h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My mother used to beat me with a knotted donkey but I came through all right. There's always a bluebird in the sky if I have to pin it there myself. I'd wear my hair longish if I had any left, but I always look clever because I'm frowning ever so slightly.

Hi Mund - I always say when the donkey comes out, keep your head down and think of England. Turn that frown upside down....

Hi Wandawoman,

I'm older now (aren't we all?). The donkey is a thing of the past and I'm an accomplished, unpublished novelist.

Crisis this weekend, as I try to present my novel about human cloning to the agents and publishers who have not yet noticed its brilliance.

You have to exploit the flow, not just go with it.

Mund

Goodluck Mund - with the book. Human Cloning, very relevant, very scary!

Yeah Mund - don't be a sheep, exploit your talents. Tell us where human cloning will take us.

I'm not a doom and gloom girl but this cloning business sounds ghastly. Would we grow clones for perfect heart/liver/eye transplants?? Or just for couples who can't have children! Or singles who don't want a partner involved in making the baby? Or mad meglomaniacs who don't want to die????

Can they clone from dead people? DNA of mother Teresa inserted into an egg? Another Martyr or Half chicken half saint??

Confuses the bejesus out of me??!?!?!?!?!?

You've given me a couple of new ideas for novels already - half chicken...

Boring bit starts here:

Cloning techniques will improve, through the "sacrifice" of thousands and thousands of experimental animals, but Antinori's experiments in the next few years might slow things down when we see the miscarriages and deformities they produce.

More rich maniacs will queue up to clone themselves, under the illusion that they will achieve immortality. But they will be too stupid to realise that their thoughts and memories can't be passed on to this wonderful, youthful body.

Scientists will work on the cloning of cultures, maybe starting from stem cells, which may well lead to efficient ways of producing replacement tissues for transplant and repair (but not big organs). There will be lots of debate about whether humans (embryos) are being produced then killed in an industrial process, but the money and the clamour for cures will drown it.

Self-promotion bit starts here:

I've got to tart up my book so that it reads more slickly, and have a shave and use a lot of make-up so that the papers don't mind taking my photograph. Maybe I should have produced a clone of myself twenty years ago. Then he could sell my book...

Hmmm interesting.

What if through more experimentation we discover that cloning produces perfection - what if our knowledge of DNA and strict scientific rules can allow cloning to guarantee no more deformaties, no more generic defects. The random factor of two people mateing no longer means - cross your fingers and hope for the best - but infact a guaranteed perfect healthy human - is always produced.

Meglomainiacs might well achieve immortality - the experiments on twins that had been sepatated at birth showed spooky findings - the twins had such similar lives, ambitions, successes... Maybe our DNA does store certain core beliefs, driving forces, ambitions - that could lead the 'clone' to having similar/exact same goals as the guy cloned or/and is more than happy to push the cloned Meglomaniacs successes/ambitions of World Domination... forward!

What paper you gonna be in - i'll keep a beady eye out!

I haven't got as far as the papers. This is a campaign to get noticed by publishers, who are unfortunately influenced by the prettiness of authors as well as the quality of the writing. And I ain't pretty.

There's no such thing as perfection - the genome is too big and variable a machine to be able to control it 100%. There may be opportunities to improve a genetic pattern, but what kind of social agency would you have to set up to direct the reproductive activiites of even a tiny proportion of the population?

I think cloning will always be a sport of the rich..... Or couples that are destined only to have badly ill children, who can encourage their communities to sponsor the treatment.

When I predicted clone technology achieving perfection, I thought someone like me... No my head isn't enormous - I meant someone free of heart defects, blindness, MS.

Doom to the Human species if cloning ever becomes standard practice. Genious comes from adversity - the human character is built through struggle. Random selection always the best.

Perhaps DNA information getting into the hands of Insurance companies - and affecting Premiums - will encourage soon-to-be-parents to invest in cloning - so their kids won't have to pay through the nose for life insurance???????!!!!!! And if the route to Worldwide success concentrates more and more on qualifications maybe prospective parents will be having serious conversations about taking an alternative route in conceiveing their babies.

Who can AFFORD low IQ and dodgy lungs?

Why produce a clone?

Is it a clone of me? Am I healthy? Good. Am I rich? Possibly. Why do I want to do it?

Is it a clone of someone else? Is he/she healthy? Good. Is he/she a great artist/philanthropist/megalomaniac? Hmm. Why do I want to do it?

The clone's genome is identical to somebody else's genome. Except that current techniques guarantee that most cloned offspring will be genetically damaged and there's always the mitochondrial DNA (whisper it who dares) which comes from the egg and threatens that precious identity. Why do I want to do it?

