Clone war

The idea of human clones has been a staple of science fiction for decades.  Whenever the topic comes up, the question is always whether it's even theoretically possible to clone a person.

The answer seems to be "yes, but."  Embryonic cloning -- splitting a blastula (an early stage of embryonic development) into pieces, and allowing the pieces to regrow into a full embryo -- is relatively straightforward.  There's no scientific reason that someone couldn't take a human blastula, cut it into twenty pieces, and when they've regrown sufficiently implant them in the uteruses of twenty different surrogate women -- and nine months later, if all goes well, you'd have identical twenty-tuplets, all born to different women.

Much trickier is adult-tissue cloning, which is the more common one to see in science fiction; taking a sample of tissue from an adult, and somehow transforming it into a zygote, and ultimately, an embryo. The reasons why this is hard are not fully understood, but seem to have something to do with the switching on and off of developmental genes, something that has to happen with great precision in order to generate a fully functional, anatomically normal child.  So to make this work, you have to be able to reset all those switches back to their (so to speak) factory specifications -- return them to where they were when the embryo was still an undifferentiated ball of cells.

For reasons still not known, this appears to be more easily doable in some organisms than others.  The first adult-tissue clone was the famous Dolly the Sheep, who was born back in 1996.  Dolly died at age six -- about half the age of a normal sheep -- which scientists initially thought was because of accelerated aging (that her cells retained a "memory" of the age of the sheep from which they were taken).  Later experiments called this into question, and the jury's still out on whether clones would age faster, and presumably, die younger.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons (Photograph courtesy of Emma Whitelaw, University of Sydney, Australia.), Cloned mice with different DNA methylation, CC BY 2.5]

So far, the list of animals that have been adult-tissue cloned is a curious one.  You can take a look at the complete list as of the time of this writing, but it includes a bunch of not-very-closely-related species -- frogs, rabbits, rats, monkeys (two species, in fact), mules, coyotes, both cats and dogs, and camels.

Note that humans aren't on the list.

Which makes it doubly odd that a rapper who goes by the moniker "Lil Buu" claims not only to be a clone, but a "second-generation clone," whatever that means.  On a television interview, Lil Buu said:

I was cloned by clonaid in Canada, my model number is 0112568…  A lot of the memories from Clonaid were erased so that way the new gen can move forward with whatever new programming was made….  They can remove a fragment of bone that’s located here [points to forehead, in between his eyes], and in this fragment of bone it stores all of your memories and consciousness, and with that, they can make a sufficient replica of yourself, a reproductive version of you including your memories, and you can be selective as to which ones you keep and don’t keep.  This process has been around for quite some time.

Immediately I read about Clonaid, that made my eyebrows rise even further.   I don't know if that name is familiar to you, but it certainly was to me; this is the group that back in 2002 claimed they'd overseen the production of the first human clone (a girl nicknamed "Eve"), but then refused to provide scientists with any proof, or in fact any evidence at all.  Then it turned out that the spokesperson for Clonaid who was said to be the chief scientist in charge of the project, Brigitte Boisselier, is a high-ranking Raëlian -- a French-based religion, founded by ex-race-car-driver turned prophet Claude Maurice Marcel Vorilhon, that believes humans were created by a race of extraterrestrials called Elohim, and to gain enlightenment we need to run around having lots of sex with any willing individuals, and wear no clothes whenever possible.

I'm not making any of this up.

Oh, and they have a temple in Japan called "Korindo," are working on establishing an "Embassy for Extraterrestrials," and their symbol is a swastika superimposed on a Star of David.

For the record, I didn't make that up, either.

So I'm perhaps to be forgiven for being dubious about Lil Buu (or model #0112568, as the case may be) and his claim to be a cloned from a memory-containing bone fragment, who was produced by a company whose leaders believe we're actually the creation of super-intelligent aliens, which was dreamed up by a guy whose primary other claim to fame is knowing a lot about race cars.

In fact, I'm dubious in general about the potential for human cloning.  It raises some serious ethical issues, and (after all) we haven't even resolved the ethical issues surrounding stem cell research and cloning non-human animals, so it's premature to leap headlong into this.

It also brings up the question about why anyone would want to clone themselves.  It's not like the clone would have your memories (whatever Lil Buu says to the contrary); our personalities are shaped not only by our genes but by our environment, so while you'd expect some similarities, they would be no more alike than ordinary identical twins -- who are, after all, natural clones themselves.

Plus, I just think it'd be creepy for there to be another me walking around, one who would be (if he was created as an embryo today) 59 years younger than I am by the time he's born.  I'm perfectly happy being a one-off.  My general feeling is that one of me is plenty.

