Cloning benefits a person

Alexander Panchin, Novaya Gazeta, 11.07.2008

And God created man in His own image.
Genesis, 1:27
What will it be like for a person to live knowing that he is just someone's copy?
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin

July fifth, 1996 is the birthday of the most famous sheep named Dolly. Her birth symbolized an outstanding breakthrough in the field of biotechnology: the lamb was conceived not as a result of the fusion of an egg and a sperm, but by introducing a nucleus from an adult sheep breast cell into an unfertilized egg without a nucleus. Thus, Dolly had genes identical to the genes of the nucleus donor, that is, she was a clone. Dolly's birth also served as a seed for all kinds of scientific, ethical and religious discussions regarding the possibilities of subsequent human cloning and the permissibility of introducing cloning into practice.

(Pictured: On March 14, 2005, the German public in sheep masks and Chancellor Schroeder protests against the presentation of the prestigious award to one of the creators of Dolly the sheep, Jan Wilmut.)

Artificial cloning uses nuclei from cells of an adult organism. To date, it has been possible to successfully clone a carp, a rat, a mouse, a sheep, a bull, a mule, a horse, a dog. Cloning a mule is interesting because this hybrid of a donkey and a horse is not able to reproduce independently and cloning is the only way to preserve a successful organism. In 2004, the first commercial cloning was carried out – the creation of a copy of Nicky's cat, who died at the age of 17, cost the owner from Texas $50,000. The very first cloned cat is more than 6 years old, she is perfectly healthy and has three kittens. There are also the first attempts to clone a person, during which it was possible to obtain viable embryos.

From a practical point of view, human cloning has two purposes. The first is reproductive cloning to produce offspring. Especially acute issues of reproductive cloning affect infertile people, as well as people of non-standard sexual orientation who are unable or unwilling to have children sexually. The second purpose is therapeutic cloning, obtaining embryonic stem cells, for the treatment of diseases.

Reproductive cloning is criticized by both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. "Human cloning is an immoral, insane act leading to the destruction of the human personality, challenging its Creator," Patriarch Alexy II believes. Perhaps if the patriarch had known that in the future cloning could be used for such important things as raising the level of Russian sports (and football in particular: 22.06.2008 Alexy II said after the wreath-laying ceremony at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier: "Today the sorrow associated with the anniversary of the Great Patriotic War is diluted by our common joy about yesterday's victory of the Russian national team"), he would have treated this idea more favorably.  "What will it be like for a person to live knowing that he is just someone's copy?" – asks Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin. The answer to the last question can be obtained by asking any identical twin. There are no problems for people with identical appearance, age and even upbringing conditions. No one will call the birth of twins or even triplets immoral or unnatural. The situation is even better for an adult clone – the clone will be a child growing up at a completely different time, in completely different conditions, which will affect his individuality: it will undoubtedly differ from the individuality of the genetic parent. Some studies on twins show that character traits are about equally dependent on genetic factors and upbringing.

People's ideas about cloning are very much distorted under the influence of cinema. Some people seriously believe that cloning is when one person enters a certain "magic" box, and two identical people come out, and in identical costumes. The plots of Hollywood films, like the picture "The Sixth Day", have very little relation to reality. The clone must be carried by the mother for nine months. The clone will not be born as an adult at all – he will have to grow up, like any child. The clone will not have the memory or skills of its genetic parent – this information is transmitted through our culture, not through genes.

Another problem of cloning is related to the potential health risks of the future clone, in particular, the possibility of premature aging. The famous scientist Alexey Olovnikov in 1971 drew attention to the problem of shortening of chromosomes in cells as a result of divisions. The scientist suggested that the shortening of chromosomes cannot go on forever – at some point the cell will grow old and lose the ability to divide. But why are our chromosomes not shorter than the chromosomes of our ancestors? It turned out that there are special areas at the ends of chromosomes – telomeres. When the chromosomes are doubled, these sections really shorten, but a special enzyme – telomerase, active in some cells (for example, in stem cells), can complete the telomeres to their original size. It turns out that in the presence of the telomerase enzyme, cells are able to divide without any special restrictions, without "aging". The absence of telomerase in most cells is one of the protective mechanisms against uncontrolled division, that is, cancer.

