C: Just a thought...

[solidoxygen]

The demand for organs is strong all over the world in all classes of society. After all, even the poor want to continue their existence simply because they live.

The much coveted organs can often save someone's life, however the body often rejects an organ and renders it useless.

Would it be viable to create a clone of yourself and grow it until around 15 or 20 years of age, then take the clone's organs and parts for yourself? With this method, you would be able to replace all your organs every two decades and have no fear of your body rejecting the part...after all, it's your own parts.

The clone will not be named and will have it's mental development permanently stunted at birth so that the original will not encounter the problems of emotional attachment or face the risk of rebellion from the organs that you will use for yourself.

Would this work? If it did, would you accept it's moral implications? If society accepted this practice, would you do it?

I look forward to your comments.

[Bindu1000]

Hmmm ... shades of "The Island".

I think any life - be it clone of yourself, or something with the mental capacity of a 1 month baby is still precious and it would not be ethically right to do that

Also - aging is a part of the process / cycle of life. You can push it back a bit / delay it, but it cannot and should not be circumvented totally
That said - growing old sucks :2:

[solidoxygen]

So you are suggesting that people should not be killed...

However, by NOT resorting to these extreme methods, you are indirectly killing so many people. If you or a loved one desperately needed an organ to live, however all the parts were rejected by your body, don't you think this idea would sound a bit more pleasant?

By choosing not to sacrifice some clones, you are dooming millions of others.

[ratratrat098]

Death is a part of life...

Actually the death of a living thing is predetermined by it's genes. As human are constantly mutating, these slight change is genes of human beings results to new talents, new knowledge , or new disease over the generation... Ever wonder why humans never reach the age of over 200 for 2000 years, these is the reason. So all I can say it's futile if you clone yourself and transplant their organs to your self, because organs from cloned organism has very short expiry date so it will only prolong your life for a few year but transplanting again and again with the organs you have with cloned organs will put a terrible stress in your body that in the end you will be forced to change your whole body in order to live...(this includes your brain too).

[Bindu1000]

Illness and disease make are also part of life. From someone who nursed her mother thru years of cancer - I can safely say that while I wish she never got it, neither she nor I would have chosen to live at the expense of another life.

On the other hand - that whole experience changed me. I now no longer strive to be part of the rat race. I have learnt to stop and truly enjoy life's little blessings and can truly say I am more empathetic to others. Unhappy instances in life - make us better people. we all need to suffer some form of pain to appreciate the good.

Also the exsistance of such diseases prompts the people with the knowledge and brains to constantly strive for cures and in the course of that search have achieved so many great discoveries. Currently the world spends billions on armaments. If they didnt have to find cures - imagine how much more would be diverted to this world's destruction?

We live in an age of disposable stuff - cups, plates, toilets, razors, linen, even relationships have become disposable. (This one isnt working out for me - lets dump him and get a new one). If we have disposable body parts, people will not care. Drink, smoke, take drugs, abuse your body - coz if parts fail, we can always replace them.

Imagine how society will be - your neighbour ticks you off coz his leaves fall into your garden - take a chain saw to him. after all he can always replace the part you cut off. Your man cheated on you? Cut of his organ - after all he can always replace it with his clones 0_0. Ethics and sacredness of life and property will disappear.

Uggg ... no thank you. Not for me. Most of us have such little regard and place so little value on life as it is. Make it disposable and nothing will be sacred anymore

[sikarus]

yeah i mostly agree with the above responses in sense that it is morally unjustified, impractical, and utterly a bad solution for the problem you present. there are a number of alternative routes science can take that require less effort and ethical implications. for example why not grow organs as needed? or why not alter genomes to get rid of such problems in the first place? the possible alternatives are endless. a society that treats life as something so trivial would be a society that has lost sight of meaning of life.

[AchronycalChaos]

When I had to write a paper on stem cell research and umbilical cord blood banking for my nursing course, I considered and had to write about ethical matters such as this. For example, the stem cells in umbilical cord blood are incredibly similar to bone marrow stem cells (there are only a few diseases that can be cured by bone marrow that can't be cured by umbilical cord blood stem cells). So, there have actually been cases in which parents have had a child, that child has been diagnosed with a hematopoietic stem cell disease (leukamias, any various 'cytopenias', etc.). Because the parents themselves weren't donation candidates for the child, they proceed to have a second child to harvest the bone marrow from.

