For reference, the online Foresight Exchange game, a play money
Idea Futures market, has a betting claim regarding cloning.
http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=Clone rests on whether a
human clone will be born and survive to be 1 year old before January
1, 2005. So it would have to be born by January 1, 2004 and therefore
"conceived" by the beginning of spring, 2003, about 16 months from now.
The current betting sets the chance of success at about 40%. This
estimate has been relatively stable over the 5-year life of the claim,
except for most of the year 2000 when the odds fell to 20%. However they
climbed back to 40% in early 2001.
Personally I think these odds are a little low; I would go as high as
50% or even 60% to see a cloned human born in the next two years. I see
today that the Raelians claim that their human cloning experiments have
gone even farther than the recent results, to the blastocyst stage, and
another lab had also predicted that they would begin attempts to implant
cloned human embryos by this month. The ACT experiments confirm that
real work is being done in this area, it's not just political posturing.
If the same is true for the other labs then I expect that some implant
experiments will be tried in the next year.
Hal
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