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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
Crossing Species Disease
libfemme ( 10/05/2003, 01:57:41 )This is not my strong suit so maybe someone with more background can give you a more detailed answer. I can tell you the basics.Infections come in 2 general types: 1. invading cells, usually bacteria 2. invading non-cells, usually virusesThe first type invades an entire organism but does not enter your cells. It poisons your cells etc. but doesn't enter them. Therefore if you are working with only one cell at a time, such as a rabbit egg,you won't be introducing things outside the cell such as bacteria.The second type such as virus and prions do enter cells, and therefore could theoretically get inside a egg cell in the rabbit's ovaries.Whether or not such a virus could continue to function once the egg started to become human, however, is problematical. The rabbit egg is used as a starter, or food almost, for the human DNA. As the cell grows before it divides it has to make new "cell" parts in order to get bigger. How does the cell know how to make these parts of a cell? It has to look at whatever genes are in the nucleus.If you have taken out the rabbit's DNA, the cell is at a loss. It doesn't have the instructions any longer to make rabbit ribosomes or rabbit lysosomes in the cell. If the DNA that is in the cell is human DNA, then that's what the cell will take it's instructions from. It will make human ribosomes and human lysosomes because that's the only instructions it has.Say a cell has 6 ribsomes (it doesn't. it has hundreds but lets keep the example simple). And in order to divide into 2 cells the cell has to grow 8 more ribosomes. Ok, it has the original 6 which are rabbit made, but the new 8 will be made from the new DNA so they will be human. That means when the cell divides into two then it will have only 4 rabbit ribosomes and 4 human ribosomes. It will be at best only 1/2 rabbit. Those 2 cells then grow again, making 6 new human ribosomes in each. When those 2 cells divide now there will be 4 cells, but only 2 ribosomes will have come from the original rabbit cell but the remaining 6 ribosomes will have been made by human DNA, so they';l be human ribosomes. After the 3 growth and division cycle there will be 8 cells, and each now will be only 1/8 rabbit. And so on and so until the rabbit ribosomes are diluted into nothingness.Ribosomes don't function forever. They get worn out, used up, whatever and are broken down by the cell and discarded as waste. New ribosomes are made to replace the old ones. The new ones will always be made with human genes since that's all that exists.In short order there is nothing left of the one rabbit started cell, and the organism is completely human.If there is a virus inside the rabbit egg that can function in a rabbit cell, but cannot function in a human cell then it is going to be broken down and discarded as waste eventually also.We ingest such viruses all the time when we eat meat or vegetables. If such viruses can't live in humans they are discarded. If they can then they infect us.The real danger, however, come when a virus mutates. A virus which cannot infect humans suddenly spontaneously mutates and it may now be able to infect humans (any maybe loses it ability to infect the other species).This is how SARS is thought to have developed. A virus that usually infects wild civet cats, mutated into a form that can infect humans and was eaten by Chinese dinners in Guangdong province.HIV is thought to be a monkey virus that mutated form so that a strain of it was able to infect humans. West Nile virus, Mad Cow diease etc. have analogies in other species. I suppose human viruses mutate and infect animal species all the time too.In that regard cloning presents no more or less danger than making vaccines using animals, eating meat or letting children keep pets.
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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