This is a controversial, but accepted practice in the US. However, taking the bone marrow against the child's will would be illegal (but then, it would be a rare case in which a kid would understand that their sibling would die without it and still refuse it).

There is an answer to the organ crisis though. I'm not sure if there are similar systems in other countries, but in the US, we have organ procurement agencies. In my state, we have LOPA - Louisiana Organ Procurement Agency. Basically, I'm 20 years old, and I'm registered. So, if I get into a bad car accident tomorrow and end up in critical care on a ventilator, need IV medications for sustained life support, and have no neurological activity for long enough to determine brain death, LOPA nurses are called in. They look at lab values, how I got into this state (whether a disease caused it), vital signs (especially temperature), what medications I've been on, and what organs I've signed up to donate (you actually have a choice if you register by website - they're not allowed to take my eyes).

From this point, they're going to take the patient to surgery. Typically, they'll clean out the body. They'll stop the IV drips and start 4 liters of normal saline to flush the organs clean of any remnants of the drugs they were on. Also, increased blood volume (due to the saline), will hyper-perfuse the organs, and the more oxygen to the organs, the better they'll last outside of the body. A lot of odd medications are ordered (I can't remember them by name, but you never see this in the hospital regularly), and then they remove what organs are allowed/useful under general anesthesia. The only bad thing is that some organs have a shelf life. So, they actually have a helicopter on standby (for example, a heart has a shelf-life of either 8 or 12 hours (I can't remember which) until it has to be put into another body. Any longer than that after it's removed from the donor, and the tissue dies and is no good). And then there's the fact that the person who receives the organs will have to be on immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their life so their body won't reject the organ.

So, the other solution aside from organ donation (since most people who volunteer to donate organs usually don't die until old age or the organs can't be taken because of the condition of overall health), stem cells are another option. As I type this, there is research being conducted on how to synthesize organs and tissue from stem cells.

Click this link for one of the results (a woman had her own bone marrow stem cells used to grow a new trachea). (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081119092939.htm)

Of course, in the above story, they needed a donor's trachea to begin with, but if they've made a small breakthrough like this (the woman doesn't even need to take immunosuppressive drugs), I'm hopeful that in a few years, they'll be able to create organs from nothing but stem cells. Similarly, another project that's being explored is synthetic blood. That would be much more difficult to make, considering all of the components of blood, but if stem cells can be manipulated in the proper way, it could be possible. The main problem here is stimulating the cells to grow into the tissue you want (stem cells grow to form all the tissues and organs in the body - there's that much possibility and variety. They're really a "mother cell", in a sense).

So, harvesting organs from a cloned living being may not be necessary after all (even though it's not ethical). And, I do agree with Bindu that,"Illness and disease make are also part of life". We need death or the world, and our race, would be destroyed in the form of starvation or war as every bit of land would become overpopulated. Also, life isn't really worth it anymore if there's no end. There's no point. Still, science may have a way to offer people another way out so they don't necessarily have to die today.


The much coveted organs can often save someone's life, however the body often rejects an organ and renders it useless.
Just as a random point, I'd like to add that while rejection does sometimes occur, it's a lot less likely if the patient is compliant and takes immunosuppressive drugs. Granted, the drugs make them run the risk of dying from opportunistic infections and disease since their immune system is knocked out, but at least they won't attack their new organ.

Just in case you wanted to know, more effects of immunosuppressive drugs. (http://www.australianprescriber.com/upload/pdf/articles/1025.pdf)

And a quote to reinforce what I've learned:
"An FDA approved immune function test from Cylex has shown effectiveness in minimizing the risk of infection and rejection in post-transplant patients[7] by enabling doctors to tailor immunosuppressant drug regimens. By keeping a patient's immune function within a certain window, doctors can adjust drug levels to prevent organ rejection while avoiding infection. Such information could help physicians reduce the use of immunosuppressive drugs, lowering drug therapy expenses while reducing the morbidity associated with liver biopsies, improve the daily life of transplant patients, and could prolong the life of the transplanted organ."

