Cloning

Introduction

Certainly is good to be here this evening and to have the opportunity to once again share some thoughts with you. Before we begin, though, I’d just like to thank once again the elders for having us here and for the Hartwriters, Bob and Arlene for letting us stay with them. And also to thank Lyndon Milton Harris for having us over. We’ve known the Harris for too many years. We’ve known them all the way back to when we were both young people with dark hair and a lot of hair and back in Mississippi days, and we’re just delighted that we had time to spend some time with them. Let me warn you now, if you want to get up and leave, go ahead. It’s going to be a little bit long tonight.

So hope you’ll hang in with me. You’ve been a great audience, and let’s see if we can get through some of the things that I’d like to share with you. We’re going to talk about building on the things that we have talked about. We talked about on Friday, Saturday night, I’m sorry, with the young people, about using God’s creation. We talked about abortion this morning. We spent some time reminding ourselves who our Creator was, and that the fact that we have a personal relationship with him, and as such we have responsibilities and obligations. And tonight we’re going to delve into this culture that we live in and just ask ourselves one very, very important question, and that is how far can we go? How much of what the modern world is offering to us can we partake in?

Really boils down to a subject known as bioethics, which is a study of the ethical repercussions of new technologies and scientific procedures. And in fact, the President of the United States has an ethical committee to look in and at some of these issues. It deals with a number of controversial topics, some of which we’ll be talking about or have talked about abortion, cloning, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, topics like that that are topics that we face in the society that we live in. And we ask ourselves that question how far can we go? And some of the things that I’d like for us to think about during our time together this evening, and again I’m stressing how far can we go with genetic engineering, and I’ll tell you what that is in just a moment.

But I want you to realize that in many ways the future is here with many of these technologies, and they will be continuing to bombard us over the years to come. And that’s why we have this concern for and why people have set up these bioethics committees.

We said that people will come with us as long as we’re talking about a powerful and intellectual creator, but they begin to wane away from us when we tell them that our creator is a personal creator and that we have obligations and responsibilities. And the thing that we want to be sure that we do not let happen to us is to let science overtake us and become our 67th book in the Bible. Man in his egotistical pride has drifted further and further away from God. And I think you see that in communities that you live in. Certainly we see that in the Boston community and at the institution where I work. Humanity progressively attempts to cut itself loose from the moral, ethical, and spiritual guidelines, the frameworks that are found in God’s book, the standard by which we must live by.

We can see statements such as I am the master of my fate, I’m the captain of my soul. Man is his own master, he can and must decide and manage his own destiny. And these are the types of things that people in the world will confront us with. Well, no one knows really what the future holds, but we know that it is turning fast and things are vastly changing, and we need to take advantage of modern medicine, modern technology, modern science when we can do it in good faith as Christians. But whatever comes if we accept such a philosophy that some men are trying to put forth to us blindly, it’s not going to be good. And this can happen in the area of genetic engineering.

1. Genetic Engineering: Something New for Something Old

In its simplest framework, it’s basically the substitution of something new for something old. And we’ve been doing this for a long time in what we call recombinant DNA. And don’t worry about the complexity up there. Just look at the colors. Half is red and half is blue. And in recombinant DNA, we take some red and some blue and we put them together and we get something new. But we’ve been doing that for a long, long time. A little red, a little blue, we put it together, and we have different type of nucleic acid. Remember this morning I told you that nucleic acid was the deoxyribole nucleic acid, the genetic material, that material that’s in every single cell that we have that makes the decision for us of what color our hair is going to be, the color of our skin, how tall we’re going to be.

All of the information that’s needed is found in that DNA. And so we make these recombinant changes, and now we can grow a microorganism which is resistant to drugs. And this happens in nature, in a hospital setting. There are resistant drugs, and this comes about through natural recombination. And we can do this in a laboratory setting as well. And we’ve done this and produce a number of good things that we can use. Insulin for diabetics is now produced by recombinant DNA. We used to have to kill pigs, take their pancreas, extract out the insulin, and then we use that for diabetics. We can now make it through recombinant DNA. Factor 8 is a factor in that blood cascade, the clotting mechanism. Factor 9 is also in that blood clotting.

