# Raelian human clone



## Brian G Turner (Dec 27, 2002)

Well, the Raelians claim to have done it. 

Anyone else think it's a load of bollocks? And - to boot - a publicity stunt to beat the mad Italian biologist?

Here's the links:

BBC on claim

Raelian homepage


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## nemesis (Dec 28, 2002)

If the baby were cloned from a 31yr old then the baby would be genetically 31 yrs old. Assuming it survived. And that's very poor. The whole issue is sick.


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## Brian G Turner (Dec 29, 2002)

Glanced a paper on the boat today - article stating the parents claimed conned out of £300,000, or something or other. Anyone keeping a close eye on the story?


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## Archangel Scream (Dec 30, 2002)

Don't they want to clone Jesus from the Turin Shroud. Or something?  ???


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## nemesis (Dec 30, 2002)

Those are the ones. Once harmless nuts now becoming something else.


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## Blade (Dec 31, 2002)

If the cloning has taken place, the result is not likely to be 'normal'. The experiments with Dolly and other attempts have resulted in problems. The question is should we be doing this with human beings, when we can't get it right for animals?
The 'hidden' idea is also rather disturbing: namely, the thought that the female of the species may in future evolutionary terms be the one and only [glow=red,2,300]'sex'[/glow]! 
 :

*Blade*


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## Kilroy (Jan 2, 2003)

I don't know if Nemesis properly understands genetics but i think cloning is quite possible.  Just not yet.  There are too many kinks to work out first that have hindered things.  The Raelians are just plain idiots.  What i do want to see happen is the cloning of animals.  Wouldn't it be cool if we could study extinct species by cloning a few.  ie the Tasmanian Tiger, The Sabre Toothed Tiger, Mammoths, Wooly Rhinos, endless possibilities.

Kilroy Was Here


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## SirRob (Jan 2, 2003)

Hey, I know what there claims are: science *fiction.*
And they say they've had a 50% success rate.
It took 200+ to clone Dolly the sheep.


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## Survivor (Jan 3, 2003)

Nemisis is right about the genetic age thing.  Cells undergoing meiosis to produce gametes activate the telomerase reaction so they become younger from a genetic perspective.  Ordinary meitosis in sexually reproducing organisms with eukaryotic cells leaves the "child" cells genetically aged because the reproductive process cuts off the terminal segments of DNA in the cell.  When the terminal DNA is gone, the whole strand unravels and the cells die (or turn cancerous, which is a bit worse).

So a nucleus from a 31 year old person's cell will be at some "age" from a genetic perspective.  Of course, since the age of a cell is measured in divisions, rather than years, a 31 year old's cell might be as young as ten divisions or as old as 50 divisions, which makes a substantial difference in what would happen to the clone.  A clone from a 10 division old nucleus will live a fairly normal life, but have a lot of cancer and premature aging symptoms after about age 40, then die a bit early.  A clone from a 30 division old nucleus probably won't make it to term, and won't survive long past birth even then.  A clone from a 20 division old nucleus could fall pretty much anywhere in between.

Which is why you would need to develop a therapy that activates the telomerase action before reproductive cloning would be viable.  Which you could use to extend life span indefinitely...


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## Voice (Jan 8, 2003)

the raelians are fraudsters--in for the money--there is no clone--not yet


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## Survivor (Jan 9, 2003)

Why do you have such a scary face?

And how did Blade do &lt;table style="Filter: Glow(Color=red, Strength='.(('2'&lt;400)?'2':400).')" width='.(('300'&lt;400)?'300':400).'>'sex'&lt;/table>like that?

[glow=red,2,300]Is it the glow tab?[/glow]  [shadow=red,left,300]What does shadow do?[/shadow] [move]Hmmm, marque...[/move][sup]superscript[/sup], [sub]subscript[/sub], and...[tt]teletype?[/tt]


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## nemesis (Jan 10, 2003)

The trouble with the issues is it is not entirely unfeasible. All it takes is a limited amount of money and enough egg donors. Thats the worst part. Completely unregulated fully legal human reproductive cloning.


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## Brian G Turner (Jan 12, 2003)

What I don't understand is the supposed court case, which is seeking to remove the child from her parents. I thought human cloning was *not* illegal in the USA? Or was that just the world moratorium that was fudged, because of a number of countries wanting to include "therapeutic" cloning in the ban as well?