(Mainly, I'm just arguing the point where you said "often rejects". I'll agree with rejection, yes, but not if the patient is being compliant with therapy and follow-up treatments).

[solidoxygen]

There's nothing more to say here.

You have effectively blocked off any of my counterarguments.

http://moomookun.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/white_flag.jpg

[jhai0603]

I just think that it's gross. That's all.

[arz17]

well, dont make a clone of OURSELF.
but make clones of our ORGANS... its easier that way so they wont be any objection from people that can cause an outrage throughout the world.
with the latest tech., this could happen, just the talk of cost still haunts scientist nowadays.
* XD

[vaporeon200]

I've seen a movie about this topic.....

And guess what? It was an Arnold Schwarzenegger FILM....

And in that movie... They were going to use clones to either replace Dead Agents or Sell the organs and makes lots of money....


I wonder what cloned cows,chickens, or pigs taste like? :emh22:

[jhai0603]

Ha ha ha! Cloned chickens...
I've read it in a comic book once...
I dunno what they taste like, but the author had the idea of fastfood chicken having deformed bodies, like multiple legs, displaced organs, eyes on the chest, or even having seven wings. It even had laser vision, and lived through boiling cooking oil.

I wonder what happens if cloned mutant chickens appears in KFC...

[jadeliciousdk]

I'm having weird images of "The Island" flashing on my retina right now :P

The whole matter of having to clone people in order to produce enough "spare" body-parts could mostly be resolved by forcing people to become donors.
Naturally no democratic government would ever do that, but what you could do is force people to make a decision regarding being a donor or not. Most people aren't on the donor-list simply because they never really thought about it or because they were to lazy to fill out the forms.
Perhaps having people on the list from birth, then doing it the other way around having them fill out a form in order get off the list.
It would save a lot of lives.
Personally I don't believe clones is a variable option, even if it were possible it would be unethical. And before the whole discussion whether we should just let people die than rather than feeble clones; I say lets start by using the resources to save people from dieing from starvation and illness that we can cure with simply antibiotics.

[ranmachua]

Would the clone self like it since he/she would also have feelings & the thought of taking his/her organs for your original other self may sound cruel to the clone

[jhai0603]

What if the clone cloned himself to replace the clone's organs using the clone's clone's organs?

[pikel]

I agree that your concept does remind me of "The Island."

Though I enjoy to hunt, and I'm pro-choice... the idea of human farming sickens me a bit.

[solidoxygen]

I just wanted to share that in China, whenever a convict is executed, his organs are "donated" to whoever wants it.

I think that this is a pretty good idea since a convict is a convict and his body deserves no respect once he is dead anyways. If his parts would benefit others, why not?

Anyone have an opinion on this practice?

[sikarus]

i like the idea. it is good in theory but as most things that involve money go. its all f'd up exploited and corrupted when put into practice. china's prison system is pretty messed up in the first place but i will stick to the topic. if it was certain that this practice would not be exploited or corrupted in any way i would say it needs to be implemented everywhere. further more under the same parameters why not use the organs of all deceased people. of course unless said otherwise by that individual. why not harvest usable organs from those who have no chance of using them again. live and let live.

[OVirus53]

I could not in my right mind sacrifice something that is myself in order to prolong my life. I would only be able to view a clone of myself as a son or a twin brother. Never an object to sacrifice for my own gain. Whatever happens to me happens.

And yeah, I'm having major shades of "the Island" here.

[Snoozy19]

I have to disagree on that concept.

I would never want to do that to myself, its freaky just thinking about it. It would be like ripping out organs from myself.
Also its unethical to do those sort of things. The clone is still a living person and taking organs is like murder.

[Rylsouske]

People die. We have to accept it since we are mere mortals. Cloning on for the sake of organ "farming" is ethically incorrect. Scientifically, it would be treated as a beneficial solution, however, logic alone doesn't apply in our world. We cannot do something logically correct and ethically correct, doing so would only result in debates, then research, then protest and rebellion. It would be a solution for one problem but a "root" to other problems. Also, I personally think a good idea. I mean, using that method will surely mean like... playing God. It's like, prolonging life through the use of underhanded tactics. Well, everyone has his/her own opinions about this kinda topic.