Human growth hormone. This is a hormone that helps us grow. We can make these by recombinant DNA, erythropoetin, interferons, interleukons, just all kinds of things we can now make by recombinant DNA. Things that we as Christians can use and take advantage of. Other factors, uh stimulating factors in tissue plasma, activating proteins. Uh if you’ve ever had a heart attack and you’ve gotten to the hospital, this is what you want them to give you. If they don’t give you an aspirin, this is uh what they ought to be giving you. And we make this by recombinant DNA now. And again, just some others, not important what they are, but just to let you know that there are a number of protein type materials that are very effective in the medical community that are now made by recombinant DNA, and without that technology of taking a little blue and a little red and putting it together, and all of a sudden we now have uh something that we want to use.

We couldn’t do this 15, 20 years ago. Well, a broader definition of genetic engineering would be any form of artificial reproduction or genetic manipulation. So it broadens it from just this recon recombining DNA in microorganisms to any type of artificial reproduction or genetic manipulation. Well, some questions we need to think about is just how extensive is this technology? And I think you’ve already seen just with recombinant capabilities, it’s very extensive. And again, we want to continue to remind ourselves is how should we we as Christians respond to this technology? I love this quote uh because it’s I think very true. For science is indeed watching God’s word. And though most scientists won’t admit it, that’s exactly what we’re doing when we delve into biological systems. We’re trying to understand what God has done for us in years past.

But what’s some of the motivation behind such research? I think it’s commendable in many ways, particularly if it can alleviate human suffering by correcting genetic defects, to therapeutically control and rehabilitate those who might be dangerous to society, to improve the general functioning and future potential of the human race. We can say this for the animal species as well. But let me give you a caution. Underlying assumption of some people in this area that they can do things better than nature, as we Christians would say, better than God, and we’ve got to be careful about that. The concept that we’re really responsible for no higher being than ourselves, that’s very much in all of this. Economic value is the final test in considering what should or should not be done.

Is it going to make a profit? Not is it ethically or morally correct, but what are the economics behind it? And that old situation ethics that we faced over the years, the end justifies the means. Well, the Bible injunction for Christians to be the salt of the earth, Matthew 5.13, seems to me carries tremendous importance for us in this area and in all areas of our life.

Modification, creation, procreation, and life alteration. Modification is basically making minor changes in this genetic material. These things that we talked about would recommonate DNA. Creation, the goal here is to create new life. And that’s part of the issue that we’re going to see when we get into cloning the concept of creating new life. Procreation, simply to help people reproduce that were incapable to do so. And in life alterating life alteration is to improve and prolong life. And in some cases it’s used to shorten life, which is something that we cannot be involved in. Well, there are a number of indirect approaches, and the most successful began to come out in the 1980s, and these have to do with bacterial recombinant activities. Human insulin is probably the easiest example to look at.

And again, don’t worry about the cartoon that’s up there. All it is is taking a little snippet of human genetic material that’s coated to make insulin. We all have it in our pancreas, in the eyelid cells of the pancreas. We all have the capability of making insulin. We can go in and take that information, put it into a bacterium, and then that bacterium will make human insulin for us, and that’s how we get human insulin today. A more direct approach began in the late 1980s, and it’s now moving at really breakneck speed.

We know a lot about the human genome. We also know that there are some 3,000 or more genetic disorders, and uh we can we can test for a lot of these. What really broke this free for us was what’s known as the human genome program, and we now know that each of us carry somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 genes. About 60% of these we don’t know what they do. The other 40% we know a good bit about them. And this all came about and it was published originally in Nature. But the thing that I want you to look at, it’s kind of amazing. If you can see it up in this corner, it says the language God used to create man. This is in nature, a prestigious English journal.

I never thought that I would see a journal of this statue in the scientific immunity use such terminology to describe what happened. But they’re saying, and it’s true, this is the language that God used to create man and to create all living organisms. And this is just kind of what it looks like, just to show you that really within the pages of nature there there’s one gene, and you can see the complexity of it, and it’s being studied. Now, let me just kind of give you a very, very simple example of taking a silk purse from a cow’s cell.

