Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Traditional culture - What else do you know about cloning technology "can benefit mankind"?

What else do you know about cloning technology "can benefit mankind"?

Science has always been a double-edged sword. However, whether a scientific and technological progress is really beneficial to human beings depends on how human beings treat and apply it, rather than choking on it just because it is temporarily unreasonable. Cloning technology may indeed be the same as atomic energy technology, which can not only benefit mankind, but also cause endless harm. On the one hand, it can bring many benefits to mankind. For example, maintaining excellent varieties, saving endangered animals, and using the same genetic background of cloned animals for biomedical research; On the other hand, it will challenge biodiversity. Biodiversity is the result of natural evolution and the driving force of evolution. Sexual reproduction is an important basis for the formation of biodiversity, and "cloning animals" will lead to the reduction of biological strains and the decline of individual viability.

As for people's fear that once the cloning technology is mature, thousands of "Hitler" will be cloned by people with ulterior motives, or another celebrity will be cloned to confuse people, that is a misunderstanding of cloning. The cloned person is only a genetic feature, and the social attributes such as thinking and personality influenced by many factors in the acquired environment cannot be exactly the same, that is, no matter how the cloning technology develops, only the human body can be cloned, but not the human soul, and there is an age gap between the cloned person and the cloned person. Therefore, the so-called human cloning is not a complete copy of human beings, historical figures will not be resurrected, and real people do not have to worry about having another "self".

[Edit this paragraph] All cloning projects and cloning time.

Sheep: 1996, Dolly

Macaque: Tetra, female, June 5438 +2000 10.

Pigs: in March 2000, 5 Scottish PPL piglets; August, Xena, female

Cattle: 200 1 year, alpha and beta, male.

Cat: 200 1 ending, plagiarist (CC), female.

Mouse: In 2002.

Rabbit: It was independently realized in France and South Korea from March to April, 2003;

Mule: May 2003, Gem, Idaho, male; June, Utah pioneer, male

Deer: Dewey in 2003.

Ma: Prometea, female, 2003.

Dog: Snoopy, Experimental Team of Seoul National University, Korea, 2005.

Pigs: On August 8, 2005, the first pig cloned from donor cells in China.

Although great progress has been made in cloning research, the success rate of cloning is still quite low: before Dolly was born, researchers experienced 276 failed attempts; After 9000 attempts, 70 calves were born, and one third of them died at an early age. Prometea also made 328 attempts to be born successfully. For some species, such as cats and orangutans, there are no reports of successful cloning. The cloning experiment of dogs is also the result of hundreds of repeated experiments.

Dolly's age test after birth showed that she was old when she was born. At the age of six, she developed arthritis, which is common in old age. This aging is thought to be caused by the wear of telomeres. Telomeres are terminal chromosomes. With cell division, telomeres are constantly worn during replication, which is usually considered as the cause of aging. However, after successfully cloning cows, the researchers found that they were actually younger. The analysis of their telomeres shows that they not only return to the length at birth, but also are longer than the telomeres at birth. This means that they can live longer than ordinary cattle, but many of them die prematurely because of overgrowth. Researchers believe that related research can eventually be used to change human life span.

[Edit this paragraph] Human cloning violates human bioethics.

Should modern science and technology, especially modern life science and technology, respect ethical principles and listen to ethical voices? According to some scientific lunatics secretly cloning human beings in the United States, experts point out that cloning human beings violates human bioethics, and there are great controversies and a series of legal problems that are difficult to solve.

Recently, many domestic media reprinted an amazing news reported by foreign media: a group of scientific lunatics manipulated by cult organizations are conducting a secret human cloning experiment in the depths of the desert in Nevada, USA. According to the same principle that British scientists created Dolly, the world's first cloned sheep, they extracted cells from an American baby girl who died in February this year and cloned them. It is said that "if all goes well, the world's first clone will be born at the end of next year."

After the news was disclosed, cloning technology and its ethical issues once again became a hot topic of discussion. If this news is true, how to treat this matter and how to correctly evaluate and think about this issue, the reporter visited the director of the Ethics, Law and Society Department of the Southern Research Center of the National Human Genome and researcher Shen Mingxian of the Institute of Philosophy of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Professor Shen said: Since Dolly sheep was successfully cloned by Roslin Institute in England in 1997, driven by fame and fortune, people abroad have been proposing and trying to engage in human cloning research. Although governments have banned it, reports related to human cloning have appeared in newspapers more than once in the past two years. However, it is really shocking that this time the speed is so fast and it is related to cult organizations.

