Cloning Ethics and Future Legislation

Welcome to the Rest of Science. I'm Hannah Frery. And I'm Michael Stevenenss Today, I want to tell you about something I've discovered Go on. A new way to make twins Is it ethical Oh, it's ethical. It's not easy. Okay. There's two ways to make twins. Yeah. And the first way is the normal way. You and your partner just really hope that that zygoote splits into two babies. Getically identical. Genetically identical individuals. The second way is for you and your partner to have about seventy trillion children. Okay That sounds like quite a lot of work. It's not that bad All it requires is birthing seventy thousand children a second. What for your entire fertile life? Well, I mean for your entire fertile life. Not mine, my partners, luckily. You're not gonna get my jobs done. No, no, but wouldn't it be cool? I'll talk about how this works in a moment This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK Here's something strange Your DNA contains more Ancient viral fragments than jeans genes that build our cells make up only two percent of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff as junk. But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave. It reminder Progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over two hundred types of cancer Work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past fifty years. For more information about CancerResearch UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerrearchuK dot org forward slash the rest is science. 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Call one eight hundred five two six seven seven thir six to learn more or visit Timphayiaradio. com I sold my car in Carbana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. realal offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow, you need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? is this table wood I think it's laminate. Okay, yeah, that's good That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. seell your car today on carana. Pick up these may apply I mean for all of us went're in a different direction than we were expecting. Well, there's two kinds of twins There's the fraternal twin, which is also called the dizygotic twin. And what happens there is that two zygotes form. What's the zygote? When the sperm and the egg mix, they make a zygote. That's the very first stage. and it contains the unique genetic sequence for an individual Now if two eggs happen to get fertilized by two different sperm, you get two zygotes dies otic. and they're both in the womb and they both become kids who have like the same birthday, but are Like siblings to each other geneetically. Yeah. however. You just so happened to be sharing a wor You just so happen to be sharing a womound with no view Well, limited view. Well you can see each other. You can see each other. That's kind of cute if One zygote forms, o, one genetic sequence for one individual, and then that zygote splits into two You now have two of the same individual. gestate and get born and have the same DNA more or less. Of course, over time through epigenetics, their DNA will diverge That's what we call monozygotic twins and they are identical twins Mono meaning one mono meaning one. But what I'm interested in is a kind of twin that I invented that I call not diygotic, not monozygotic, but Doples, I got it. Doples I was in like Dppel Ganger. We've doubled a zygoat. So we have two zygoates that are identical, but not because one split. at the same time into two But because at two different times, the same zygote randomly happened to be made So hold on, where did you get this seventy trillion number from? Is it because you take two parents, right, mother, father and the number of different combinations of ways that you can genes? Yes. We don't know enough about genetic science and reproduction to give really concrete numbers. So seventy trillion is within a degree of magnitude or so one way or the other What I'm getting at is how many different genetic variations can two parents make? Because they have to come from the same individual two parents. That's right. But when you have a kid with someone else Exactly which half they get from the mom and the dad is up to chance and how the chromosomes change during that conception process is up to chance. But there are only so many variations and there are only so many that are viable There are only so many combinations that will turn into a kid, and there are only so many that will turn into a human. Like some of these variations might be like a different species for all we know. But seventy trillion is a pretty good estimate based on my important research on Reddit for how many Viable, unique Progeny two people could have I wonder how many siblings there have ever been, you know Like, how close are we to seventy trillion? N know nowhere near. There have only been about one hundred ten billion humans to have ever been born in the history of our species. But we can also grab on to the birthday promise. You don't actually need to have seventy trillion kids in order to get a specific possible kid you'll have to try like seventy trillion times. Yeah. But to get kids such that you can find a pair that match You only need to have about ten million kids. Oh, hang on, suddenly, this sounds achievable. Suddenly it's looking like it's gonna happen T million children The chance that there will be a pair that have the same genome is about fifty percent. So it's like a coin flip Now, okay, you can't compare that ten