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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
Anabanana reply: wouldn't post in the proper place
SC ( 11/13/2003, 08:18:29 )Let's say you have a car assembly line that produces car parts. You also have a car that came off the line, say ten years ago. Suppose the muffler wears out, and you go to the plant and make a new one, and put it in the old car. Then you do the same with the brakes, and the engine, and the tires, and the upholstery, and so on. Eventually you'd end up with a vehicle of the same brand as the old one. For all practical purposes, it would be the same car, just a little less worn out. However, you would have reproduced the car, even though you did it one piece at at time. It would have more history than a new car, but it would look just the same as a car built from scratch that just came off the assembly line. Once you have the factory operating that produces all the parts, it's difficult to sell the people the parts for replacement purposes only. They could use the parts to repair a car, build a whole new one, or both.Therapeutic cloning would work on a similar principle (the engineering would be very complicated; this is the way people want it to work, which hasn't been completely done in practice). By one method, you take cells which are normally present in the body, and used for repair purposes, but which are very rare. You put them in a dish under the right conditions and grow more of them. Some you might treat in a certain way to make heart cells, others nerve cells, and so on. Then you reintroduce those cells back into the body to replace cells that are worn out. However, these raw material cells, called stem cells, can also be made to start dividing and grow into an embryo, and if the embryo is placed inside a woman, eventually a baby. The cells are so flexible that they can be made into almost anything, a part of a human being or the cells that can grow into a whole one. That's why it's hard to make them available for one purpose and not another.Does that make sense?As an aside, stem cells are being used not to replace an organ, but to strengthen it. There is potential to make it unnecessary, not just to grow a whole human for organs, but unnecessary even to grow a whole organ. The repair could be done on an even smaller scale, supplying the cells the organ needs to prevent the need for a larger-scale transplant.
This Message is being posted for educational purposes, as well as for comment and criticism, by the visitors to the HumanCloning.org Foundation website (www.HumanCloning.org ).
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HumanCloning.org™ Established December 11, 2002.
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