2. The Bible and Genetic Engineering

Well, here now we have a material, if we could make it, that’s harder and more resistant than Keplar, but stretches like nylon. And so we’ve taken the genetic material out of this spider, put it into cow cells, and now have actually made this material. And if it can go into production, it’s going to be really valuable for things like sutures, uh, for uh tendons and lignans in the human body, and for uh basically uh sweatshirt type protective garments for police and military people. So there are all kinds of applications out there for this technology. Well, let’s think about for just a moment the Bible and genetic engineering and what should be our responsibility, our response to it. Uh how can we know what is right in this area?

And how is the morality of such practice to be determined? Well, first of all, let us remind ourselves that the word of God is complete and perfect source of moral and spiritual information. 2 Timothy chapter 3, verses 16 and 17. It’s not just for those people that lived 2,000 years ago, but it’s applicable now, and it’s going to be applicable a thousand, two thousand. How much ever time is left in the future? 2 Peter 1 and verse 3. God is not the author of confusion, much less contradiction, 1 Corinthians 14 verses or verse 33. So I would say to you that the principles are there within God’s word. We just need to probe diligently and study intently for the principles that are going to imply to apply in this area.

The other thing I would suggest to us is that we need to not forget the importance of prayer.

Someone goes into surgery, and we typically pray that the surgeon might do the things that he can do so that that person can come out of surgery. We need to pray, I think, for guidance as we think about some of these bioengineering technologies that we’re going to be talking about. Well, man was a creature that created a creature of freedom and choice, and there are a number of passages that you can turn to to show that. We have a choice to have or not to have children. Adam and Eve were commanded to fill the earth, Genesis 128, and their specific purpose was to appropriate the human race through the lineage of Adam and Eve. Well, there are people today that cannot have children. Does that same thing apply to them?

3. Assisted Reproduction Before and After Conception

If they’re unable to conceive or they’re potentially diseased, and we need to think about this from our standpoint. What are some of the things that modern technology offers to people that cannot naturally have children? There are a number of options open to married couples. They can remain childless, they can adopt, they can foster children, or they can think about assistant reproduction. And this is the first topic that we’re going to get into that we need to think about. Can we participate as Christian in all of the technology that’s available to us? Well, what is assisted reproduction? It can occur before conception, at conception, prenatally, and postnatally. Before conception, we’ll just say a little bit about genetic counseling. We can get a lot of information from genetic counseling, information on birth defects and inherited diseases to help us with our own health, the health of our children.

As I said, there are about 3,000 known genetic defects, and we can screen for many of these. Unfortunately, about one in 50 children born in this country have some type of congenital abnormality or mental handicap. It’s a very, very high percentage. A simple case in point is Down syndrome. It’s caused by an extra genetic material. There are about 350,000 people in the United States. It’s an imbalance of the number of the autosome and people.

It’s most common, about one in 800 births. If you’re below 30, it’s about one in a thousand. When you start aging, it’s about one in a hundred.

And so it’s called trisomy 21.

But the extra chromosome, about 90% of the time, comes from the female. And here is the pattern. If you if you lay out the chromosomes, you can see chromosome 23 here. And instead of having two, like all the others, there are three of these. Just a little sidebar for you.

There are 46 chromosomes in all of us if we’re normal. Now just look at this. Can anybody tell me if this is a boy or a girl? Boy. Why is it a boy? Right over here, XY. Those are the sex chromosomes. And boys have an XY, girls have an XX. Every time. Never varies. Well, the effect varies greatly from person to person, but can include mental retardation, eyes that slant upwards, and heart defects. And here’s one of these lovely, lovely children. They’re just sweet, sweet children. And parents that have Down syndrome children should just be blessed because they’ve got wonderful children, and they can be raised and loved and cared for just like any other child. All kinds of genetic screening we can do. I put up hemophilia just to give you an example.