million number to one hundred ten billion do, right No, because this is ten million children from the same parents. Right. But even so, actually suddenly, the chances of two siblings being essentially very at least very, very, very close, if not completely identical, despite not having come from a single zygo. I mean, it starting to look quite likely. But here's the thing that makes it even more complicated. I'm talking about People sharing their genome Re reallyally when it comes to looking at them, it's the phenotype that makes them unique. It's the expression, the behavior, the things that we can observe And someone can have a very different genome than someone else. and yet their nose, their eyes, their hair, all that stuff can be really similar. And that's why siblings so often look alike, even though we can genetically tell them apart. I can open my sister's face ID on her phone. Are you serious? She finds it extremely annoying, by the way.ike Not that I'm opening her phone all the time, just that she shares my face. I would not confuse you too. No, no, you wouldn't confuse us, but it like our mannerisms and face Ia. Yeahah, face ID. Because face ide is a lot of it is about your bow. Oh, is it? Yeah. because it's a structure that doesn't change. My sister I don't think she looks anything like me, but I think our mannerisms, like you said, very similar. My daughter picks that up. She only wants me or my sister to read her bedtime stories because she says that we deliver them in the same way. I guess so. Or is it. Or is it? says my sister, and me. But the point I'm getting at here is that randomly Conceiving a child who is genetically identical to a child you've already had, not impossible in principle, in theory, but practically it's never going to happen. Okaykay? We all share DNA for the most part because a lot of the genes that we have do the same thing in all of us and they don't cause a noticeable difference. We've heard this before that like ninety nine point nine percent of our DNA is the same amongst every human. But it'ss the marginal difference. Yeahah, it's thatzo point one percent that really codes for the things that make me recognizably a unique individual. I can pass some of that to my children And some of that might appear in my grandchildren, but it decreases very quickly And it's not an amount that just keeps getting cut in half and therefore it never becomes zero. My grandkids aren't going to have a quarter of my DNA. Even though mathematically you could easily kind of handwave into that. Grandchildren have anywhere from twenty three to twenty seven percent. of their grandparents, each grandparents's DNA. And this is because even though you get fifty fiftycent of your mother and your father, there's nothing saying which fifty percent of your mother and father you're getting? Exactly. So you're not definitely getting twenty five percent of their mother and their father. Exactly. You're getting somewhere between twenty three and twenty seven percent. and the half you get from your mom could be like a little weighted towards her dad andless her mom. For example, your great grandchildren We'll only have between nine and fourteen percent. Okay of what makes you unique. By seven generations, your're seven great, great, great, great grandchild is Statistically No more like you are right now. A stranger on the street? No how many generations did you say? Seven. Really? By seven. After seven generations, we reach a point where it's possible for your progeny to have absolutely none of your personal genetic variation. That's so interesting. Yeah. You know I've thought this quite a few times actually about ancestors, right? So if you go seven generations back, because I've done some work in the past where I've tried to find their names and try to find out where they're from and all of this kind of thing. Let's think seeven generations back, so we're talking about seventeen hundreds or so Mbe a little bit earlier. I guess it'd be like almost hundred plus years ago. Yeah, ye. Okaykay. I don't feel like I have an emotional connection to those people. You know, like I can hear about their story, but I don't feel emotionally connected to their plight in the same way as I do you know, when I look back to sort of my great grandparents, for instance. But now what you're saying is, I mean, that's fine, because I don't even have a sort of genetic connection to them either. I mean, you might But it's going to be small, but it could very potentially be zero. Seven generations is the first distance, the closest distance at which we can expect zero percent of the personal genetic variation to have persisted If you go back eleven generations Sventy percent of your ancestors from eleven generations ago are not in you at all. So when you think about your legacy being about your genes passing on temporary extension of your life. And it' it's a very quickly shrinking This does make sense though as well, because they think if you imagine, okay, you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and so on and so on and so on that number is essentially doubling every generation you go back What that means is if you can sort of turn that upside down, There comes a point where the number of potential ancestors you have is more than the number of people who were alive, and thus there was some crossover. Of course. And if you do this calculation, you can work out that there's a point where you go back far enough in history where there are some people who are essentially everyone alive in modern