Every since Dolly the sheep, I have been wondering what would happen if a human was cloned.
Would the clone have the latent 'memories' of the donor (at least up to the time the donor cells were taken) and more importantly, would the clone have a soul ?

Any thoughts on this will be gratefully received.

From a science point of view, i dont think the clone would have memories of the doner.

As for the soul....WHOA - your freakin me out man

Originally posted by Eireann
Every since Dolly the sheep, I have been wondering what would happen if a human was cloned.
Would the clone have the latent 'memories' of the donor (at least up to the time the donor cells were taken) and more importantly, would the clone have a soul ?

Any thoughts on this will be gratefully received.

I guess that all depends on what your definition of a soul is and how living things receive one. IMO, something that is artificially created could possibly have one because it originates off another living organism either through plasma, organs, or whatever it is the scientists use to clone things.

but then, since a soul is bot of material in form would they share the same soul?

twins are clones of each other ,they have seperate personalities. I think that a cloned embryo would have it's own soul, I think that the body is just a vessel for them and that a new soul would use the cloned body.
What does get me thinking though is if it were possible for people to be exactly duplicated in another place in the way that they are starting to mess around with duplicating objects, then what would happen with the soul?

Which identical twin has a soul?

Is that your question?

Unlike genetic engineering, cloning creates what is for most practical purposes an identical twin. If the cloning is done with stem cells which are a new possibility from even an older person, then the twin will have the requisite pristine telomere length. That would avoid the problems of the dolly sheep in regard to source cell age.

One could talk a great deal about GM foods, and how not a lick of protest occurs about it, in fact discussion is censored for the most part. US policy is to shove it down the throats of Europeans, even though there are contra indicators for health in many variants and enough laboratory proofs to shut down all GM food operations.

Cloning on the other hand is the creation of an identical person from the source cells, and we get this quasi religious argument which makes no sense. A twin is not "immoral," so why should a clone be "immoral," and why should anyone have any questions about the soul on the issue?

I would love to raise my own clone, and do the job right, or have him do the job right on his clone and so forth. The is a "be ye perfect," argument here, and the fact you are only creating for all practical purposes your own twin when you clone a human being. To make it "morally right," I suppose you would have to make sure your mother is the surrogate mother I suppose, but all those moralisms get so entangled. It is a matter of science, but when the chips are down, a clone has a soul.

There is another method of "cloning," which starts from the beginning of cell division. By artificial means you keep some of the first cell divisions frozen, separate some of these divisional groupings, and use only one for in vitro fertilization. In so many years you would have the requisite cells to create your identical twin in the same manner. There is no residual DNA from an implanted egg, since the egg is already present in the embryonic leftover cells for the next in vitro fertilization.

So is the argument clear now about the soul? The is no problem with identical twins, triplets, quadruplets is there?



[Edited on 3-3-2004 by SkipShipman]