Again, this is another one of these, unfortunately, that’s carried through the female. And you can see we have the father without it, the mother’s a carrier, here’s one son that doesn’t have it, a daughter’s a carrier, here’s a son that doesn’t have it, and a daughter that’s not a carrier. So these are just genetic malformations that can be passed on, and we can detect these and we can monitor for these. And there are a number of ways that we can do this. We can look at the mother’s serum for Down syndrome, for neural tube defects. There are a number of fetal tests, but you begin to at some point put the fetal the fetus in jeopardy with some of these tests, but again, you can get a lot of information with these kinds of tests.

Well, what do we do from the standpoint of treatment? Well, we can do nothing. We can do in utero prenatal surgery, do blood transfusions, and as genetic therapy begins to improve itself, I think within the next 10 or so years, we’re going to be able to deliver DNA, or at least alter DNA so that we can overcome those defects in children. This is not here yet, but it’s on the horizon. And this is little Sammy again, spinobifida being fixed by surgery at Vanderbilt University. Prenatal manipulation, abortion, Proverbs 6, 16 through 17. There are six things which Jehovah hateth, and hands that shed innocent blood is the seventh, and I’ve already told you about that this morning. There’s no blood that’s more innocent than a child. There’s the treatment of the end results of an abortion again.

Postnatal manipulation, passive treatment. This is really just an euphemism for allowing the baby to die. Think about our constitution. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Roe versus Wade says that small children, babies, fetuses do not have protection under the Constitution. Let us remind ourselves of such passages of Scripture, and I’ve listed some, Proverbs 24, 1 Samuel 16, and the word of the Lord in Luke 14, 13, and 14. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maim, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you, for you shall be repaid in the resurrection of the just.

Human life is sacred because God made man in his own image and the likeness, Genesis 1, 26 and 27. And we saw this morning that God is actively at work in the womb, Psalms 139 and Job 10. It is not an option for Christians to care for those who cannot care for themselves. God’s word contains specific commandments regarding such actions, and I’ve listed a number of passages where that’s the case. Well, how are we going to use this information from genetic counseling? Before conception, I think it can help us make a number of decisions.

And if you happen to be married, uh within a close family circle, and we’re going to see how this can come about in a little bit that we hadn’t thought about in the past. This is one of the problems that came about in the royals in Europe, particularly in the Mediterranean area that developed hemophilia in that line. But before conception, you can make decisions. If you know that you carry the gene for down syndrome or hemophilia, you can make a decision not to have children and go other routes. Or you can make that decision knowing that your chances are of having a down syndrome child is one in four. Older couples, again, we’ve talked about that. Decision making for risk after conception. I will say to you emphatically, it is limited.

4. At Conception: Artificial Insemination

We do not, as Christians, have the right to abort. We do not have the right to do things that would harm the child. If we can do prenatal surgery or some of these other things, then those are possible. But once conception has taken place, as Christians, what we can do is very limited. Okay, at conception, there’s some of the things that are being done artificial insemination in vitro fertilization and cloning. Again, the same question as Christians. How should we look at this? Well, artificial insemination, we want to ask ourselves what is it, what are the potential applications, and how, as Christians can we respond? There are three ways that artificial insemination can take place, and this is primarily when the husband has problems as opposed to the wife having problems.

You can use only the husband’s sperm with his wife’s egg. The second type is only a donor sperm, and the third type is a mixture of the donor and the husband’s sperm. And basically it’s injected the sperm, and then they make that race that we talked about this morning. Problems with males, uh, and about 10 to 15 percent of young males have this inadequate sperm number, faulty sperms, that is, they don’t have the ability to swim like they should for ejaculation or impotency, and there are a number of drugs out now that uh can help in that area. Let’s skip over these.

It’s simply a medical science aid to correct a physiological problem, and I think Christians can support that. The other two types that’s when there’s a mixture or a donor, I would suggest to you that it’s unacceptable for a Christian to do that. And then really, who is the legal father? And this is a problem that’s beginning to come about now. Many people, and some of the biggest uh people at fault are medical students, will donate their sperm to get them through college or through medical school, uh and then they come to find out that they may have fathered 10, 20, 30 number of children over the course of time. And what happens if these are in the same community, and these children then fall in love with each other.