Britain, for instance, is descended from that person, Charlemagne being one example, right But not just because Charlemagne' special, everybody who was around at that time, there's so much folding over and overlapping of our ancestors that essentially there's an inevitability that you're related to everybody who was around at that point. But what you're saying makes a lot of sense then, because otherwise, we just all look the same, right? If Charlemamagne's DNA really persisted for a much longer time, then we would all look like Sarnimen. Yeah. That's right And there would be Literally Dppel's otic twins everywhere, everyverywhere. But That doesn't happen. And so The more you think about it, the more it feels like you're genetic, sequence is really Arguably very much yours And if anyone randomly had it. like found a way to sort of pro off it. Just by chance. Right. The chromosomomees all contained and it happened to be the exact same sequence of base pairs that you had wouldn't be impossible. could happen. It could happen from some parents that aren't even my parents Probably not on this planet. The planet couldn't even support the amount of people required for us to feel like this would happen. But if we We colonized other planets and we found a way for the species to last for trillions of years, it could happen So it's something to look forward to. And that feels like a quite far fetched reason to not say that it's not yours, you know what I mean? Like there's a sort of philosophical discussion. I'm comfortable with accepting that that's not going to happen. So to what extent do we own our genetic sequence. If it is so uniquely mine And it's so unlikely to naturally again What kind of claim do I have to own it? But it belongs to you. Surely. sureurely, this is one and done. is This is an open shut case, Michael. It It seems that way. However, it's theoretically possible another human could be born with my exact sequence. and I wouldn't I clearly wouldn't have any right to say, hey, I had that first get back. I mean, the twin think, you're right though, you do get natural twins and you can't have one twin that owns it more than the other. Yeah, that's right. And again, twins don't share their DNA exactly. this is like a Fine little party thing to bring up if you want to be pedantic Be of mutations that happen epigenetically through life They're not going to be exactly identical. Also, they have different fingerprints. We've talked about this before. Fingerprints are not designed by your DNA. They're not coded by a gene. They just form randomly in the womb. It's So you can tell twins apart by their fingerprints. Twins make for a really interesting case because which twin claim that they own genome When would this even come up legally? Like if one set of a twin was like, hey, I want to sell. be personersally unique part of my genome. for this company to create digital versions or even real flesh and blood versions like clones of mee, wouldould the other twin be like Uh I don't want that and I'm the same in appearance in many ways. peopleeople are going to confuse me with all these like clones that you're allowing to have made. I feel like courts would a pretty easy time with that one. saying no, you're not allowed to. I think veto power would be given. But what can they do with let's start with just cells? What can they do with my cells? We've already talked about body parts. People can do a lot with my body parts after I'm dead But what about while I'm alive? They don't take a body part. They just take some cells from me What could they do with? What could they do with it? Would they still belong to you? Would they still belong to me? Well, the thing you're describing has actually happened, right? in the case of Henrietta Lackax. That's right. Very famous story and we'll come to after the break I live seven thousand six hundred and thirty six kilometers away from Hannah, so we rarely get to see each other in person That's what makes this such genuinely thrilling news for us. and maybe for you too. because for the first time ever, you can see both of us live on stage at Golhanger's Inaugural Festival. It's gonna be amazing to be able to reach through the screen and meet those of you who watch and listen to the show in the flesh The restest is Fest runs from the fourth to the sixth of September at London's South Bank Center. General sale goes live on the second of June at ten AM. so get some tickets and get ready for some fun Some serious Go to southbankcenter. co. uk to find out more This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. In the UK, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime. The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins? In over the past fifty years, canancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And that's proof of what research can achieve, like take cervical cancer Almost every case is caused by HPV, the human papilloma virus. And when scientists uncovered that link prevention became possible. Indeed it did by vaccine, and it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly ninety percent lower than expected in women in their twenties. I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in young women in the UK. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with. For more information about canancer research, UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them canancerreesearchuK. org forward slash restest is science Hi, this is Garalinika from Gold Hangers. The restest is foootball. