HUMAN CLONING

1. HUMAN CLONING Helena Pereira de Melo Helena.melo@fd.unl.pt March 2014

2. RICHARD DAWKINS:

3. RICHARD DAWKINS: “My feeling is founded on pure curiosity. I know how I turned out, having been born in the 1940’s, schooled in the 1950’s, come of age in the 1960’s, and so on. I find it a personally riveting thought that I could watch a small copy of myself, 50 years younger, nurtured through the early decades of the 21st century. Mightn’t it feel almost like turning back your personal clock 50 years?”.

4. “If, one of these days, someone asks a physician to have his clone born, before or after his own death, how can we not fulfill his desire?”

5. Death is overwhelmed by: • Sexual reproduction– genetic information is inherited by each generation, but biodiversity is assured; • Asexual reproduction – the creation of a new life from a single parent – the same individual genome is transmitted to offspring, until the end of times.

7. Is this kind of immortality acceptable from a legal point of view?

8. What is cloning? Which are the applications of cloning?

9. Cloning: producing genetically identical individuals (cells, tissues, animals, plants…) by a form of asexual reproduction.

11. Ways to produce genetically identical animals: • Embryo splitting; • Nuclear transfer.

13. Embryo splitting: • physically separating the cluster of cells derived from a single fertilized egg into 2 or more parts; • it occurs spontaneously in our species, to produce “identical” twins; • it supposes a mother and a father; • you can only obtain 4 genetically identical individuals.

15. Nuclear transfer: • never occurs spontaneously in mammals; • produces thousands of copies of genetically identical individuals; • the nucleus of an unfertilized egg is removed, and replaced by a nucleus of a somatic cell, and this reconstructed egg is stimulated to start developing as an embryo; • can be done with the genetic material of 1 individual.

17. The history of cloning: • Embryo splitting; • Nuclear transfer.

18. a) Embryo splitting: • monozygotic twins have always existed; • artificially done in the last 50 years with frogs, rabbits, sheep, cows and human embryos; • in 1993, JERRY HALL and ROBERT STILLMAN of George Washington University, splitted 17 nonviable human embryos in 48 embryos, some of which survived in vitro 6 days.

20. b) Nuclear transfer cloning: • commonplace in the plant breeding world; • in the animal breeding world – preformed in frogs, sheep, mice, cows and monkeys; • Megan and Morag, Welsh Mountain sheep were born in 1996 at Roslin Institute – the first clones from differentied embryo cells.

21. Megan and Morag:

22. 1996 – Dolly is born: • cloned from the mammary cells of an adult female; • Scottish; • had no father; • was a twin sister of her biological mother; • mother of a lamb, named Bobby.

25. She had 3 mothers: • the ewe which gave the somatic cell; • the ewe which gave the enucleated egg; • a surrogate mother (a Scottish Blackface). Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, since she was genetically identical to the donor ewe.

26. 1996 - 2014: • Meng and Wolf clone monkeys from embryonic cell nuclei; • Wakayama clones mice from adult cell nuclei; • Wells clones cows from adult cell nuclei; • Severino Antinori proposes to reproductively clone humans. When shall humans be cloned?

27. Dr. Antinori and Dr Panos Zavos:

28. Prof. Grahame Bulfield

29. Human cloning: • technically possible – “in principle, what we can do with one mammal we can do with another”; • “the only barrier to cloning is the political and ethical barrier”.

30. Is human cloning ethically and legally acceptable? Dolly’s cloning lead to the discussion of human cloning.

31. We have to consider: Non-human animal cloning; Human cloning.

32. a) Non-human animal cloning:

33. is useful for the treatment of human diseases; • allows the serial production of genetically engineered animals that can be used as animal “donors” for xenotransplantation; • allows to expand the n.º of chosen livestock, so that we can have more and better food.

34. Ex.: • Polly, a transgenic sheep that has a human gene in every cell of her body, and produces proteins that can be used as medicine in her milk; • Pigs are genetically engineered in order to became source animals for xenografts.

35. Polly, the sheep:

36. Questions: • How many human genes must a lamb or a pig have in order to be a juridical person? • Which are the risks of the disappearance of the barriers among species? • Which are the consequences of cloning in biodiversity? – all clones shall be affected by the same infections that may kill them all.

37. Chimera:

38. Animal cloning is not forbidden: • it is very important for medical progress; • if the legal principals that rule animal research are respected and animal welfare preserved.

40. Why should we clone sheep if they are so similar to each other?

42. Why should we clone human beings if they are so similar to each other, the sheep would ask.Why should we clone or not clone human beings?

43. For cloning: • it is important for medical research, allowing a better understanding of human development; • therapeutic cloning is useful for the treatment of diseases like cancer and Parkinson.

44. Reproductive cloning: • embryo splitting raises the n.º of embryos available for womb implantation, and so it will not be necessary to repeat in case of failure, medical treatment in infertile women; • allows us to perform pre-implantation diagnosis in one embryo and to implant the other if the first embryo is healthy; • allows us to have identical twins that are born in different years.

45. It allows: • a grown up person to have an identical twin that he should rise as if it were his own child; • a couple with a genetic disease to have a child only with the genome of the healthy member; • the enlargement of the reproductive options available for humans;

46. the resurrection of the dead, cloning them from cells that were kept in laboratories. • to settle the old-age nature-nurture dispute by creating clones and raising them systematically in different environments.

47. To produce: • embryos for allotransplantion in case we needed an organ; • embryos to replace a child in case she/he dies; • hundreds of copies of genetically superior persons; • clones to give or to sell multiples of chosen human beings.

50. The clone would be “unique” since: • identical twins have different personalities; • the genome determinates only a part of human identity, being also important factors as the place and time of birth, the culture where one lives and the family to which one belongs.