5. In Vitro Fertilization

They’re going to be bringing very close genetic material in. If this continues, you can cause problems because the longer you inbreed, so to speak, the greater the chances you are to develop these hereditary type diseases. In vitro fertilization, we’re going to ask ourselves what is it? A little bit about the history, how does it work, and what are the potential applications of in vitro fertilization, and then again, as Christians, what is our response? Well, some of the causes of in vitro in vitro fertilization now lie on the woman’s side, and I’m not going to go through these, but there can be tubal problems, uh intrometrius, which is a hardening of the uterus lining, uh, problems with her ovaries, uh, the shape of the uterus, uh, fibrous tumors, and having been exposed to a chemical uh diethyl stylbesterol when the woman herself was a fetus.

Well, in vitro fertilization is simply fertilization outside of the female in blast or a test tube. It’s a test tube baby. Many of you have heard this term. It’s combining of an egg and a sperm in a test tube. The earliest attempts began in about the 1940s. The first test tube baby was born in July the 25th, 1978. Her name was Louis Brown, and her parents were John and Lisa Brown in London, England. The first woman to give birth to her own grandchildren took place in South Africa, and she gave birth to triplicates in October the 14th, 1987. This technology has been available on a mass scale since about 1986, and there are about 100,000 in vitro fertilized children in the United States. In Boston, the large in vitro fertilization clinic has done about uh conceived about 7,500 babies in the last five years.

Their success rate is not great. It’s about uh 10 to 15 percent, uh, but it’s closer to 50 percent for women below 35, not inexpensive, uh 11 to 15,000 for a single attempt. The issue here that you need to keep in mind is often extra embryos are created, and there are about 400,000 frozen embryos in the United States. They’re not regulated. The other place that I’ve got statistics is the UK, and they’re about 50,000 regulated. And remember, an embryo is a living, living human being. Keep that in mind because when we get to cloning, you’re going to see how these embryos are used in the cloning process. Well, in vitro fertilization, it’s really a very, very simple process. Uh the female is given a hormone which uh causes her to uh ovulate, the egg is taken, uh, put into the eggs are taken, put into a petri dish, sperm are added.

Uh, a couple of days later, uh, these are planted into the uterus. Uh the you take the egg out after it’s been uh the egg is out, the egg and sperm, they’re put together in the uh in a test tube. Here’s the embryo, and it’s transferred generally multiple embryos into the female. Now, this is the very simple but yet extremely complex process of the beginning of human life. Here’s the fertilized egg, two stage, four, eight, sixteen, and what we call the blastula, and this is the part of the embryo that forms the fetus. The outside part is the part that forms the placenta and the supporting organs. In the past, they have used this stage, and they had to implant a number of embryos. They’re now going to these stages, much later stages, and they can plant fewer embryos.

One of the things that you can do, a couple can do is they can tell their physician, implant no more than two, and actually fertilize no more than two, and we’re going to use those so there are no embryos that are lost. Well, what are the potentials? Infernal women might conceive, and then there’s nothing wrong with this, women whose health will not permit routine pregnancy, uh, fertilization into a surrogate mother, uh, older women at risk for all kinds of potential uh hereditary diseases, uh, women could rent their womb and they have done it to act as surrogate women, uh, surrogate mothers. I think some of the issues that we find uh lesbians can have children, uh they can just become a surrogate mother, they can bear children for other couples, for unmarried men, for homosexual men.

Uh the sex of the child can be pre-selected, uh, but you don’t have to do this, you can do this to some line some limited extent now by just looking and separating in what’s called a flow cytometer, a sperm. Unknown traits can be eliminated. Somewhere in the process, it seems to me that the child has ceased to be a gift of God, Psalms 127, 3. Embryos are created and often destroyed in this process, and that’s the real problem with this technology. If we can only fertilize the exact number of embryos that we need, then it’s okay. It’s when we make these extra ones and they’re not used, and then they become either destroyed or used in things like cloning, which we’ll come to, we begin to have problems.