It is understandable that parents who have lost their beloved daughter hope to revive their daughter through cloning technology. But if scientists use this to carry out experiments on human cloning, it is worth discussing. Professor Shen believes that even if cults are abandoned, this practice is not desirable. As far as "human cloning" is concerned, he will live in the shadow of "I am a replica of the dead". How will this affect his psychology?

According to the viewpoint of bioethics, science and technology should proceed from long-term interests and benefit all mankind. It must follow the four internationally recognized ethical principles of "doing good, not hurting, being independent and just". Dolly's sheep cloning has successfully experienced more than 200 failures, and there have been deformed or aborted sheep. However, human cloning is more complicated and will undoubtedly encounter more failures. If we create unhealthy, deformed or short-lived people, it will be a violation of human rights.

Professor Shen pointed out that at present, the scientific community divides cloning into therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. The former uses embryonic stem cells to clone human organs for medical research to solve the problem of insufficient donors for organ transplantation, which is supported by the international scientific and ethical circles, but there is a premise that the embryos used for therapeutic cloning cannot exceed the limit of pregnancy 14 days. As for reproductive cloning, that is, human cloning, on the whole, it violates the principles of bioethics, so the mainstream opinion of scientists is firmly opposed. UNESCO, the World Health Organization, the International Human Genome Ethics Committee and governments all expressed their opposition to reproductive cloning very clearly. Even if human cloning is really born, we still have to stick to this basic position.

[Edit this paragraph] Advantages and disadvantages of cloning

From Wen Wei Po, June 5438+065438+1October 8, 2000.

The advantages and disadvantages of biotechnology we are talking about mainly refer to cloning, and its advantages and disadvantages are as follows.

Pro: 1) cloning technology can relieve women's pain of not being a mother.

2) The implementation of cloning experiment has promoted the development of genetics and opened up a prospect for "manufacturing" animal organs that can be transplanted into human body.

3) Cloning technology can also be used to detect fetal genetic defects. Cloned fertilized eggs are used to detect various genetic diseases, and cloned embryos have exactly the same genetic characteristics as fetuses developed in uterus.

4) Cloning technology can be used to treat nervous system injury. Adult nerve tissue has no ability to regenerate, but stem cells can repair nervous system damage.

5) In in vitro fertilization, doctors often need to implant multiple fertilized eggs into the uterus in order to choose one of them to enter the pregnancy stage. But many women can only provide one egg for fertilization. This problem can be well solved by cloning. This egg cell can be cloned into multiple cells for fertilization, thus greatly improving the success rate of pregnancy.

Disadvantages: 1) Cloning will reduce genetic variation. Individuals produced by cloning have the same genetic genes and the same disease sensitivity, and a disease can destroy the entire population produced by cloning. It is conceivable that if all cattle in a country are the same cloned product, a slight virus may destroy the animal husbandry of the whole country.

2) The use of cloning technology will make people tend to breed the most valuable individuals in the existing population, instead of promoting the survival of the fittest of the whole population according to the laws of nature. In this sense, cloning technology interferes with the natural evolution process.

3) Cloning technology is an expensive technology, which requires a lot of money and the participation of biological professionals, with a high failure rate. Dolly is the only result of 277 experiments. Although more advanced technology has been developed, the success rate can only reach 2-3%.

4) Transgenic animals increase the risk of disease transmission. For example, if a cow producing medicinal milk is infected with a virus, the virus may infect patients through milk.

5) The application of cloning technology to human body will lead to the artificial control of the genetic traits of offspring. The core of the controversy caused by cloning technology is whether genetic manipulation of human embryos can be allowed in early development. This is unacceptable to many ethicists.

6) Cloning technology can also be used to create "Superman", or people who are physically strong but mentally retarded. Moreover, if cloning technology can be effectively used in humans, men will lose their genetic significance.

7) The impact of cloning technology on family relations will also be enormous. A child born from his father's DNA clone can be regarded as his father's twin brother, but the birth time has been delayed for decades. It's hard to imagine how a person will feel when he finds himself just a copy of another person.

[Edit this paragraph] The origin of cloning technology

Cloning is a transliteration of English clone, which is simply an artificially induced asexual reproduction method. But cloning is different from asexual reproduction. Asexual reproduction means that there is no combination of male and female germ cells, and only one kind of organism produces offspring. The common reproduction methods are spore reproduction, budding reproduction and fission reproduction. By layering, cutting or grafting the roots, stems and leaves of plants to produce new individuals, it is also called asexual reproduction. Sheep, monkeys, cows and other animals cannot reproduce asexually without manual operation. Scientists call artificial gene manipulation of animal and plant reproduction process cloning, and this biotechnology is called cloning technology.