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I've been a bit of a geology buff since I was a kid.  My dad was a skilled lapidary artist, and made beautiful jewelry from agates, jaspers, and turquoise, so every summer he and I would go on a two-week trip to southern Arizona to find cool rocks.  It was truly the high point of my year, and ever since I have always given rock outcroppings and road cuts more than just the typical passing glance.

So I absolutely loved John McPhee's four-part look at the geology of the United States -- Basin and Range, Rising From the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  Told in his signature lucid style, McPhee doesn't just geek out over the science, but gets to know the people involved -- the scientists, the researchers, the miners, the oil-well drillers -- who are vitally interested in how North America was put together.  In the process, you're taken on a cross-country trip to learn about what's underneath the surface of our country.  And if, like me, you're curious about rocks, it will keep you reading until the last page.

Note: the link below is to the first in the series, Basin and Range.  If you want to purchase it, click on the link, and part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia.  And if you like it, you'll no doubt easily find the others!

Opening the floodgates

There's a bizarre battle going on right now in the state of Florida.

First, a Christian group was allowed to hand out bibles to students in eleven high schools in Orange County.  So an atheist group asked the Orange County School Board for permission to hand out atheist pamphlets, and was denied.  This resulted in a lawsuit from the atheists, which was summarily thrown out.

The school board wouldn't comment on the reasons for their denial, only saying that the atheist literature would be "disruptive."  Others opined that since atheism isn't a religion, it's not covered under the freedom of religion clause.

This last suggestion, however, opened the floodgates.  The next to step up to the plate was the Satanic Temple, who applied to the school board to pass out promotional materials including a book called The Satanic Children's Big Book of Activities, the cover of which I show below:

[image courtesy of the Satanic Temple]

The tall kid looks kind of grumpy, doesn't he?  You can tell he's regretting posing for this picture.  Maybe he was coerced somehow, you think?  ("If you won't be part of the group photo, we won't let you take part in sacrificing the goat on the equinox tomorrow.")  And the kid on the left could probably use going up a shirt size or three.

The Satanic Temple, of course, was trying to make a point, and they were completely up front about it.  "There has to be an understanding that they probably have a student body that is generally aware of Christian teachings," Temple spokesperson Lucien Grieves said.  "Kids know about the Bible. They probably go to church on Sundays with their parents. But our material juxtaposed to that offers differing religious opinions, not just the view that's dominating the discourse."

"We don't argue the merits of any one voice in a school environment," Grieves added.  "We think it's in the best interests for everyone, especially the kids, that the district not to have religious materials of any kind distributed in schools."

If that wasn't enough to make the school board question the wisdom of their actions, just yesterday we had another group throw their hat into the ring.  This, unfortunately, was the Raelians, a religion based in France that believes that the Earth was created by an extraterrestrial species, who are still more or less managing matters.  The core beliefs of the Raelians are that we should strive for world peace, feel free to have lots of sex with anyone who is willing, and both men and women should run around shirtless all the time.

"It's about equality for all," Donna Newman, spokesperson for the International Raelian Movement in South Florida said.  "No violence, peace on Earth.  If society is just leaning towards just one specific doctrine, it's not fair.  Why can't they open up their doors to other beliefs?  Let the children choose, not just pound one doctrine into their heads all their lives."

So.  Yeah.  If the whole debacle brings up the phrase "Be careful what you wish for," I have to say that it did for me, too.

But the main thing that bothers me, here, is that none of the groups -- Christian, atheist, Satanist, Raelian -- seem to be thinking much about the children, here and now, who are in the middle of what is turning into a four-way tug of war.  Sure, the school board created this mess, through a misguided Freedom-Of-Religion-As-Long-As-It's-The-Right-Religion approach.  But now the kids are the victims, hearing every other day about some new group who wants a crack at their allegiance.

Can we clarify one thing, here?  Schools are about free education.  They are not about proselytizing, a lesson that I can only hope the Orange County School Board has learned.  But they are also not about using high school students to score political points, however important the issue is (and I do think this issue is important).  Children are not pawns on a chessboard, and partisanship has no place in the classroom.

Being an out atheist in my community means that a good many students walk into my classroom knowing my views on religion.  But that's no different, really, than students seeing one of their teachers walk into any of the half-dozen or so churches in our village.  I keep my religious opinions (and my political ones, as well) out of my classroom.

And so should every teacher.  And so should school boards.  The Orange County School Board's misstep, therefore, serves as a shining example of what not to do.  All of us -- religious and atheist alike -- hopefully get that by now.  So to all the groups currently clamoring for these poor Florida teenagers' ears, I can only say one thing:

Point made.  Time to lay off.