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Posted by klausen on 22:06:52 2004/07/28
In Reply to: Re: Ron Reagan Democratic National Convention 07/27/04 posted by Claudia
England has the sensible policy of banning attempts at cloning whole humans while permitting research to clone individual organs. No sense in throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I wonder what people would think of cloning anencephalic humans for spare body parts? These creatures would have no real brains and no consciousness, but would otherwise be just like humans, perfectly genetically paired with normal, existing humans. We could keep them on life support and store them in warehouses, harvesting the organs out of them whenever they were needed, thus providing identical-twin style transplants for everyone without immunosuppression. The image seems ghastly, but what exactly would be wrong with it, unless you assume that a human soul would reside in anything that looked like a human, even if it never had a brain? With respect to the technical difficulties of this project, viable anencephalic frog clones have already been produced.
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