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Neanderthal converts?

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Raulmarrio2000:
A child who does not know his parents may also be in that situation due to human intervention. By this logic, in case of war, if a hospital has to be abandoned and the patients taken somewhere else in a hurry to save their lives, then it would also be forbidden lest the children lose contact with their parents.

A man who cannot have children is already unable to fullfill the mitzvah of being fruitfull, no matters if he attempts cloning or not.

The problem with cloning is that we just don't know all the details and probably will never know. The articles you post are commentaries, not a definite psak. As for now, science hasn't even solved the problem of DNA age, and a clon would be several years old at birth. Certainly, no Rav would allow a cruel procedure to create a human being with a little life expectancy. They are just answering theoretical issues.

Raulmarrio2000:
http://www.chabaduchicago.com/templates/articlecco_cdo/aid/242917/jewish/Reproductive-Cloning-By-Rabbi-Dr.-Jonathan-Sacks.htm

By Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks

Reproductive cloning is no substitute for humanity's perfect flaws

The proposed experiments on human cloning, announced by Italian embryologist Severino Antinoni, are dangerous, irresponsible and deserve condemnation. They mark a new low in playing roulette with human life.
First things first. Cloning is a procedure fraught with hazard. In the experiments that created Dolly the sheep, 277 cloned embryos were produced. Only 29 developed to the point where they could be implanted and only one survived to term. The others developed abnormalities and were aborted. In all animal experiments to date less than 3 per cent of cloning attempts succeed. Not only are there fetal deaths and stillborn infants, but even among those that survive there is a high incidence of subsequent, initially undetected, abnormality.

Only a month ago a major study in America showed that cloned mice, outwardly healthy, carried a basic genetic instability that put them at risk of subsequent deformation and premature death. Cloning apparently disturbs the normal process of "genomic imprinting" by which the genes on the chromosomes from one of the parents are switched on or off. The evidence has already convinced many scientists that mammalian cloning is an intrinsically flawed process. Certainly it is too unsafe ever to be used in human reproduction.

These are not lay reactions. Dr Ian Wilmut who cloned Dolly the sheep has said many times that he believes human cloning will never be acceptable. Two months ago the Royal Society called for a worldwide ban on human reproductive cloning. The risks are too high and the unknowns too great. These are wise voices. When in doubt, do not play games with someone else's life.

It is one thing to attempt a hazardous medical procedure on a living patient who otherwise faces certain death, quite another to bring children into being who will carry massive risks of abnormality, malformation and premature death. What will the doctors, or the parent, say to those who do not turn out as expected? Sorry? I thought it was safe? The thalidomide tragedy was surely enough to make scientists think twice before making available treatments not fully tested, that have a high - in this case overwhelming - chance of failure.

However, cloning is not just another technology. It raises issues not posed by other forms of assisted reproduction such as artificial insemination or in vitro fertilisation. Somatic cell nuclear cell transfer is a form of asexual reproduction. We do not know why it is that large, long living creatures like us reproduce sexually. From an evolutionary point of view, asexual reproduction seems much simpler. It avoids the problems of finding a mate and all the love and war to which that leads. Yet none of the higher mammals reproduce asexually. Is it because only by the unpredictable combination of genetic endowments of parents and grandparents can a species generate the variety it needs to survive? The history of the human presence on earth is marked by a destruction of bio-diversity on a massive scale. To take risks with our own genetic future would be suicidal.

However, the real objection to cloning is the threat to the integrity of children so born. To be sure, genetically identical persons already exist in the case of identical twins. It is one thing, though, for this to occur, quite another deliberately to bring it about. Identical twins do not come into being so that one may serve as a substitute or replacement or the source of compatible tissue for the other. Cloning represents an ethical danger in a way that naturally occurring phenomena do not. It treats persons as means rather than as ends in themselves. It will be a decisive further step to the commodification of human life. It cannot but transform some of the most basic features of our humanity.

Every child born of the genetic mix between two parents is unpredictable, a gift of grace, like yet unlike those who have brought it into the world. That mix of kinship and difference is the essential feature of human relationships. It lies behind what is surely the defining belief of Western civilization, that each individual is unique, non-substitutable and irreplaceable. What would become of love if we knew that if we lost our beloved we could create a replica? What would happen to our sense of self if we discovered that we were manufactured to order?

If there is a mystery at the heart of the human condition it is otherness: the otherness of man and woman, parent and child. It is the space we make for otherness that makes love something other than narcissism and parenthood something greater than self-replication. It is this that gives every human child the right to be themselves, to know they are not reproductions of someone else, constructed according to a preplanned genetic template on someone else's whim. Without this, would childhood be bearable? Would love survive? Would a world of clones still be a human world? I doubt it.