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## mac1 (Jan 12, 2003)

Can an undivided cell exist in a 31 year?
Is that possible?
If not, then at roughly what age does a person become uncloneable?
Does anyone know of any good websites, which explain this sort of thing without too much technobabble?


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## Survivor (Jan 14, 2003)

Hey!  I wasn't using technobabble.

Okay, first off, no, no cells in a 31 year old or even a newborn (or blastocyst) have the full complement of divisions left.  Only the newly formed Zygote has the full complement of divisions (it has to divide to grow).  That said, you really don't need _all_ of those divisions, unless you want to go for the oldest living person record.  As I said, a 10 division old nucleus could be used to clone a person with a near normal lifespan.

I wouldn't guess that a fully grown person would have many, or even any, cells much younger than 10 divisions, but it certainly is possible.

A person never becomes "unclonable" until they have no viable somatic cells.  However, the prognosis for a clone from a nucleus with very few remaining divisions is not good.  And this limitation really only applies to nuclear transfer cloning.  If you use some process that can reconstruct the nucleus from scratch (hah ha ha) then you could clone as long as you could reconstruct the genome of the target.


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## mac1 (Jan 24, 2003)

My science knowledge isn't great, but am I correct in saying that as a person gets older, and as their cells divide they gradually take up certain functions. Is this the reason that cells that have divided up more than 10 times create unstable clones?


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## Survivor (Jan 24, 2003)

Yes and no.

Yes, because the genetic material in the nucleus is constantly "expressing" some genes and turning others off, and which genes are being expressed determines what proteins and enzymes are produced, which in turn regulates cell behavior and gene expression.  We cannot currently control what the nucleus is doing, so cloning from a somatic cell consistes of snatching the nucleus from one cell and injecting it into an egg cell that has already had the haploid nucleus removed, then jolting it with a miniscual electrical current to sort of jumpstart things.  This is basically the equvalent of throwing your shoe at the TV to change to your favorite channel.  Sometimes the nucleus is able to take a cue from the surrounding cytoplasm and reset itself to work as a zygote nucleus, but more often it doesn't.

But even with improved techniques (and there is a _lot_ of room for improvement) the fact remains that some specialized cells don't just have different sequences expressed, they may have actually lost certain parts of the DNA and thus not have a full set (some specialized cells don't have nuclear DNA at all).  These types of cells simply cannot provide a nucleus for cloning.  By contrast, most types of cells have a complete set of DNA.

The barrier that is currently insuperable, though, is telomere decay and the lack of controlled means of activating the telomerase reaction.  Telomeres are the terminal ends of each chromosome.  Every time a cell divides and the DNA replicates, both copies end up with one less telomere.  All living cells have a process that reverses this decay, but in multicelled organisms this is turned off for any cells not involved in reproduction.  Because the reproductive cells are rare, hard to get at, and tend to want to divide into haploid cells, it is impractical to clone from them (it would be difficult, painful for the donor, and you would just end up with a cell that would divide into two eggs instead of developing into a blastocyst the way a zygote is supposed to).  Thus, this problem is more akin to...trying to record a three hour movie on a two hour tape.

Given current methods, even a successful clone (normal genetics, normal development, normal growth) will hit a wall as the cells become too old to continue dividing (which is essential for tissue repair).  For instance, Dolly (the sheep) now has symptoms of aging consistent with a sheep more than twice her actual age (arthritis and other degenerative conditions).  Her cells cannot continue to divide, because they've reached the division limit already (or have begun to approach it, the division limit is not a sudden stop, as the cell approaches it it becomes progressively less capable of dividing or carrying out other activities).  Soon she'll be riddled with cancers as the cells at the limit begin to mutate (when the telomeres are gone, the ends of the chomosomes unravel and the cell either dies or goes renegade, rebuilding the telomeres "illegally" and breaking any other rules that seem too restrictive--I know that's an egregious anthropomorphism, what actually happens is an example of microevolution, all the cells that _don't_ break the rules are selected against and those that do break the rules reproduce and thus predominate, there is no element of consciousness or volition).

Cancers always begin to appear once the division limit is reached, this is pretty consistent for all mammals and probably most animals generally.  This is the genetic instability which is related to telomere decay, and is not a question of what type of cell the nucleus belongs to, and is the ultimate limiting factor on the lifespan of a multicellular organism.


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