Nevertheless, cell nuclei taken from an adult organism may contain chromosomes with shortened telomeres, and this could affect the development of a clone. However, some experiments show that the environment inside the egg can turn on telomerase, which will lead to the completion of telomeres on the chromosomes of the introduced nucleus. In cases where this does not happen automatically, telomerase can be turned on artificially. In any case, the problem of chromosome shortening during cloning, as it turned out, is only technical in nature. There is another problem. The fact is that all cells of the body, with a single exception (lymphocytes), have the same DNA sequences, despite the fact that the cells themselves may be different. For example, a nerve cell is completely different from a skin cell. This is due to the fact that different genes are turned on or off in different cells. Therefore, it was not at all obvious that as a result of transplanting the nucleus of a skin cell into an egg, it would turn out to be an egg, and not a skin cell. But it turned out that after the transplantation of the nucleus, the egg can still retain its properties and give a full-fledged embryo, otherwise cloning by this method would be impossible.

Dolly the sheep lived for six years, half as long as the average sheep of her breed live, but she did not die of old age, but from lung cancer caused by retrovirus pulmonary adenocarcinoma, a very common disease for sheep. No physiological signs of aging were found in Dolly. She left offspring of six healthy lambs. At the moment, there is no reason to believe that clones age faster or get sick more often. Perhaps we will find out about the problems in the future when there are more cloned animals. But even if there were any problems, this would not be a reason to prohibit reproductive cloning. Our society is full of people with genetic diseases that are very likely to be passed on to their descendants, and no one forbids such people to have children. At best, they are offered artificial insemination and diagnosis of fertilized eggs in order to choose the healthiest embryo. If people whose children are known to be sick are allowed to have offspring, it is unclear what moral grounds exist to prohibit the creation of a clone that is likely to be healthy. After all, at least the absence of genetic diseases in the donor of the nucleus is time-tested!

Some critics of cloning scare with horrors like those shown in the Michael Bay film "The Island", where clones are grown to then take organs from them. If in any society people can be disposed of for organs without their consent, then, undoubtedly, such a society has very serious problems and cloning technology has absolutely nothing to do with it. Having been born, a clone has all human rights, including the right to life. No one can just take an organ from a person.

Another argument against cloning can be formulated as follows: people will clone themselves for selfish purposes. However, in this sense, cloning is no worse than ordinary reproduction. Many people have children in order to leave an heir, an assistant, a breadwinner, and there is nothing immoral in this. In the case of cloning, there is even a significant advantage: creating a clone will require a well-considered decision by an adult, which means that the clone will be a welcome child. But with sexual reproduction, pregnancy is often undesirable. Thus, cloning is a good alternative, but by no means a substitute for sexual reproduction: cloning is an expensive and complex process. Sexual reproduction, on the contrary, is a natural (pleasant) process that does not require special expenses, and cloning will not compete with it. But the painful part of reproduction is childbirth, while it is inevitable in both cases.

Another problem is that cloning requires surrogate mothers and egg donors. There are a lot of legal problems here: who will have the right to be considered a parent, is it possible to pay for an egg, how many eggs can be taken from one donor? All these are important, but solvable issues. It is much easier for women in this sense – they can give themselves an egg, a nucleus, and bear a fetus. The problem of the shortage of donor eggs may be solved by using animal eggs, for example, chimpanzee eggs. The use of animal eggs for therapeutic cloning (which we will now smoothly move on to) is already being put into practice.