The idea of cloning technology was first put forward by German embryologist in 1938. 1952, scientists first carried out cloning experiments with frogs, and then people continued to study cloning technology with various animals. Because of the little progress in this technology, the research work once entered a trough in the early 1980 s, and later some people cloned it successfully with mammalian embryonic cells. 1On July 5th, 1996, British scientist Dr Ian Wilmut cloned a live sheep from adult sheep somatic cells, which brought a major breakthrough in the research of cloning technology. It broke through the technical difficulty that only embryonic cells could be used for animal cloning in the past, and achieved the goal of animal cloning with somatic cells for the first time, realizing animal replication in a higher sense. The goal of studying cloning technology is to find a better way to change the genetic composition of domestic animals and cultivate animal groups that can provide consumers with better food or any chemicals they may need.

The basic process of cloning is to transplant the nucleus of a donor cell containing genetic material into an egg cell without nucleus, then fuse the two cells through micro-current stimulation, and then promote the new cells to divide and reproduce and develop into embryos. When the embryo develops to a certain extent (it takes about 6 days for Roslin Institute to clone sheep), it is implanted into the uterus of an animal to make the animal pregnant and give birth to an animal with the same gene as the donor. In this process, if the donor cells are genetically modified, the genes of the offspring of asexual animals will also change in the same way. The main difference between "Honu Lu Lu badminton technology" and Dolly sheep technology that successfully bred three generations of cloned mice is that the genetic material in the cloning process is directly injected into the egg cells by physical methods, rather than cultivated in the culture medium. In this process, chemical stimulation is used instead of electrical stimulation to control the egg cells again. 1On July 5th, 998, scientists from Ishikawa Animal Husbandry Center and Animal Husbandry Laboratory of Feng Jingen University announced that two calves cloned from adult animal somatic cells were born. The birth of these two cloned cows shows that the technology of cloning adult animals is repeatable.

What is cloning?

Cloning is a transliteration of the English word clone, which comes from the Greek word klone. Its original intention is to cultivate plants through asexual reproduction or vegetative reproduction, such as stem cutting and grafting.

Today's cloning refers to the asexual reproduction of organisms through somatic cells and the population of offspring individuals with exactly the same genotype formed through asexual reproduction. Cloning can also be understood as copying, copying, that is, producing the same copy from the prototype, and its appearance and genetic genes are exactly the same as the prototype.

1February, 1997, the news that Dolly the Sheep was born immediately attracted the attention of the whole world. This cloned sheep bred by British biologists through cloning technology means that human beings can use a somatic cell in an animal to create the same life as this animal, breaking the eternal laws of nature.

What can cologne be?

It should be said that all creatures can be cloned.

What is cloned now?

Frog: 1962, unsuccessful.

Carp: 1963, as early as 1963, China scientist Tong Dizhou successfully cloned a female carp by injecting the genetic material of a male carp into the egg of a female carp, which was 33 years earlier than Dolly's cloning. However, because the related papers were published in a China sci-tech journal and were not translated into English, they are not well-known internationally. (From: Public Broadcasting Company)

In ancient mythology, the Monkey King turned his hair into countless bizarre stories of the Monkey King, expressing the illusion that human beings copied themselves. 1938, German scientists first proposed the idea of mammalian cloning. 1996, after Dolly the sheep was born, cloning quickly became the focus of the world's attention, and people could not help but wonder: Will we follow the sheep? This kind of problem makes everyone feel uneasy. However, the opposition to cloning has not stopped the unremitting pursuit of scientists. With the successful cloning of primates, such as cattle, rats, pigs and even monkeys, which are closest to human biological characteristics, it has been believed that one day, scientists will use a human cell to replicate exactly the same person as the cell provider. Cloning human beings is no longer a dream in science fiction, but a reality that will surface. At present, three foreign organizations have officially announced that they will conduct human cloning experiments. Professor zavos of the University of Kentucky in the United States is working with an Italian expert named Antinori to plan to clone a human within two years.