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee and what might be hidden away in the small print Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate and easy transfer and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple WS is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than one hundred and sixty countries and with over forty currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. WS uses the mid market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate Know the fee and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the wise app today. Be smart, get wise, Ts and T's apply Welcome back. Okay, Henrietta Lax Dark story in a lot of ways. I mean, not in a lot of ways, in almost in every way. in no way. This is the nineteen fifties. And up until this point in history, people had tried to grow human cells in a lab and really struggled with doing so they would die after a couple of days. And there was this one surgeon, this is at John Hopkins Hospital America where unusually they would treat patients, poor bllack patients in particular they did so in these really segregated wards. I As you say, in the way, this is a really dark story. And the unspoken, really unethical rule in all of this was that these patients were essentially paying for their free medical care by unknowingly acting as clinical research patients The subjects effectively So this doctor, Richard Tellindy, he was called He was trying to understand the causes of cervical cancer And so he ordered that every patient who came into the hospital and was treated for cervical cancer, he would take a sample from their bodies and would send it off to his lab assistant who would then try and either experiment on the cells or try and get them to grow So this is nineteen fifty one. There was a young mother She was called Henrietta Lax, a poor black woman from America and she had a very aggressive form of cervical cancer. And so during her treatment during her you know when they sort of cut her open and tried to remove the tumor As was standard under this doctor's care, they took this about a dime sized piece of tissue and they sent it off to the lab F her cervix. From her cervix, but specifically from the cancerous part of her cervix. Okay was really strange when they took it to the lab was that whereas normally these cells would die after twenty four hours, forty eight hours, something like that, there was something about Henrietta's cells That meant that they actually just kept replicating They just kept replicating and kept replicating and kept replicating. It didn't matter how many generations of replication they would go through. they just didn't They're essentially immortal. Henrietta's cancer cells were essentially immortal. Imortal outside of her body. outside in the hospital. Yeah. Now, really tragically Henrietta died of this cancer really soon after all of this happened but her cells remained in the laboratory And the scientist there really understood how strange and unusual this thing was. Initially, they were interested in this from a sort of really scientific perspective, like what is it about these cells that makes them so unusual And it turns out that it all comes down to something called teelamres. So the way that I've had this described, my friend Adam Rutherford's Genesis is really good on this stuff And he describes Telames as, you know when you have a shoelace, the very end of a shoelace that sort of caps it and stops it from fraying. This is like the idea of telom is. that every single time that you have your cells dividing It degrades ever so slightly, right? There's a limit to how short the shoelace can get, right before the cells just end up dying And what had happened in this I mean, it really was a sort of one in a billion fluke chance that the way that the cancer had interacted with Henrietta Lax's cells meant that she had had the viral DNA, human pablova virus, which is the thing that causes cervical cancer for the most part had sort of invaded her own DNA next to this incredibly sensitive point along the DNA chain. And so next to the bit that essentially acts as the master growth switch for regular cell division and replication. So it altered her DNA in a way that meant that it could carry on forever that it would end up being immortal. So okay, initially it's like this this this scientific interest butought very soon. They realize that if they have these immortal cells, there is profit to be made from this So a company was started which essentially sold Henrietta Lax's cells. L literally a portion of the culture. Literally a portion of her cells. Her name was stripped from it. It's now called Hela I don't know whether you say it like that, but it's about HELA. Yeah And this stuff is all over the world. R. And it wasn't sold as a curiosity, it was sold to other researchers, to universities to also learn from and study. and to pharmaceutical companies particularly. Because the thing about this is that so many drugs been tested on her cells. Her cells have been sold and sold and sold and sold again. I mean, we're really talking probably billions of dollars of profit been made purely from The kind of unusualness of. Her family must have made a killing. how nice it would be if that were the case. Her family didn't even know that this had happened until many years later, when researchers started calling up and asking for additional blood tests just to work out what was going on with the body. It's estimated Scientists since nineteen fifty one have grown fifty million metric tons of her biological material