It was just about a year ago that humans were successfully cloned for the first time. Those researchers used fetal cells. A couple of weeks ago, it was announced that Robert Lanza from Advanced Cell Technology successfully cloned two humans using adult cells (from a 35 year old man and a 75 year old man).
May 1, 2014
Now we’ve made clones from adult humans
Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Bioethics, Cloning[3] Comments
Thinking to Believe 
May 1, 2014 at 7:28 am
What,…Social justice!!!
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May 1, 2014 at 9:14 am
Jason:
I believe this post will undoubtedly end up only discussing the right and wrong of human cloning as all religions will argue against it because it will challenge all religious traditions. BUT Could this be the precursor to the “Resurrection”? The new heaven and the new earth?
Could this new twist in human cloning be a way of looking outside the pretzel?
It would be interesting to talk about the infusion here of the “spirit”, if there is such an infusion and the infusion of the “soul”, if there is such an “infusion”, so often claimed to survive the body and live on after death.
Will human clones have a “soul”, ‘breathed into it’? It is even intriguing to imagine that identical consciousness may be passed on to the clone, sensory perceptions as well.
Dolly the sheep could never tell us anything about that but full adult human clones presumeably will be able to reveal the answers to those hidden questions, ethics and morals aside, of course.
Though it should be noted that there is a major difference in objective—with humans, the aim is to clone stem cells so that they can be used to treat diseases, not reproduce whole human beings.
Theoretically such stem cells could then be engineered to grow into various cells, e.g. heart, lung, liver, for transplant into a patient.
Funding for the research was provided by an unnamed foundation and the Korean Government—the experiments were conducted in a lab in California. The researchers point out that the process cannot be used to create a whole human being.
The big debate before was the use of fetal cells for cloning but this cloning is done from adult donor cells for use by the donors for medical purposes albeit to clone the stem cells, the researchers used unfertilized eggs donated by several unidentified women. After removing the DNA material inside the egg, new DNA material extracted from the skin cells of the male donors was injected inside and the resulting filled egg was exposed to a small dose of electricity to cause fusing—the egg was then allowed to “rest” for two hours. Afterwards each egg reprogrammed itself and grew into a blastocyst which eventually grew into a pluripotent stem cell that genetically matched the skin donor.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-04-successfully-clone-adult-human-stem.html#jCp
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May 1, 2014 at 9:34 am
No, this is nothing akin to a resurrection. It is asexual reproduction. Indeed, a better description of it would be late twinning.
Of course clones have souls. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be alive.
You could no more pass on one’s consciousness to a clone made in a lab than you could to a clone made in the uterus during natural twinning.
The act of cloning produces whole human beings. The only question is whether or not you allow that whole human being to mature through all stages of normal human development, or if you kill it early in its development so you can use its biological parts as medicine.
While some have debated whether or not cells from aborted fetuses should be used, the debate has never been about fetal cells in general. The debate is about how human beings are being treated. Cloning creates a new, unique, whole human being, that if implanted into a womb, would mature into a full-term baby, be born, and grow up just like you and I did. The moral problem is not the act of cloning (that’s just a matter of how you create the human), but how the cloned human being is treated (killed for its parts).
There is a concern about the act of cloning too, but its related to the technology. Lanza only had a 5% success rate. This is common, because the cloning process is not easy. To perfect the cloning process (even if every cloned human was gestated rather than killed) would require the creation and death of hundreds of thousands of humans.
Jason
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