From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Fri Feb 14 2003 - 16:02:19 MST
From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky [mailto:sentience@pobox.com]
> Ramez Naam wrote:
> > People are probably going to pick up on this as a sign that
> > cloning is not safe.
>
> It's *not* safe. If anyone is trying to clone humans at this
> point, I blame the media's glamorization of cloning.
I agree that safety hasn't been sufficiently well established to
justify reproductive cloning of humans.
At the same time, most of the data people cite about how unsafe
cloning is are either wrong or exaggerated. For example, people talk
about the fact that it took 200+ attempts to create Dolly. The
undertone is often that the failed attempts were awful, mutated sheep
that died at birth. That's just not true. Of all the attempts to
create Dolly, only 1 egg implanted in the uterus. Most of the eggs
failed to ever divide. The rest died at around the 8 cell stage.
In any case, my goal was to point out that Dolly's medical problems
could well stem from technical problems in the cloning process that
have since been ironed out.
cheers,
mez
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