Re: Count sheep, anyone?

Loren Haarsma (lhaarsma@OPAL.TUFTS.EDU)
Fri, 07 Mar 1997 14:24:47 -0500 (EST)

Janet Rice wrote:
>Loren, with regard to your point about using a cloning technique to grow a
>specific type of tissue rather than an embryo - the question I would ask is
>whether or not this could be considered as analogous to self-donated blood
>transfusion? Admittedly this is far outside my area of expertise, but for
>me it passes my internal "yuk" test - i.e the automatic response to cloning
>humans is "yuk", the automatic response to blood transfusions for most of
>us is "yeah, ok".

I tend to agree. It seems to me that there is an important difference
between (1) using cloning techniques to grow only specific tissues (by
turning on certain "control genes" during nuclear implantation); and (2)
using cloning techniques to grow an embryo with certain "control genes"
turned off to halt development at some point. The first procedure still
bothers me somewhat, but it seems like it could be considered separately
from the second. We must remember, also, that there are likely to be a
number of other procedures proposed which fall at various points between
those two scenarios.

I would hope that any proposed technique would be *thoroughly* tested on
other primates before it was even considered for humans.

Loren Haarsma