[Flipside]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22540374

Basically, a new technique has been developed that allows very early-stage clone embryos to be grown in a Lab.

Whilst I have mixed feelings regarding the ethical/scientific issues of cloning, I think it is the sheer fury and deliberate misunderstanding by the more virulent opposition that pushes me away from their arguments.  The truth is that Cloning-based technology is probably going to be needed by mankind, if not for medical purposes in the short term, then quite possibly for Space-Exploration in the long term, so balancing ethical and social concerns with scientific needs is going to be a tricky job in the coming years.

[General Battuta]

Are you talking about reproductive or therapeutic cloning in terms of the space exploration requirement?

[Flipside]

My own thoughts went more along the lines of reproductive, with regards to colonization etc, it would be a lot cheaper and easier to protect and maintain a collection of stem-cells or fertilized eggs than a group of humans. Of course, there are other issues involved with regards to education etc, but since one of the biggest hindrances to long-distance spaceflight is the maintenance of a crew, it may be that cloning-based tech is part of a workable solution. Even if actual 'cloning' isn't used, but rather just the techniques being developed to allow a baby to grow outside of the womb.

[General Battuta]

Like you mentioned in your last sentence, that's not cloning at all - it's a separate set of reproductive technologies called artificial gestation that pose an arguably much more challenging problem.

It's ironic that reproductive cloning is so morally controversial when it's functionally not very different from some natural and accepted reproductive outcomes. It's the therapeutic stuff I'd expect people to get up in arms about.

[Flipside]

Agreed, but the technologies developed for one can be applied to the other, like many human developments, something can be developed for one purpose and then aspects of it can be applied in a whole plethora of things. That's why I used the term 'cloning-based tech' rather than just cloning.

I don't really have a problem with therapeutic cloning as such, though I think I'd feel more comfortable if it was individual organs being cloned. Developments are taking place on that as well, though at a much slower pace.

[General Battuta]

I'm not sure I'd agree that that's proceeding at a slower pace. We're already dropping fully functional organs grown from stem cells into people.

I'm also...not totally sure there'll be as much cross-pollination between cloning tech and artificial gestation as you suggest. The challenges involved in cloning are mostly cellular; first you need to convert denucleated eggs into embryos, then get those embryos to implant, then you need the implanted embryos to survive. Each of these steps has enormous attrition. But once the embryo is implanted, you can count on the mother's biology to take care of the insanely complex process of actual gestation.

Artificial gestation poses almost exactly opposite challenges. It's easy to get the embryos you need to implant, since you can use bog standard IVF techniques. Where artificial gestation becomes hard is exactly where cloning becomes easy - the gestational environment. Rather than an evolution-tested womb, you've got to build your own gestational environment, one that mimics every baffling capability and unexplored nuance of the biological uterus. None of the technologies used in cloning are particularly applicable here, since this is the part of the cloning process that just leverages existing biological systems. And unlike cloning, this is an area we don't actually have any real progress in.

Put more simply, the reason cloning and artificial gestation don't cross-pollinate well is because they're each working in a separate room of the reproductive process. Cloning technology targets processes in the ovum that produces the embryo, but doesn't worry about gestation. Artificial gestation doesn't worry about the ovum or embryo, but targets the gestational environment.

[Flipside]

True, but they are all stages of the same process, I personally feel there may be link-points in the future, though it depends a lot of scientific and social aspects, I suspect any colonists we do send out are not going to be 'out of the box' humans, our minds can adapt quickly, but I suspect our bodies will need more than a little help in any new environment. It may even be that colonization will take place in the first case with Turin-compatible exoskeletons, and then those mentalities transferred into vat-grown bodies once the environment is tolerable, though that's entering the realm of purely theoretical tech.

It's kind of like Jet Engines and Parachutes, both related to the same business, and yet they do not seem to have any physical links scientifically, and yet the two are often used together to form a system. Particularly when it comes to colonisation, the knowledge gained from both constructing and controlling a genetic pattern and nurturing it to full term may yet work to complement each other.

[General Battuta]

I have a story about the aftermath of a frozen-embryo seedship colonization program currently at Tor.com, maybe you will see it in print in a year or two!

It's kind of like Jet Engines and Parachutes, both related to the same business, and yet they do not seem to have any physical links scientifically, and yet the two are often used together to form a system. Particularly when it comes to colonisation, the knowledge gained from both constructing and controlling a genetic pattern and nurturing it to full term may yet work to complement each other.

You're giving too much credit to what cloning does right now. We neither construct nor control any genetic patterns. The objectives you want to reach for colonization here are already simply achievable through classic IVF, no cloning required.

[Kopachris]

So.... how long until I can breed my own clone army?

[Flipside]

Unless you are able to find an awful lot of women willing to carry a cloned egg to full term, quite a while

[deathfun]

It's hard enough finding a woman to do it normally...

[Kopachris]

EDIT: Nevermind

[BloodEagle]

Damn it, now I want to know what that originally said. 

[Kopachris]

Damn it, now I want to know what that originally said. 

Just contemplating the need for an artificial placenta.

[MP-Ryan]

Call me skeptical, but nobody has yet figured out how to reset the permanent alterations to DNA from an adult, which means you need an adult totipotent stem cell to clone in the first place, which is not only exceptionally hard to find but bloody expensive to find and extract.  Sounds like that wasn't the case in these cloned embryos - they used iPS cells, which are problematic due to those permanent DNA modifications that even the iP technique can't fully overcome, and is bloody expensive because they have to strip the nucleus and fuse in a new nucleus with the iPS cell DNA into an ovum.

iPS cell technology is useful, but it's still nowhere near as good as obtaining ES cells in the first place.  And given that we can actually extract ES cells without killing the embryo, using focusing on ES cells makes a lot more sense (fun fact:  it is a government regulatory requirement that the embryos used for ES cell harvest are destroyed at a certain lfie stage, not scientific necessity - the discarded embryos from IVF that are used in this process could actually be implanted and grown if they fuse properly to a woman's uterus).

So, my general thoughts are.... meh.

iPS cells are a lot more exciting for their potential applications in growing organs.  Not only is full-cloning expensive, impractical, and probably unethical, it's completely unnecessary if what we're after is spare parts for the human body.  I wouldn't be surprised in the not-so-distant future to see first world countries (particularly those with socialized medicine) adopt stem-cell banking of embryonic stem cells, extracted from a growing fetus early on in the pregnancy with virtually no risk to the child.  That merely requires surgical advances - we can already conduct genetic testing on a fetus in utero at very early life stages.