Because human cloning may bring complicated consequences, most countries with advanced biotechnology have adopted an attitude of explicit prohibition or strict restriction. Clinton said: "It is dangerous to copy human beings through this technology and should be put an end to it!" "Hong Guofan, member of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and director of the National Gene Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also made it clear that he opposed the study of human cloning and advocated distinguishing cloning technology from human cloning.

Is human cloning really as terrible as the devil in Pandora's box?

In fact, the main reason why people can't accept human cloning experiments is the obstacle of traditional ethics. For thousands of years, human beings have been following the way of sexual reproduction, but human cloning is a product in the laboratory and a life created under human manipulation. Especially in the west, cloning "abandoning God to divide Adam and Eve" has been opposed by many religious organizations. Moreover, the relationship between clones is also contrary to the traditional ethical way of determining kinship by blood. All these make it impossible for clones to find a suitable place to live in traditional human ethics. However, as He Xiuxiu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, "The ethical issues of human cloning should be faced squarely, but there is no reason to oppose scientific and technological progress." The development of human society itself tells us that it is a historical progress for science and technology to drive people to update their ideas, while it is rigid to bind the development of science and technology with old ideas. Historically, blood transfusion technology, organ transplantation, etc. , has brought great ethical controversy, in 1978 when the first test-tube baby was born, caused an uproar, but now, people have been able to treat all this correctly. This shows that the idea of constantly updating in the face of scientific and technological development has not brought disaster to mankind, on the contrary, it has benefited mankind. As far as cloning technology is concerned, "therapeutic cloning" will make a breakthrough in producing transplanted organs and overcoming diseases, and bring revolutionary changes to biotechnology and medical technology. For example, when your daughter needs a bone marrow transplant, no one can provide it for her; When you unfortunately lost a 5-year-old child, you can't get rid of the pain; When you want to raise your own children but can't have children ... maybe you can realize the great scientific value and practical significance of cloning. The research of therapeutic cloning and the experiment of complete human cloning complement and promote each other. The end point of therapeutic cloning is the emergence of complete human cloning. If used properly, they can and should bring good news to human society.

Science has always been a double-edged sword. However, whether a scientific and technological progress is really beneficial to human beings depends on how human beings treat and apply it, rather than choking on it just because it is temporarily unreasonable. Cloning technology may indeed be the same as atomic energy technology, which can not only benefit mankind, but also cause endless harm. But the essence of "fear of technology" is the fear of misuse of technology, not the fear of technology itself. At present, the attitudes of all countries in the world towards human cloning are ambiguous. Last year, Britain passed a bill allowing the cloning of early human embryos with more than two-thirds of the votes, while in the United States, Germany and Australia, voices calling for relaxing restrictions on therapeutic cloning gradually sounded. It can be said that which country has mastered the technology of human cloning first means that it has the advantage and initiative, and the country that started late may suffer unpredictable losses. Just as the United States first mastered atomic energy technology, although this technology showed its evil side from the beginning, later countries had to step up research and experiments in this field. From this point of view alone, it is also worth discussing to adopt a simple negative attitude towards human cloning experiments.

As for people's fear that once the cloning technology is mature, thousands of "Hitler" will be cloned by people with ulterior motives, or another celebrity will be cloned to confuse people, that is a misunderstanding of cloning. The cloned person is only a genetic feature, and the social attributes such as thinking and personality influenced by many factors in the acquired environment cannot be exactly the same, that is, no matter how the cloning technology develops, only the human body can be cloned, but not the human soul, and there is an age gap between the cloned person and the cloned person. Therefore, the so-called human cloning is not a complete copy of human beings, historical figures will not be resurrected, and real people do not have to worry about having another "self".

Sheep: 1996, Dolly

Macaque: Tetra, female, June 5438 +2000 10.

Pigs: in March 2000, 5 Scottish PPL piglets; August, Xena, female

Cattle: 200 1 year, alpha and beta, male.

Cat: 200 1 ending, plagiarist (CC), female.

Mouse: In 2002.

Rabbit: It was independently realized in France and South Korea from March to April, 2003;

Mule: May 2003, Gem, Idaho, male; June, Utah pioneer, male

Deer: Dewey in 2003.

Ma: Prometea, female, 2003.

Dog: 2005, experimental team of Seoul National University, South Korea, Snaby.

Although great progress has been made in cloning research, the success rate of cloning is still quite low: before Dolly was born, researchers experienced 276 failed attempts; After 9000 attempts, 70 calves were born, and one third of them died at an early age. Prometea also made 328 attempts to be born successfully. For some species, such as cats and orangutans, there are no reports of successful cloning. The cloning experiment of dogs is also the result of hundreds of repeated experiments.

