Question

Which statement best describes why scientific research on human cloning is often funded by private companies?
A. Governments want to collect the financial rewards from a successful project so they always pay for this type of research.
B. Many governments support it and commit great resources to cloning projects.
C. Since human cloning has many ethical considerations, many governments will not fund the research.
D. Taxpayers want their money to go to projects like this because it could save lives.

Answer 1

it will be C choice

C. Because human cloning has many ethical considerations, many governments will not fund the research.

Answer 2

None of them. Because human cloning is as silly as cryonics, and no scientific body (like the NSF) would waste its money on it. It's similar to the fact that only private crazies fund research on perpetual motion machines.

Answer 3

@Carl_Pham: How can you compare cryonics & perpetual motion machines to something that's actually possible and has already been done in mammals?

Ignoring the ethical and moral implications of cloning humans there could be quite a few benefits gained from the research...not that I'm in favor of it.

Answer 4

No dead animal has ever been frozen and then back to life. You are correct that I do not know the aspirations of cryonics violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way perpetual motion machines do. They may, they may not. I wasn't intending to make that comparison.

What I was intending to say that is that cryonics shares with human cloning the fact that both are well-defined linguistically, but not scientifically. That is, we can form a sentence (or write a story) in which either human cloning or the revival of a "corpsicle" occurs. But in neither story would we be able to lay out even a plausible if unproved explanation of HOW it occurs.

Mind you, when I say "human cloning" I don't mean the actual cloning that can already be done with animals, which is just fusing a somatic cell with an egg, so you avoid meiosis and get, essentially, a younger twin. I mean what people imagine when they think of a clone of themselves -- which is a person just like them, perhaps even with the same memories magically transported across, the kind of stuff you see in fantasy fiction. That's in the same category as cryonics.

Answer 5

I see. I just never look at it as anything more than reproductive cloning. Cloning depicted in fictional books and movies is just silly and quite a leap from reality.

Answer 6

OK, then we are mostly in agreement. But then, the government would not fund cloning per se, because from your and my point of view, it's just another lab technique. It would be like asking whether the government funds pipetting or titration. Well, no, not as such, although they certain fund research projects that use those techniques.