Therapeutic cloning is associated with obtaining stem cells with ideal genetic compatibility for transplantation to a patient. As with reproductive cloning, a nucleus is taken from an adult cell, transplanted into an egg cell devoid of a nucleus. The resulting hybrid cell divides over a period of time, and the resulting cells can be used to treat diseases such as Parkinson's disease, muscular dystrophy, diabetes. An interesting possibility in connection with the use of such (and other stem) cells is that the embedded cells can be modified genetically to treat genetic diseases. For example, patients with hemophilia suffer from the fact that they do not have two genes responsible for the production of IX and XIII blood clotting factors. If working copies of genes are embedded in the chromosomes of the transplanted nucleus, it is possible to obtain a culture of cells producing these factors, which theoretically can be used to treat hemophilia. In practice, such technologies have just begun to develop.

Along with cloning, other methods of obtaining embryonic stem cells have been developing recently. These include developments related to the "reprogramming" of cells. Some scientists believe that it is possible to turn an ordinary skin cell into an embryonic cell using genetic engineering. Another option is to take an embryonic cell "in reserve" from a developing embryo. When such a person is born, he will have a culture of his own embryonic cells, which can be used for therapeutic purposes at any age, if necessary. Unfortunately, the latter method applies only to those people who have not yet been born. With the development of such alternative methods, there may be no need to clone embryos obtained from eggs as sources of stem cells.

The most extreme and fantastic case of therapeutic cloning is the cultivation of a body devoid of a central nervous system for the subsequent transplantation of an aging person's brain into it. At the moment, this is purely a fantasy: modern medicine is not able to restore even a broken spinal cord, as the tragic experience of Christopher Reeve has shown. The actor who played Superman invested a huge amount of money in the development of stem cells and medicine, but did not wait for a cure for paralysis, which he acquired as a result of a spinal injury. However, in the distant future, even such fiction can become an everyday reality.

Interestingly, Islam has a negative attitude towards reproductive cloning, but sees no particular harm in therapeutic cloning. For example, in Malaysia, the National Fatwa Council has ruled that therapeutic cloning of human embryos is ethically permissible if the embryo is not allowed to reach the age of 120 days. But Christians find themselves in an awkward position: on the one hand, they are against abortion, because they believe that a person's soul appears at the moment of conception. On the other hand, cloning conception does not imply, so, according to this logic, the clone does not have a soul at all. Let's hope that in this regard, the era of the Inquisition will not return and the church recognizes clones as equal to other people. In general, the rejection of cloning by Christianity is surprising, because this is an extremely rare case when a scientific discovery fits well into the Holy Scriptures, no matter what atheist skeptics say: "And the Lord God made a woman out of a rib taken from a man, and brought her to a man." What is this, if not cloning, using the osteoblast nucleus – bone tissue cells? Interestingly, it is theoretically possible to create a female clone of a man: a man has one X chromosome, which is enough to double during uneven cell division, and remove the Y chromosome to get a female genotype. Therefore, it is possible that in the future men who are interested in the question "What would I be like if I were born a girl?" will be able to get an exhaustive answer. But it will not be possible to create a man from a woman's rib – you will need a Y chromosome.

It must be said that human cloning has some relation to eugenics, but not to the eugenics with which racism, Nazism, and the extermination of peoples are associated. Modern eugenics uses such approaches as artificial insemination, contraception, gene therapy, genetic analyses (including genotyping) – all these are ways to control the genetic diversity of people without infringing on the rights of the individual. In the future, gene therapy will be especially relevant, because the development of medicine has not had the most favorable effect on the number of genetic diseases of people: diseases that were previously incompatible with life now do not interfere with leaving offspring. Only the most modern technologies will be able to save the next generations from the diseases of their ancestors. The Church, especially the Catholic Church, consistently opposes all these innovations. However, today, in a civilized society, a person protesting against the use of condoms for ethical reasons (and not for reasons of pleasure) looks a little ridiculous. It is possible that cloning in a couple of decades will be as commonplace as the use of condoms today.

Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru14.07.2008