in labories around the world goossh. so calling them her cells.. If these are her cells, they're part of her then at this point H existence has mainly been as Oh these cells. Yeah. I mean, her actual existence as a human body is sort of a statistical anomaly.. Can you as a human that can like drive a car and like eat breakfast That was a blip of her existence. Right. She is immortal in the form of these tons and tons and tons of ever growing cells of hers, whose genetic sequence is Basically hers with the The difference of course, that they don't die. Right. Exactly, exactly. But the genetic sequence is exactly hs. Now I need to tell you, right the difference that her cells have made to the world is you can't understate this. know, The Pio vaccine was tested on her cells, the COVID nineteen vaccine was tested on her cells, you know her cells have been using in crIisPper gene editing in sick or cell anemia. I mean every I don't think this is an overstatement to say this, but pretty much every major advance that has happened with genetics and you know, with with this sort of type of biology has in some somewhere along the line had Henrietta Lax's cells to thanank But yeah, as you say, the family just completely cut out of this altogether. So in so many ways, she is a hero. Totally. And our health and well being because of her and yet she didn't know any of this was happening. She had no consent in the matter, no knowledge it was even happening until ater herer family finds out. Well, because this is the thing, she's given this incredible gift to the world without knowing it. I mean, it was taken from her. Yeah. But meanwhile, her family were unable to pay for health insurance, you know? Like all of us, all of our health has increasedks thanks to herselellves, but her own family were left unable to pay for health insurance So yeah, this big court case, there's actually been another couple that have gone through just this year with different pharmaceutical companies. No one knows they settled for an undisclosed amount.. But the family, when they initially sued, they sued for all of the net profits that were gained directly by selling her cells. I mean, who knows what they actually got in the end. The law came down very firmly on the family side that actually the ownership of that intellectual property. I mean, I'm not sure how to even really describe it, that sort of the property side of her cellves belonged to her family And that I love trying to figure out what word to use because it's Her cells are uniquely hers because they have the same genome in them. I guess it's not intellectual property. She didn't think it up. She in a way, I would say it's almost like abandoned property Like when you're born you have been given This whole new kind of genome And slowly your consciousness matures and you're like, oh, hey, look, I found this. and it's mine. Binders keepepers. So, you know, she, I think should have that right to her se. Well, her property was then taken against her knowledge and without her knowledge and then used The family got a settlement from att least one, maybe more companies But has the court actually decided or has any legislation come down to help us with future cases? I don't know if it has, you know, because the other thing on the flip side of this is, you know, we did the episode last week that was about whether you still own something that was a part of your body after you died The answer was no. I mean, it was a resounding no. It's your skeleton. It can be bought and sold and pushed around and you know posed in funny poses and someone could put a hat on it and drink out of it if they want to And so why is this different? Because these cells, look, I think that her and her family were treated appallingly. really clear. But I think you could also say, well the cells never act belonged to her body And even if they did, well then doesn't the same thing apply about skeletons? I guess perhaps the difference is that it's the information within the cells, right? Well, I know that in nineteen ninety there was a big California Supreme Court case versus the regents of the University of California where a guy who back in the late seventies had a form of cancer, had his spleen removed. And then without his knowledge cells from that spleen were also cultured and then this whole cell line began and it was sold other universities to do tests and studies on I think a lot of really important medical knowledge came from it. simimilar in a lot of ways to. Very similar. But in this case, what happened is in nineteen ninety He sued the university F not tellelling him exactly what they were going to be doing with his cells and then for profiting off of them He went to court And the first case was decided that like No, you know, nothing happened here wrong. like day They have the right to do this. Right. He appealed it. The appeals court was like, oh my gosh, no, you're totally in the right. They went on his side and they argued that he deserved to know, first of all that all this was happening and should be paid. The California Supreme Court took it on And they said These cells are the property of the university and you don't deserve anything from it. One of the reasons they gave is that if we decide otherwise, then medical innovation gets slowed down. Right. because now Researchers can't work on a cell line without having to constantly work with and do everything at the direction of the person the cells came from. Right, Because you have to work on human cells in a petry dish. Yeah. And those