Genetic Savings and Clone

[piranha]

i am not kidding you -- that is the company's name -- has delivered the first cloned pet to a woman in texas who was so bereft by the death of her cat that she shelled out U$50,000 for the clone.

"It's morally problematic and a little reprehensible," said David Magnus, co-director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University. "For $50,000, she could have provided homes for a lot of strays."

oh, i dunno -- is it also morally problematic and a little reprehensible if people with fertility problems don't just adopt an already-born child instead of going to extreme measures to get one of their own?

of course i think that in the case of cloning a lot of people have ignorant ideas about just how much a cloned pet will resemble the original; ignoring the impact of environmental factors both before and after birth. though i imagine it'll be interesting to research, and will likely tell us more regarding nature vs nurture questions. do we need more "feline production systems"? no, obviously not, but fancy breeders produce new cats too instead of encouraging people to adopt strays. *shrug*. good luck trying to change people's desires for what they consider "better".

Comments

[redbird]

I'd say it's problematic not because the $50,000 could have been spent some other way--I wonder how many strays, or homeless humans for that matter, could be taken care of for the price of hiring one co-director of a Center of Biomedical Ethics, which could probably function with a single director--but because, as you say, it probably won't be that much like the clone-parent, and because cloning is an iffy technique, at least so far and perhaps inherently, and may be more likely to produce animals with painful defects than normal breeding is.

I'm not big on fancy cats--we've had only basic housecat types from animal shelters and rescue organizations--but at least they don't breed for such unhealthy weirdness as is found in some dog breeds.

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree with redbird that the ethics are not about using money in a silly way. For me, the problem is that the success rate for cloning is still only 1-2% (from what I read in the Wall St. Journal yesterday), so this woman got Mr. Fluffykins back at the probable expense of dozens of Mr. Fluffykins that died in vitro. I don't think that I'd be comfortable knowing that I killed a beloved pet that many times, but I guess it gets back to the ethics issue that people don't identify the "personhood" of an entity until we can hold it in our arms, I suppose.

Re: Genetic Savings and Clone

[jinian.livejournal.com]

There are so many changes due to sheer randomness, too. White spotting in cats is supposed to be just one gene, so it'd have a lot of variation in pattern. (Really I'm not sure that the one-gene idea is accurate, though; Van pattern appears to breed pretty much true, so something else must be in the mix too.) And good luck trying to get similar tortoiseshell patterns; X inactivation is totally random as far as my bio text knows.

I do think it's a bad idea for people to spend huge amounts of money on having kids who are genetically theirs, but I can understand better how you could get there little by little. Cloning a pet would be one big lump sum, so I'd expect people to realize a little better what they were getting into. I can understand feeling like a pet has wonderful traits that should be passed on, but I've been to the pound and there's no shortage of wonderful traits there either. The human gene pool's the same way, and there are plenty of us without homes too.

I have a small conflict of interest with the human fertility problem, actually, since my parents got me through artificial insemination. I guess I think that level of intervention is probably all right, but I'm not sure how I'd feel if I hadn't come from one myself.

[djm4]

oh, i dunno -- is it also morally problematic and a little reprehensible if people with fertility problems don't just adopt an already-born child instead of going to extreme measures to get one of their own?

I find I don't have an easy answer to that one, actually. 'Reprehensible' is too strong, but it does sometimes make me wonder if such people have their priorities on straight.

It's their choice, and I'll actually pay quite a lot of taxes to let them have that choice, but I would personally look at adoption and fostering solutions (while there are still kids around who'd benefit from that). But then, I don't have any kids that are biologically mine, so I may not have a full understanding of what that means.

Odd Uses of Money

[eagle]

The very rich waste so much money on things that even fewer redeeming qualities that I get very suspicious of comments like the one that you quoted. Would they be saying the same thing if the person just spent $50,000 to breed a rare species, or is it specifically cloning that has them cranking up the commentary machine? I know what the news media cares about.

The way I look at this, I certainly wouldn't spend $50,000 on this, but the idea that money is "wasted" is based on largely bogus economic reasoning and I'd rather see experimentation and research in genetics (something that we are going to have to do somehow at some level to solve real, difficult problems like curing rare diseases) be paid for by quirky rich people with more money than sense than raising taxes on the average working family that has to check their financial resources before adopting an ordinary pet.

Any time the always bizarre world of people's individual priorities serves to finance a public good as a side effect, I'm happy. Seems like the best of all worlds (well, it would be even better if the company would promise to return all of their research results to the public domain, but even without that it will trickle out).

[nolly.livejournal.com]

oh, i dunno -- is it also morally problematic and a little reprehensible if people with fertility problems don't just adopt an already-born child instead of going to extreme measures to get one of their own?

Honestly? I think so.