The press, and the bioethics people, and the religious groups, and the Pro-whatever groups, seem to have this fascination with cloning, and especially human cloning.
After reading my lecture notes a few times, I suddenly saw this sentence “She (Dolly) was not genetically modified, but was a clone”. Now what is so amazing about this sentence is that the entire module is more interested in the different ways of genetically modifying organisms. Cloning, simple basing cloning, is taken for granted. It’s so easy, it’s practically insignificant in the scientific sense. Dolly was great for the ability to clone a complicated being from an adult somatic cell. The press wasn’t very interested in the previous cloning successes with lower lifeforms. Perhaps if nobody reported it, we could have launched human cloning with only just as much hoo-ha.
But still, it’s just cloning. Genetic modification is the fun part. I personally do not believe we’ll ever be able to (in the next millennium) clone the brain/personality though. The very fact that it’s a growth process, in that neurons grow and die based on body interactions and stimuli, makes it impossible to reconstruct manually the neuron patterns.
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Side-Theory: if you came up with an idea, and no one argues against it, then it must be a very simple idea and/or very boring because it’ll be unstimulating, uncontroversial, inconsequential.
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Side-Thought: Are there monozygotic/identical triplets? quintuplets? If identical twins appear when a single embryo splits into two, how do you get triplets?
Identical triplets or quadruplets are very rare, as this means that the original fertilized egg split and then one of the resultant cells splits again (producing identical triplets) or, even more rarely, a further split occurs (producing identical quadruplets). Sometimes the original fertilized egg will split twice (to produce four embryos), and all four may survive and produce quadruplets, or one of the embryos may not survive and result in identical triplets. Wikipedia
Some identical twins are mirror-imaged. This means that if one twin is right-handed, the other is left-handed, or if one twin has a birth mark on their right shoulder, the other has it on their left shoulder, or their hair will part on opposite sides! Link
then there’s all that stuff about whether they share the same amnion or chorion or placenta, which isn’t very interesting to me.