The other thing is the experiment is not for the benefit of the embryo if it’s destroyed. Uh, as I’ve said, multiple eggs and these tiny embryos, is there any difference in an embryo traveling down a flopian tube or implanted in the uterus and floating in a petri dish? And I would say to you, there is no difference. It’s exactly the same. It’s just modern science helping out. But what should our response be? Are we opposed to married couples having children? The answer is no. Are we opposed to using legitimate means to help childless couples have their children that they so desperately want? And the answer is no, as long as it’s done properly within the framework of God’s rules on childbearing. And I’ll get to that in a minute.

But I think Christians have to be opposed to wholesale production and subsequent slaughter of human embryos and search for the fittest that is being good enough to be given a chance at survival. But we can also support the research that’s going on to improve this technology, and I’ve just listed a couple of examples of types of research. But we need to understand that these technologies must be used according to God’s spiritual law. And I think God has given us within his word a spiritual law to govern the physical law of sex and reproduction. Oneness of flesh is approved only in the marriage of male and female who are producing another part of their flesh. Hebrews 13, 4, and 1 Corinthians 6, 16 and 7, 1 through 5.

To reproduce according to God’s spiritual law, males and females must be married to each other, 1 Timothy 5, 14. And cannot express enough, marriage precedes childbearing. If the female bearing a child is not married to, is not one flesh with the male in the reproductive process, they violate God’s law. Remember back to artificial insemination, a donor sperm or a mixture of sperm. They’re not one flesh. In the case of in vitro fertilization, as long as it’s done with those that are married and we control the number of embryos, then it doesn’t violate God’s law. God designed the woman to be a wife, baby bearer, and mother all in one, and not merely a baby-bearing machine. And he designed the man to be a husband, progenitor, and father, all in one, not merely a stud or a sperm donor.

Any action that strikes at the heart of Jehovah’s divine plan and purpose for the home, in my opinion, must be avoided and opposed. Remember, man is the offspring of God. It is God who gives life and breath in all things, human life as a gift from God is sacred. Intelligently and morally, humankind was created in the image of the Godhead. Mankind is designed by God, as designed by God was thus fearfully and wonderfully made. As originally made, mankind is the wondrous work of him who is perfect in knowledge. Job 37, 16, man was together with the rest of creation very good. Genesis 1, 31. For practices such as the use of donor sperm, donor egg, surrogate mothers ignores the true function of human reduction. Childbearing is not an end with itself, but part of a larger plan.

6. Cloning: Reproductive and Therapeutic

Parental responsibility really starts before conception and continues from conception on through raising that child to the level that they’re independently mature. And a greater part of that rearing is training of the child for service to God. Well, how could any Christian surrender his or own reproductive power to another person, thus ignoring the divine responsibility connected therewith? We’re going to move into cloning now. What is cloning? Types of cloning? How does it work? What are the potential applications? Does this approach work? And what should be a Christian’s response to cloning? Comes from the Greek word clone, a spout or a trig is a noun form and a verb form. The noun is just the organism or cell, and the verb form is the process. Well, cloning is a natural process that occurs in nature.

It’s known as asexual reproduction, in which you get the exact genetic duplication of the original, just divides into two parts.

And this is very simple. One cell breaking into two cells, two cells into four cells. This is very, very simple cloning. Well, most plants and animals reproduce sexually.

Well, I’d ask you a question. Did human clones exist today? Are there human clones? Anyone want to? I hear maybe there are human clones. Exactly. Identical twins are human clones. And the reason they’re human clones, they’re fertilized. A single egg is fertilized, that egg splits into two zygotes, and you get two identical individuals. And because they’re identical, they must be boy, boy, girl, girl. You cannot have boy girl and be identical twins. That’s only fraternal twins. You can have boy, boy, girl, girl, fraternal twins, but if they’re boy girl, such as our twins, they have to be fraternal.