There seem to be a couple of people out there with far more dollar bills than brain cells who think that they can clone "me". But "me" is a body plus a mind and a history, and there's nothing in the farthest reaches of cloning self-advertisement that even addresses that REALLY hard stuff...

Why Reproduce?

Is it simple for cute little babies, or someone to look after us when we get older??? Is it so we never really die, there is always something of us still walking around in the years to come.

I don't think it's tooooo much of a stretch to believe some people would prefer not to just go on POT LUCK when conceiving but instead make a clear decision on what baby they will have - same IQ, same looks as Father or Mother!

Plus couples who have a high propensity for producing defective children (I know that isn't a very PC term) - Could cloning guarantee a child without problems?

I think cloning is foder for dark comics. It embraces a science which is scary, even when considering the cloning IDEA as a pure and positive technique to improve mankind!

Around the world this technique is being used - Russia, Europe, America. The possibilites are vast, the implications boggle my brain. There will ineveitable be casualties and outcomes that will disgust, but the discoveries will advance our knowledge by such a grand degree that disasters become worth while!

This technology is cataclysmic in it's scope - it could allow the great dictators to recreate themselves over and over again. Armies of the strongest men could be grown - as a crop - from the loins of peasants!

I think Intelligence is guaranteed in the people involved with cloning - What about Morals?

Do you mind if I steal a few of your phrases for my story?

In the short term, cloning is going to be imperfect - there will be lots of defective children for every successful one. That might mean 99 defective clones of Fred for the one son-of-Fred who appears to be viable. Alternatively, Fred and Jim and the 98 others each have one chance and it happens that Nigel is the one with the apparently successful birth.

Either way, and just to keep the numbers simple, that might mean 60 embryos which fail to implant in the womb or abort spontaneously, and 39 which go to term and are born. 29 might die early, and ten might need continuing care.

I hate to be so blunt, but that means that somebody has to look after a lot of "failed" babies. Who's going to pay for the many Freds? Who's going to support the many families which don't end up with the one out of a hundred?

And it's only an apparently successful birth...

Hey Mund,

You steal what you like, I feel proud you would consider some of my phrases worthy!

Where do you get your figures from? I wonder how they compare with just trying to have a baby the normal way?

For any organisation or entrepreneur (spelling has always been a problem) to consider cloning as a legitimate alternative surely would only do it when the technology gives statistics of success at over 50%? Am I being naieve?

My figures were plucked from the air, but based on reading of lots of the science from Dolly the sheep and later. The embryo which became Dolly was one of nearly 500 attempts, if I remember rightly, and none of the others got a name.

The technique at the moment is to replace the nucleus in an egg with that from a male cell (it doesn't have to be the man, but that's what Antinori is proposing for his human experiments). You have to stick needles through cell walls, put the genetic material in the right place, give it a small electric shock to make it somehow start to behave like a recently fertilised cell, and hope for the best.

We have a sheep and a handful of other large creatures generated by this type of technique, but most of the recent work has been on mice and there is no public coverage of the wastage rate - the number of failures for each success.

The gross intervention required to produce the electrified egg cells is known to produce frequent genetic damage which can't necessarily be detected by screening the embryo before implantation in the womb.

To get to your 50% chance of success we'll have to go through thousands and thousands of mice and an unknown number of human "failures". With luck, many will be miscarriages which can be studied, but at least some will be born handicapped. Who looks after them? Who pays for them? What are they told when they grow up about why they were born?

I'm concerned that parents can be so deluded or desperate that they will sign up for this kind of experiment.

You raise an interesting point. When discussing the birth of abnormal children through cloning you ask who will look after these children. From what i've read we are far from being able to produce babies by artifical means so obviously the mother would be responsible.... Or would women accept money to grow a clone.. Would mothers hand over their baby to authorities?? Could there be women in the first world who are desperate enough for money to do this??? Or would these women be 2nd/3rdWorld women on the Breadline... Would the UN allow this?

There has been basic selective breeding for hundreds of years - Dogs, Cats, Cows, Pigs, Horses... The scientists must of gone through many manky, mutations before we got the healthy, pleasing appearances, strong, meat full creatures that we see today. Out of a low tech science we created good?!? Are we not just perfecting a technique?

My middle names are 'Devils Advocate'

Selective breeding almost always produces viable offspring at every generation (though you could make an exception for the Pekinese dog). Cloning (and GM, though IO don't want to open that one up again just now) isn't like that.

This is a fascinating conversation It's not something I know much about, but I can appreciate how important it is and know I suppose relevant bits and pieces from what my sister has told me. Genetically speaking I suppose she's going the other way - she's studying evolution - but I guess that's more relevant a topic to cloning (in a fairly broad sense) than anything else.