Looks like they’ve figured out how to clone primates.

There’s long been some sort of quasi-religious belief for some that there is something more fundamentally difficult about cloning humans that means it will never happen, or not for decades. (“OK, you can clone a mouse, but you can’t clone a larger animal. OK, you can clone a sheep, but not a monkey.”) Well, it seems to me that the cloning of humans is inevitable, and now not very far off.

Of course, unlike conservatives (and one of the many ways in which I’m not one, “neo” or otherwise, despite confusion on the part of some apparent simpletons who comment here), I don’t have any intrinsic problems with cloning. It’s just a technology, and one (like all technologies) that can be used for good or ill. I in particular have no problem with cloning that provides directed organ generation, such as a liver, and think that the notion that such a growth would be a human being in its own right, and entitled to personhood status, nonsensical.

I also don’t have any intrinsic problem with cloning people and raising them to adulthood (despite the “yuck factor” issue that many seem to have with it). It just seems to me that it’s taking gene selection (something that we’ve been doing with offspring, consciously or otherwise, since the beginning of the race) to a new level. I don’t think that so many are going to do it that we become a monoculture, and that there will remain plenty of genetic mixing, as long as we consider it necessary as humans.

In any event, I welcome the development, and if it causes problems, then we’ll deal with them as they arise, but I certainly don’t want opposition to it to prevent the beneficial effects. If I have to go to Thailand or South Korea to grow myself a new liver, I’ll certainly have no moral compunction restraining me from doing so.

[Update in the afternoon]

Here’s a Reuters story that’s kind of a mess.

I wish that we could come up with some other word for growing stem cells and organs from your own cells than “cloning” because it creates the kind of confusion expressed in both the UN resolution and in the article. It strikes me that this is mainly a “feel good” resolution, since it’s non-binding, and everyone realizes that there’s no enforcement mechanism even if there were. This technology is going to happen, regardless of debates in Turtle Bay.

And this sentence makes no sense to me at all:

The authors said laws should grant clones full human rights to protect from discrimination.

Otherwise, opponents of clones in an inheritance dispute, for instance, might say that a clone and the person from whom their cells were grown should only get a half share each.

Huh? What is the legal scenario here? Who was cloned here, and what is their purported relationship with the person from whose cells they were cloned? If a couple, after reading my blog, and despite my physical appearance (or vice versa) decided that they wanted to create and raise a clone of me, there would be no legal relationship between me and him (or her). I’d like to think that they would need my permission, but as far as I know, there’s no clear law against stealing a lock of my hair and doing so. That person would be a legal child of that couple, with nothing to do with me, unless some prior arrangement were made for it. We are completely separate legal persons. If I were to inherit something from someone, that clone would have no claim on the inheritance simply because (s)he shared my genome.

On the other hand, if I were to create and raise such a clone, it would be my legal child, and no more or less entitled to my inheritance from (say) my father than any other child of mine would be.

But granting (assuming that this is the line of thinking here) that a clone is somehow a second instantiation of the same person, with the same legal rights, it makes no sense to complain about both being entitled to only a “half share each” of an inheritance. How much more could it, or should they get? If there is a whole inheritance that must be split evenly (and thus “fairly”) between two inheritors, how could each get any more than half? Do these people want to defy the laws of mathematics, or did they go to the Leo Blum school of accounting, in which he sold several thousand percent of a Broadway musical? Did the Reuters reporter give this statement any thought at all when writing it?

Expect a lot more confused argumentation, and reporting, as these technologies get closer to fruition. I think that it also points up the fact that people who were raised reading a lot of science fiction are both more familiar, and more comfortable with these concepts.