Stem Cells: Same-sex couples to have their own genetic children in future.

[Mendicate Bias]

ghaleon1980 said:

Mendicate Bias said:

ghaleon1980 said:

"Ethics" alone is not the reason why human cloning has not been successful.  This may be true in industrial, modernized countries such as the US but I can assure you that there are plenty of research teams in other countries that disregard the "ethics" involved and have still been unsuccessful.  

You're wrong. I work in a state of the art lab manipulating stem cells and have written proposals on manipulation of human stem cells not to mention the countless research papers I have read from leading scientist in the field due to my area of research.

The reason we don't clone humans is exactly what Scoobes said.

Kasz216 is also quite correct. The problem with cloning is that they use somatic nuclear transfer which creates defects in the cloned organism since histone acetylation and methylation of DNA is not completely reversed from the original nuclease. This causes many genetic diseases as the cloned organism grows older. It is the same reason ips cells are inferior to embryonic stem cells. This is a vast oversimplification but I hope you get the idea.

What are you talking about?  Read my previous comment.  I said that "ethics" ALONE is not the reason why cloning of humans has not been successful. I agree that the ethical issues are a barrier, they are just not the only one.  Just because you have "written proposals on manipulation of stem cells"  in no way means that you would actually be successful in cloning a human if ethics weren't an issue.

I will concede that you probably know more about this topic than I do.  I am but a lowly physician and work on the clinical side of things, although I did participate in quite alot of transgenic research prior to going to med school.  Regardless, I stand by my original point.  Night. 

When I say ethics I mean that it would take multiple attempts with many failures. However it is within our technological grasp to do it.

Heck without ethics we could just make ips cells (only using oct4 and sox2 to avoid using oncogenes) and put them in the icm of a blastocyst and place the blastocyst within a female. Once the child is born it would be a chimera so we would have to breed him or her with another person and force the chimera to conceive multiple children in order to make sure a full genetic clone is conceived. Of course we would have to slightly alter the clones DNA with a marker to be able to identify it when it is born (I guess we could just use PCR but hey no ethics, might as well take the easy route). Plus we will still probably have problems with demethylase not being a hundred percent effective but at least we get around the telomerase problem that occurs with somatic nuclear transfer. The clone probably won't live a long life because of genetic problems arising from using ips cells, but it will be a clone nonetheless. Any of its organs can be transferred with the originals with no histocompatibility problems whatsoever.

I hope you can see how ethically wrong my above paragraph is. However if we really wanted to we could do it. What makes you say we couldn't?