Poll of the Day: Clone Wars

Is it ethical to grow brain-dead human clones for organ donation?

  • Yes

    Votes: 11 42.3%

  • No

    Votes: 15 57.7%
  • Total voters
    26
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Does brain dead mean they feel pain? Do they have a soul/consciousness? Consciousness may not even lie in the brain.

Then again you can use those exact arguments for fish.

It really depends on the supply too. Will we have less stolen organs? Or people tricked into selling their kidneys? Or the inconvenience of donating your liver /bone marrow to a relative?

I would say it's about as unethical as domesticating animals for food. Sure it's bad, but awfully convenient and something we won't even notice by a few generations.

 
Reading the title, I first thought it would be about building a clone army to fight wars for us ¬¬

But anyway, wouldn't it be better to grow the organ individually instead of cloning a whole human? I think that if we really have to clone brain dead human for their organ then it really should be done when there are no other options (e.g. no suitable organ donors).

 
Bear said:
Reading the title, I first thought it would be about building a clone army to fight wars for us ¬¬

But anyway, wouldn't it be better to grow the organ individually instead of cloning a whole human? I think that if we really have to clone brain dead human for their organ then it really should be done when there are no other options (e.g. no suitable organ donors).
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Well I mean we are doing that, I read this a while ago. It would be to time consuming to grow a full human and then let the body and organs age to work for an adult. (If the one who needs the organs is an adult) Their is a book called the House of the Scorpion that is about a kid who is a clone grown for his organs though he is not brain dead and is allowed to grow a "normal" life but in the story many of societies elite have brain dead clones grown for the purpose of organ transplant. It's fiction of course but it's relevant. Now that I have gone off topic back to my original point, the way we are going is seems that we will be using 3d printing and a persons stem cells now we aren't there yet but right now people are printing replacements for hips and such things tailored to each person. As it goes we may be able to if not eliminate at least reduce the need for donors in the future.  

 
Yeah, seems to me we'd be better off simply cloning individual organs or body parts. 3D printing has a lot of potential, maybe one day we'll be able to print pretty much anything as long as the necessary matter and energy is available.

 
Don't change the poll now. Growing a new organ is no fun for the topic. 

Also good luck at 3D printing a cell xfd. 

 
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I don't think it's very ethical. I don't like that kind of future. I don't think that should be a thing. It just sounds wrong. I'm gonna go with my gut and say no on this one

 
Big Brother said:
Yeah, seems to me we'd be better off simply cloning individual organs or body parts. 3D printing has a lot of potential, maybe one day we'll be able to print pretty much anything as long as the necessary matter and energy is available.
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alyster said:
Don't change the poll now. Growing a new organ is no fun for the topic. 

Also good luck at 3D printing a cell xfd. 
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It'd definitely be easier to simply clone the individual organs or body parts. MIT is currently working on 3d printing livers, they haven't been able to do it to scale yet, but it has a lot of potential: http://www.3ders.org/articles/20140622-mit-researchers-building-mini-human-livers-with-3d-printing.html 

Something I could definitely see myself working on some day :)  

 
Alex Taylor said:
I would say it's about as unethical as domesticating animals for food. Sure it's bad, but awfully convenient and something we won't even notice by a few generations.
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It also offers a much higher benefit than animals for food do, just saying, since meat is basically a luxury where as this would save people's lives.

 
I'd bet domestication was about saving lives too at some point. Only very recently in history did we have an abundance of food.

 
BlackAsLight said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0EJmBoLq-g

One day we will be able to print organs for people, but I don't believe that we should. Are we not just playing God?
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I can understand not wanting to grow brain dead human clones and harvesting organs (there's some ethical issues there for sure). But simply cloning and printing organs? That's science increasing the quality of human life, it doesn't matter if it's playing "God" or not.

 
BlackAsLight said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0EJmBoLq-g

One day we will be able to print organs for people, but I don't believe that we should. Are we not just playing God?
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I think we should, the benefits are too great to ignore. If we have the technology to provide sick people with the organs that they need, it would be unethical and wasteful to not do so.

As for playing god, I don't really see this as an issue. If mankind possessed abilities and technology that would make us godlike, we could surely accomplish great things. That's probably a discussion for another thread though.

 
Isn't anyone going to bring up the point that it's not currently possible to know if someone is self aware or not?

So what if you clone a human and they end up being completely self aware and conscious, just like you. Bummer. What you guys are arguing for is a form of slavery that is so appalling, I'm seriously surprised so many of you are ok with this. Printing organs is obviously way more ethical than cloning humans. Not to mention cloning humans is generally considered unethical in the scientific community for a myriad of reasons. That's some dystopian shit that almost definitely would bite us in the ass/completely destroy ethics in general. You aren't treating these people as people, just meat, solely because they're "brain dead". That's not ethical by any means.

And playing god? I can see a lot going wrong if humans possessed power we weren't able to control. To have godlike technology, you need a godlike understanding of science and the consequences of your actions. We aren't even close to having the latter and would therefore almost definitely destroy not only ourselves, but any life that we would get our hands on. Gods can be evil too.

 
Piratemonkey said:
And playing god? I can see a lot going wrong if humans possessed power we weren't able to control. To have godlike technology, you need a godlike understanding of science and the consequences of your actions. We aren't even close to having the latter and would therefore almost definitely destroy not only ourselves, but any life that we would get our hands on. Gods can be evil too.
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I don't really have an opinion regarding the ethics of human cloning other than that it seems unnecessary.

As for playing god, in my post I wrote "abilities and technology that would make us godlike". Godlike abilities could be, like you said, "a godlike understanding of science and the consequences of your actions". Of course there would be obvious dangers in lacking such abilities if one was to attempt to "play god". If mankind did possess such abilities, we could accomplish much. And you're right, gods can be evil (by some definitions) but that doesn't make them any less divine, and evil is really just a meaningless construct, especially when speaking of gods. They are surely beyond good and evil.

 
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