Dolly's age test after birth showed that she was old when she was born. At the age of six, she developed arthritis, which is common in old age. This aging is thought to be caused by the wear of telomeres. Telomeres are terminal chromosomes. With cell division, telomeres are constantly worn during replication, which is usually considered as the cause of aging. However, after successfully cloning cows, the researchers found that they were actually younger. The analysis of their telomeres shows that they not only return to the length at birth, but also are longer than the telomeres at birth. This means that they can live longer than ordinary cattle, but many of them die prematurely because of overgrowth. Researchers believe that related research can eventually be used to change human life span.

Human cloning violates human bioethics.

Should modern science and technology, especially modern life science and technology, respect ethical principles and listen to ethical voices? Experts point out that some scientific lunatics secretly clone human beings in the United States-cloning human beings violates human life ethics.

Recently, many domestic media reprinted an amazing news reported by foreign media: a group of scientific lunatics manipulated by cult organizations are conducting a secret human cloning experiment in the depths of the desert in Nevada, USA. According to the same principle that British scientists created Dolly, the world's first cloned sheep, they extracted cells from an American baby girl who died in February this year and cloned them. It is said that "if all goes well, the world's first clone will be born at the end of next year."

After the news was disclosed, cloning technology and its ethical issues once again became a hot topic of discussion. If this news is true, how to treat this matter and how to correctly evaluate and think about this issue, the reporter visited the director of the Ethics, Law and Society Department of the Southern Research Center of the National Human Genome and researcher Shen Mingxian of the Institute of Philosophy of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Professor Shen said: Since Dolly sheep was successfully cloned by Roslin Institute in England in 1997, driven by fame and fortune, people abroad have been proposing and trying to engage in human cloning research. Although governments have banned it, reports related to human cloning have appeared in newspapers more than once in the past two years. However, it is really shocking that this time the speed is so fast and it is related to cult organizations.

It is understandable that parents who have lost their beloved daughter hope to revive their daughter through cloning technology. But if scientists use this to carry out experiments on human cloning, it is worth discussing. Professor Shen believes that even if cults are abandoned, this practice is not desirable. As far as "human cloning" is concerned, he will live in the shadow of "I am a replica of the dead". How will this affect his psychology?

According to the viewpoint of bioethics, science and technology should proceed from long-term interests and benefit all mankind. It must follow the four internationally recognized ethical principles of "doing good, not hurting, being independent and just". Dolly's sheep cloning has successfully experienced more than 200 failures, and there have been deformed or aborted sheep. However, human cloning is more complicated and will undoubtedly encounter more failures. If unhealthy, deformed and short-lived people are created, it is a violation of human rights.

The diversity of human genes is the biological basis of human evolution, and the so-called "immortality" that those scientific lunatics want to create is actually a copy of the same gene, which may reduce the diversity of genes and is not conducive to human evolution. Therefore, we should resolutely oppose human cloning from the perspectives of individuals, the whole, social evolution and bioethics.

Professor Shen pointed out that at present, the scientific community divides cloning into therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. The former uses embryonic stem cells to clone human organs for medical research to solve the problem of insufficient donors for organ transplantation, which is supported by the international scientific and ethical circles, but there is a premise that the embryos used for therapeutic cloning cannot exceed the limit of pregnancy 14 days. As for reproductive cloning, that is, human cloning, on the whole, it violates the principles of bioethics, so the mainstream opinion of scientists is firmly opposed. UNESCO, the World Health Organization, the International Human Genome Ethics Committee and governments all expressed their opposition to reproductive cloning very clearly. Even if human cloning is really born, we still have to stick to this basic position.

Modern science and technology is a double-edged sword, which will bring some negative effects while benefiting mankind. This raises a question for us: should modern science and technology, especially modern life science and technology, respect ethical principles or listen to ethical voices? Professor Shen pointed out: Now some scientists suggest that it should be done as long as it is scientifically possible. Actually, this is a wrong view. If technically we can create super life that seriously harms human beings, can we also create it? Some scientific lunatics are doing things that are harmful to mankind under the banner of "scientific freedom". Therefore, we should be wary of modern science and technology being used by some people with ulterior motives. In addition, the freedom of science and ethics cannot be opposed. The fact of the development of modern life science shows that the standardization and guidance of ethics does not restrict the development of science. Listening to the voice of ethics is conducive to the healthy and smooth development of science.