Clones II

Just read a story on CNN.com (link broken, so try Wikipedia)regarding cc. the Cloned Cat.  She was named cc. for Carbon Copy, as she was cloned from a cat called Rainbow. 

They are different colours, both calico cats, but not the same colour patches, so that gene doesn’t work.  Personality?  I know many of us here have cats, so we can talk about that easily.

Rainbow is a bouncy thing, curious, etc.  cc. is quiet and reserved.  Rainbow, the donor DNA is slim and trim and cc is a bit of a pudge.  DNA testing proved that Rainbow and cc are identical cats and the whole deal was done at Texas A&M University, which is a fairly reputable place, not affiliated with an alien race, unless you consider Texas to be alien. (Insert your own joke here, this is an interactive posting by the way…)

Which I think opens up the whole Nature/Nurture argument.  Assuming we had some Adolf Hitler DNA around could we brew up another?  Based on Rainbow and cc, the first answer is no and thank you Deity of Choice that the mythical experiment fails.  So how much is of a person is DNA sequencing and how much is how they are raised?

I tend to side that Nurture is more of a determinant in how we develop as humans.  For example, my brother and I come from the same genetic material and approximately the same upbringing.  However, I was the firstborn and since kids don’t come with manuals for raising them, my parents made their first mistakes on me. 

Six years later, they made a different set of mistakes with my brother.  Welcome to parenting.  Consequently, my brother and I are totally different people in temperament, abilities and any other measurable parameter you might choose.  We share a sibling resemblance, but we even have different hair lines last I looked, so common donor DNA is at best, a flaky matchup.

It looks like you can’t get an exact duplicate through cloning.  There are too many parameters and outside influences that determine the whole of the person and the personality, which is what people who want to clone their pets, for instance, really want.  The Rainbow and cc experiment was initially developed because some guy with too much money wanted to clone his favourite collie, Missy, before she died.

A noble sentiment, as most of us have pets who have passed on, that we sorely miss and would love to have back.  But the Rainbow/cc science shows that it doesn’t really work that way.  We have known this, intuitively, just by looking at our siblings and seeing the differences. 

I’m going to set aside the whole ethical thing for a moment here.  Why couldn’t we use this technology of making exact genetic duplicates to make spare parts?  If you caught your arm in a punch press, or forgot to turn off the mixer before you licked the beaters, the clone is a perfect source of parts.  The added benefit is not having to take immunosuppressive anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life, as the spare from the clone, will not be rejected by the body as it IS the body, at least genetically.

Taking this to a more logical conclusion, Type O blood is a universal blood:  If you need a transfusion, you can take Type O, regardless of what your blood type is in the vast majority of cases, which is why Canadian Blood Services wants lots of Type O around.  Could we engineer spare organs and parts that are like Type O?  They’ll graft into the vast majority of people without anti-rejection drugs and about all you’ll have left is a bit of a scar from the surgery?

There is the real Brave New World border.  Essentially eternal life, swapping out body parts that age, get damaged or stop working.  We already do it with hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, bone marrow, skin and eyes.  If you believe that the brain is the bag of water and flesh that determines the person and personality, then moving it to another chassis is just a few years away.  Perhaps ten years.  Welcome to the future my friends.  We are now here.