There are some mysteries before which the only appropriate response is reverence, responsibility and restraint. Dr Antinori and his team have shown a lack of all three.

Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom

 

Kahane-Was-Right BT:

--- Quote from: muman613 on March 25, 2010, 09:19:41 PM ---How would a Clone honor its mother and father? Could it even come close to performing this command? 
--- End quote ---

Silly.

How does an adopted child honor its mother and father?   How does an orphan honor its mother and father?

What a silly argument.  I suspect you were not sincerely presenting that as an argument.  Please be real.


--- Quote ---
What about the mitzvah of Puru E'Revu? The command to be fruitful and multiply... This command requires a man and a woman to engage in sexual relations in order to produce a child. I dont think that Hashem intended humans to play G-d and create people without mothers and fathers. The commandments to honor parents is because a person must be able to honor his parents in order to be able to honor Hashem..



--- End quote ---

And a human being produced through cloning is also equally able to procreate with a spouse (female spouse if he is male, male spouse if he is female), just like any other human.

A cloning procedure would be done for medical purposes, either for research (not carried to the full term, but only to embryo stage - thus a "clone" never comes about), or due to infertility perhaps to produce a child.   Like IVF.   I don't think you have a problem with IVF, do you Muman?   The argument you present here against cloning can be applied no differently to IVF-produced babies.   Yet IVF technique seems accepted by standard halacha, and famous Dr. Baruch Brooks is in consultation with Rav Eliyashiv about his clinic's fertility work where they certainly help produce children for infertile couples.

Kahane-Was-Right BT:

--- Quote from: Raulmarrio2000 on March 25, 2010, 10:24:55 PM ---Torah allows scientifical investigation. The question about human soul is not scientific but metaphisical. Even if science could tell something about Neanderthals, we don't have them now to examine. That sorts of speculations are no good and have no0 practical application. 
--- End quote ---

Very true.  Similarly, it is also true that it is impossible to determine at what stage of embryonic development God infuses a soul to the child (or maybe it happens at conception?  or maybe at birth?)  Who knows?   And who cares?  It is not really relevant.


--- Quote ---
Torah does not say that cloning is allowed either. 
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Torah does not speak about many modern technologies, and why would it?   But that is the role of Judaism.  We have chachamim and the Oral Torah to address modern day concerns.   Chachamim would determine whether this fits (for a given purpose and in a given context) within the halacha, or does not.  We are not a stumbling nation poking around in the darkness, blind and with nowhere to turn and no one to lead us.  Chas veshalom.   

I want to stress that people from among the masses make assumptions quite often, and they are often baseless, at times influenced by other religions or what the spokespeople of other religions are saying as the "party line" on given issues.   The chachamim are the ones to decide what fits with Torah and what does not.  No one else.   And there is clearly a difference of opinion between our chachamim and the other religions about whether a fetus is a child or not.  In Judaism it is not a child but a potential child.   All the moreso an embryo is not considered a "life."  That is why in Judaism stem cell research is permitted from what I know.



--- Quote --- The only way of reproduction mentioned in the Torah is by a man and a woman.
--- End quote ---

Once again, the Torah is not a science book and does not speak of modern medical technology.  And it had no reason to do so.  God's Torah is perfect.


--- Quote --- And science can tell nothing about Neshamot.
--- End quote ---
  It doesn't need to.  What do we need to know about it?  The kaballah speaks about it and therein lies the information about neshamoth which are otherwise not relevant to this discussion.



--- Quote --- You admitted in a previous post that you understand the doubt of whether a clon is a human bieng. 
--- End quote ---

Perhaps you refer to Muman, but I certainly did not.  In fact, I know for sure that a clone of a human being IS a human being.  It will have a full set of chromosomes, a normal human body, human brain, etc etc.   I highly contest anyone who proposes here that a clone of a human would not be human.   That is not a scientifically valid assertion.

muman613:
Many of these points were mentioned in the portions I quoted above.

I don't need to reiterate those points.

The issue is not whether clones are human because as KWRBT pointed out they are physically identical to the original genetic material donor... But the issues I have are whether halachically this organism is a Jew, whether he can perform the mitzvot {whether he has an obligation to do so}.

I also bring the 'slippery slope' argument that this kind of thing will lead to an even more estranged method of bringing people into the world. At this time KWRBT mentions how close to natural birth this method is, that the clone goes through fetal stages, and birth from a mother, etc.... But lets just say that 10 years from now they can create an artificial, external womb. And maybe they can create a farm of artificial wombs from which many cloned children can be grown. It would not be much more difficult to argue that this too is permitted even though it may violate a couple of principles.

Science fiction is full of stories of madmen who create clone armies. Maybe this is 20 years away?

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