The following was taken from this website. It's a Q&A session with Lee Silver, who is a Professor of Genetics at Princeton University where his laboratory is attempting to identify genes that influence personality and behavior.


You predicted, I think two years ago, that human cloning would be here with us, within two years.


I don't think I said that ... I predicted that human cloning would be with us in 10 years and I still believe that is the case, because there is a demand among a small number of people for this technology to have babies. It's being driven by the marketplace. I think that, ethically, one should not use this technology until they are convinced that it is safe and efficient, shown with the use of animals. But I don't think that physicians around the world are going to wait for the confirmation that it's safe and efficient in animals.


The best example I can give you why physicians are not going to wait as they should is with ICSI, an intracytoplasmic sperm injection. This was a new technology developed in the early 1990s to overcome severe infertility and physicians did not wait to prove that it wasn't going to cause birth defects before they embraced it wholly across the country. We can use that history to understand how cloning is going to go. I'm not advocating the use of cloning in this way. I think it is wrong, but it's going to happen.


Can you explain simply what cloning is, because [some] people think that it's the creation of an adult copy.


When biologists use the term cloning, they mean something very different than what the public views cloning as. In the case of Dolly, what happened is the genetic material was taken from an adult cell and that genetic material was placed into an egg whose own genetic material had been removed. Under the right conditions, that egg with a complete set of genes, with a complete genomic material, could develop into an embryo. It would divide into multiple cells and that embryo could be placed back into a uterus to develop into a fetus and ultimately into a baby.


What would happen in those relationships?


Well, in purely genetic terms, if a woman used this procedure to have a baby, the child, the daughter would actually be the genetic sister of the mother. But I don't think that the mother would treat the child as a sister. The social situation would make the mother treat the child as a daughter ... we already have confused examples of heritage right now. If a person's father has an identical twin brother, then that person's uncle is also their genetic father in purely genetic terms. So we don't look at things in purely genetic terms. We look at things most often in social terms.


We have these confused identities and new forms of family, but we don't deliberately create them very often. In this instance, we are creating them and we are creating them within a private, market-driven industry.


When it comes to cloning, people are over emphasizing the genes ... the genes are being blown out of proportion. The reason is because every day somewhere in the world there are children born who look just like one parent and who grow up and behave just like one parent.


A clone will be no different than children who are already born today. It will pretty much look like one parent and it will have many of the same behavior predispositions as the one parent. But that already happens, so nobody is going got be able to distinguish a cloned child from a child who happens to look and behave like one parent.


- - - - -


Is it just me, or does the above sound utterly preposterous? I mean, it's a clone. It's essentially "you" -- yes, it's still a child. But would you want to raise yourself? That just seems so weird. And besides, wouldn't people start to wonder when the kid grows up and looks exactly like you did at their age? Even children who closely resemble their parents have still have their own identity, physically speaking. They're a blend of two genetic doners, which creates something completely different.


But I guess I was amused by this part: "If a person's father has an identical twin brother, then that person's uncle is also their genetic father in purely genetic terms." We should tell Nikki and James that, technically, they already have a kid since Mike's daughter was born, and Mike & James are identical twins. Think of how happy it'll make Nikki!



( 0comments )