Cloning of DNA, the recombinant DNA, we’ve talked about this, and so I’m not going to say any more about that, other than to remind you that it’s being used now and it’s being used very effective, and in most cases, we can use most all of that stuff. Well, here’s the real issue. There are two types of cloning reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning. That’s the first real issue that we have. Reproductive cloning. This is to form a fully developed living child. And in the other case, is to generate stem cells. That’s the second issue that we have. The first issue is the two types of cloning, reproductive and therapeutic. I just tell you right up front, we got to put reproductive cloning aside. We cannot take part in that.

And most scientists would agree you can’t take part in that. But as Christians, we cannot take part in reproductive cloning. Therapeutic cloning, I think there are some areas where we can take advantage of the system. And that depends on this concept of stem cell, which we’re going to get to in just a minute. But just very briefly, there are two types of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Embryonic stem cells require an embryo. And it requires us to kill that embryo. That living person. When you’re doing embryonic stem cell work, you have to kill the embryo to get those stem cells. Adult stem cells, you do not have to. And we’ll get into that. So keep in mind the two major divisions, reproductive and therapeutic cloning, and then within that, therapeutic cloning, stem cell, embryonic stem cell, or adult stem cell.

Well, the goals of reproductive cloning, as I’ve already said, are to grow cloned embryos into babies, aimed at producing new people, and aimed at reduce producing new parts. Think about that just for a minute. You need a heart transplant. So what do you do? You clone yourself. And when that embryo gets to a certain stage, you take it out, you kill it, and you develop part cells that you plant into your heart, and you can replace the valve or the more the muscle. I mean, these are all conceptual things that are coming down the road. So we need to think about that, and we just can’t take part in that. The goal of therapeutic cloning is to create cells that can regenerate all the types of cells within our body.

It’s aimed at creating cell lines for medical treatment and to produce stem cells. And again, remember the difference embryonic and adult stem cells. It’s going to be very helpful in testing of new drugs, new diagnoses, and tissues for regenerative medicine. Well, my wife told me to leave this one out, but it is complicated. When we get to stem cells, there are different types of stem cells, whether they’re embryonic or adult stem cells. The first one of these, and don’t worry about the name, is a stem cell that can make every single cell in our body, whether it’s a hair cell, a toenail cell, or two cell. It can make every single cell in our body. The second one has the ability to make a lot of cells, but not all of them.

And the third one is pretty restricted in the type of cells that it can make. It can make blood cells. It can make all of the blood cells, whether it’s white blood cells, red blood cells, neutrophils, macrophages, there are a whole bunch of blood cells that they can make. So the first one can make any cell in an organism, the second one can make a bunch of cells, the third one is restricted to the type of cells that it can make. And then the ultimate stem cell is that zygote, that thing that’s formed at conception when the sperm and egg come together. And here it is. Here is our sperm and egg coming together. This is that stem cell that can make everything. Here we have our blastocyst.

We take these out to get these stem cells, and instead of going here, we kill this fetus, and now we have these stem cells. And well, how does cloning work? And there are two processes, and I’m only going to tell you about one of them. That’s nuclear transfer. And this is the one that you’ve read about in the newspaper, you’ve seen in magazines. And basically what this is, is that you take an egg, you remove it from the female, and you take the nucleus out of it. The nucleus is where the genetic material is contained. So we now take the nucleus out of the egg from the female, and there is no genetic material now in this egg cell that we have. It’s been denucleated. And then we take another body cell, maybe a cell from our cheek.

And we take the nucleus out of that and stick it into the egg and stimulate it and put it into the uterus, and we go forth. And this just is a picture of how you can denucleate the uh the egg cell by sticking a pipad in, sucking it up, and taking it out. So we now have this all done. We now implant it in the uterus, uh, and basically uh what we have uh after five or six days, we have the blastocyte, uh, we take the blastocyte out, and remember I told you that there was an outer core and an inner core, that this inner core is what makes the placenta and all of the support area, the I’m sorry, the outer part is what makes the placenta uh and all of the support cells, the inner part is where the uh embryo is.