Cloned Babies

[Troubleshooter]

Originally posted by wolf
It all regresses to the mean, dude.

Won't work. You won't end up with slightly smarter. You'll get significantly dumber.

How would adding smarter/stronger/faster/etc. people to the breeding population lower the results?

I know that it all gravitates towards the mean, but your math puzzles me.

[Shattered Soul]

They're not talking about IMPROVING children; they're talking about making them to order.

It is, in the strictest sense, taking away from an individual the right (yeah, it's not the word I mean, but it's gets the point across) to be who they would've been so that you can get the baby whose hair color, height, etc. matches what you want. Hell, if that's how you feel about it, go and adopt one who matches your criteria.

Using genetic manipulation to fix congenital defects is more than acceptable; it's a responsibility of science to use what it can to correct things that would destroy quality of life, if they are able. Using genetic manipulation to order up the kid you want is just shallow. And when you think about it, what you're saying when you do that is that your genes aren't good enough....

As to improving intelligence and the like, we don't know what that will lead to. For instance,would an increase in intelligence lead to a decrease in emotions? After all, emotions and logical thought don't always mix well. Will we end up with a generation of Spocks? That would suck.

What we oughta do is just sterilize all the stupid people.

[tw]

Babies, like Dolly the Sheep, cannot be made to order. Some factors can be made more likely to occur. But DNA alone does not determine what results. Statistical variences occur which is why clones of Dolly were not identical to Dolly. Best one can do is increase probabilities of certain characteristics - then hope for the best.

[aerion_13]

Then does anyone know why Dolly was crippled and died of old age at a young age? Scientifically speaking.

[jaguar]

I'm no expert but from what I read the cells in dolly aged incredibly fast, I think they may have started at her mother's age or something. Like a counter that needed to be reset or something. That of course it the highly scientific version

Considering the complexity of the human body I'll be surprised if we can accurately pick more than a couple of traits by the end of the century. The genome is an incredibly complex intertwined mass and the opportunities for experimentation are very, very minimal.

If the first publicly shown clone is a fuckup the science will be off the agenda for the next 20 years. If someone is caught doing it behind the scenes the effect will be similar. We're still miles off being able to even guesstimate which genes control things like eyecolour without side effects - genetic characteristics tend to be the result of a mix bag of genes, it's like like you flick the switch up for brown and down for green. The whole exercise is like decrypting a massive RSA key.

Of course sooner or later, it will happen and all the moral handwringing will have no effect whatsoever.

[CzinZumerzet]

And I hear the distant sound of jackboots....
'Springtime, with Hitler, in Germany' tra la...

[staceyv]

i want to clone myself and re-raise myself.

[lumberjim]

oh, let us do it.

[BrianR]

I found this when I was looking for another pic...

[be-bop]

Originally posted by aerion_13
Then does anyone know why Dolly was crippled and died of old age at a young age? Scientifically speaking.

You've no idea what happens to good looking sheep in the wilds of Scotland do you Baaaaaaaahhhh

[Slartibartfast]

Originally posted by jaguar
I'm no expert but from what I read the cells in dolly aged incredibly fast, I think they may have started at her mother's age or something. Like a counter that needed to be reset or something. That of course it the highly scientific version

That's very close to true, from what I understand.

The chromosomes in cells duplicate themselves every time a cell divides. The duplicates are identical to the original except for the ends of the chromosomes, called the telomeres. After each division, the telomeres get shorter. Cells are programmed to self destruct if their telomeres are too short. This means that the total number of divisions an animal cell can undergo is fixed at a certain number from the moment of conception.

Dolly's original egg cell was really some cell from her parent that was 'zapped' or something in order to make it think it was a fertilized egg. While its DNA is intact, it still has the shortened telomeres of a grown sheep, so Dolly may have been physically young, but her cells thought they were old.

For true cloning (or immortality) we have to discover how to reset this telomeres timer.