomes would be susceptible to the same viruses. Genetic homogeneity would mean a field day for certain viruses. Wouldn't pets become confused by all the identical scents of each other? People talk about regulating human cloning, but I haven't heard any talk about regulation of animal cloning. Is there any way this technology might be abused? What if all this cloning leads to weird cross-breeding and genetic manipulation experiments? I wonder if it could be possible to engineer pets that are immune to rabies? I'd imagine that a lot of veterinarians could be put out of business, if the pet population is engineered to eliminate many diseases. What about pets that are engineered to emit scents to soothe you? Forget air fresheners, just buy a perfumed poodle or persian.

What if people are allowed to rate their steak or chicken wings at their restaurant? The restaurant owners could then make sure to order more meat from that particular genetic batch. McDonalds and KFC would go to town with this.

Phew, I hate to sound like a party pooper, but I think there's going to have be some kind of regulation of the cloning stuff, just to prevent it from mushrooming out of control. I'm not trying to sound like a Charles Krauthammer, but I have to admit this technology is very powerfully protean.

[manofsan]

Well, I don't find pet cloning offensive, just a little surreal, that's all. I do think that human cloning would be a crime -- one against the clone. It's one thing to end up looking like someone else by random chance, but to have physical traits stamped upon you, so that you're born deliberately to look like "Great Uncle Al" or "Dear Aunt Harriet" or Grampa or a dead sibling is a burden upon you, if you're the clone. Nobody has the right to impose that upon someone else without their permission. And since permission can't be given from the womb, it shouldn't be allowed. Otherwise, we run the risk of manufacturing people as playthings, as objects to fulfill the whims and or desires of others. But I suppose we can allow it for pets, since they exist to fulfill our whims and desires, since we are the master human species whom they exist to please. ;P

[manofsan]

Well, it's like saying that we can allow people to have thalidomide during pregnancy and then give the armless kids the option of genetic engineering to cure them later on. Nah, I'd just rather that these things not happen in the first place. Allowing some parents to make their kid deliberately look like Great Uncle Al, and then giving the kid the later option of plastic surgery to undo that, when the whole thing could be avoidable, is the morally respectful thing to do. I am however in favor of the idea of genetic enhancement, like improving their genes to give them greater strength, height, intelligence, etc, because those things will make the kid more successful in life. Morally, that's no different than surgical methods to help your kid. But I suspect that this approach will eventually morph into cloning, because people will try to emulate some common pre-set ideal genome/phenome. Instead of taking your own less-than-ideal genome and adding on genetic enhancements, why not start off from some common ideal model genome(clone), and then modify it for uniqueness?

How do you feel about that approach to designer babies? Comments?

PS: The only problem I see with this, is that viruses love homogeneity, because it allows them to evolve to match the target genome, for optimal infiltration. As we know, genetic mixing thwarts the viruses by scrambling the locks.

[manofsan]

Haha, if that were possible then everyone will be re-engineering themselves every few months, as fashions change. I don't think that it's possible, but would probably get a kick out of it, if it were. People will be body-swapping, gender-swapping, etc, etc.
I don't think we'd be able to control our own desires.

But the reason why it's not likely to be possible is that you'd have to be able to re-vamp the genome in all your billions of cells, without destroying your life support systems in the process. Your heart would have to continue beating, pumping blood to your brain, keeping everything going. Either that, or we'd have to invent artificial technical ways to keep the brain alive. And we'd have to keep you sane -- overhauling all your cells could be pretty stressful on the mind.

[kraemahz]

You're making some pretty big assumptions about what would go on in a gene alteration. For one thing, gender is mostly controlled by hormones. It's been shown that introducing testosterone into a woman changes not just hair growth and muscle but also brain structure. This change also doesn't happen overnight, it takes well over a month. Drastic biological changes aren't instantaneous. We're also not talking about being able to do some more radical things. Our knowledge of the workings of the genetic code is still fairly limited. Most of what scientists can do is splice in a gene for a certain protein. Most of DNA, however, doesn't code for genes. This "junk" as it was originally thought to be is becoming more thought to actually code for our complexity as an organism, so we're not going to start rewriting the entire genetic sequence. It would be more along the lines of inserting a few lines of code in, which could be done with a retrovirus.

Let's assume though that we eventually understand everything DNA does. This I do agree with you that it wouldn't work to change an organism after it had matured, at least in certain ways. Let's take as an example eye color, which doesn't seem too far-fetched. In pigment-less eyes like those with albinism (and to an extent blue eyes) a gene could theoretically be added to give them color, however with the pigment already present it would be highly unlikely that we could do anything but add more pigment, thus giving someone brown eyes. This is unless we found a way to remove the pigment that is already present. It means that with JUST genetics you can't have perfect control over what you want to change in an already grown organism unless you are only adding something.

[manofsan]

kraemahz, yes, I'm aware of all the things you've said. But the genome is like a computer program. Technically, if you could modify the genome in all the cells of a fully matured organism, you could still reshape its body. You could code the genome to shrink the body (the excess flesh would waste away) and you could reshape it into whatever new shape you wanted. But you'd have to keep the life support going and keep the brain and mind happy.

[kraemahz]

I'm no expert either, and it wasn't my intention to suggest you couldn't speculate, far from it. I appologise it came across that way. To my logic what was being said had a ring of total science fiction that needed to be sorted out. I have no doubt gene therapies could be used to do any number of things once they are understood, but what I wanted to point out was that they would have limits. Many things happen environmentally to change us along with genetically, we aren't simply a product of our genes. Irises, fingerprints, and birthmarks like moles are prime examples of things that could never be duplicated through genetics, as these things are formed by environmental randomness.

I think your analogy to a computer program is too vague to be correct, manofsan. With a program I couldn't change the architecture of my processor, add any more RAM, etc (I can make them work more efficiently, but that's moot to this point). Nor would I want to try to recompile my script while it was running. Bodies, however, do have a way of modifying themselves ala stem cells, but once that changes its permanent. There's no operating system to error check later and say "Oh wait, that's not what the plan says, let's change it."

As an example, let's take the foot. The foot grows to a certain size, based on growth plates present in it at the beginning, and then stops. If we remove the foot, the body doesn't know what to do. It can repair the exposed tissue, but genetics has essentially stopped telling it what belongs there. It either has no idea there's supposed to be another foot there, or it doesn't have the resources it needs to create a new foot. Here's my completely unscientific theory on why this occurs: When growing in the womb genes give a very specific picture of what goes where using the initial stem cells, including all the points of growth. However, growth runs independently of this first assembling, based mostly just on preprogrammed cells set to grow to a certain size and then stop. This is to say that genes can say what the body looks like at the beginning and what it should look like given everything goes according to plan, but not what it actually does look like. So, you couldn't make someone taller by changing the program because the start-up scripts have already run. If you consider it, the body has no reaction at all to grafts, organ replacements, or loss of limbs in terms of growth or shrinking. These things are all environmental in origin, once genes set your basic appearance they then turn dormant.

In order to actually remake pieces of the body it would require a comination of gene therapy, stem cell therapy, and surgery, a very invasive process. Say you have someone with a genetic heart defect that they wanted changed, the only way I see it working would be to grow a new genetically different heart from stem cells, remove the old heart, replace it with the new one, and find some way for the body not to reject it (commonly done through immosupressants). It would be completely irrational to proceed this way, the dangers would far out weigh the benefits.