human cells, you can't just manufacture them out of nowhere. they have to come from a human. Right. And if you are continually asking for permission from the person who gave them I can see that argument. Yes. I think part of it was the idea that like, yes, the cells that are in your body right now, they're totally yours. But if you consent to having some of them removed In Moore's case, it was his spleen in order to prolong his life. And that did help him, by the way. L his cancer went into remission because they removed the spleen. It was a white blood cell cancer. and they're stored in the spleen. I'm not a doctor. Anyway I'm not going to be removing spleens from anyone who asks. But But he consented to that surgery and then In the process of removing cells and I don't know if culturing is the right word, but in creating this cell line A new thing was invented far as the California Supreme Court was concerned, and that new thing did not belong to the original human whose genome and life was responsible for its existence at first. Is that where things stand now then? Well, I mean, that was in the nineties nineties. But so this, I mean, this must be because because I know that the Henrietterax settlements are I mean You're fascinating to legal scholars. Yeah. because I think you're right that the law says, Hey, it's not yours, no big deal But if you're a pharmaceutical company and this is Dodgy, dodgy Dan W. I think in the case of Henrietta Lackax and in the case of Moore, There wasn't enough information given to the patients about what exactly they were signing away. Today, I think a lot of that is told to people because we use cell lines, especially from fetuses a lot and we test different medications on them. and so the fact that it's definitely happening today more than ever means that probably has has fallen on the side of the university can own it Other people can own your cells even long after you've died and while you're alive so long as you've given them permission to What about your DNA though? Yeah canan they clone me? Right, if they have your DNA sequence, can that be owned without you? That's still very much un exxplored So while I could certainly donate some cellves to a research hospital and tell them, hey Do whatever you want with these for as long as you want. Pose them with a silly hat? Well, yeah, put silly hats on them, insult them, whatever. And in some ways, I might think that that's really worth it. If this is gonna really help medicine advance, then I'm all for it But at a certain point they could start to say, hey teechnology is advancing, we can take some of this DNA and we can literally create a zygote that matches Michael's genome plant that in a womb, Boom, we got a new Michael. And would I'd be okay with baby bee sauce. A little baby bee sauce. Would you be okay with that? I would not be so okay with it for two reasons. One is the selfish right to publicity that I want to have. I want to be in control of myself and my personality, my image, Michael, I think it'd be pretty good publicity to have a mini you. Like a literal mini, I think that's pretty good That brings me to the second problem I have with it, which is that the mini me deserves their own life They would live their whole life as, whoa, you're like, you're just like Michael. Hey, do some of his catchphrases. No, that wouldn't be fair to them. Raise your eyebrow. Yeah, can raise your Oh, he can't raise his eyebrows yet.. And then the person's like, whyy do I have to live up to this thing? Why can't I be an individual? Yeah. The thing is I don't know paperwork that's signed by people who donate cells even includes the possibility of future Th things like cloning It might circumscribe what can be done with the cells actually quite finely to not include cloning. When it comes to cloning, I looked into the legality of it And there's two different types of cloning. One is therapeutic cloning where I clone someone's cells in order to make them new tissue or a new organ for transplant. And that is legal in the UK. It's legal in much of the United States. There are parts of the US where it's illegal It's very different country by country reproductive cloning is a whole different measure. This is where you don't just create tissue that matches. This is where you obviously create a person who can be born and is now a baby with the same genome as someone else. So I guess this is ad a third way of cloning. Yeah. This This by the way is the Dppel's otic twin that I was joking about earlier notot created by chance and a lot of attempts, but through science and Cloning for reproductive purposes is actually surprisingly not illegal everywhere. It's illegal here In the United States, it depends what state you live in. Really? What Human cloning? Human cloning? No. Yeah So as it turns out, there are many states have made it illegal. But most states don't have a statute one way or the other. They just haven't decided it Idaho has no law against it do have a law saying that if you are a health carere worker You can, due to your own conscience, not be forced to participate in human cloning should it happen. If it happens You can't lose your job because you don't want to be part of it. Louisiana made human cloning illegal, but it recently expired that prohibition. So legally, you can go clone humans in Louisiana. No one's actually done this though, have they? Well, no. no one's done this for reproductive. No no one's done reproductive cloning. Yeah. As far as we know, right? you can imagine that some scientists where we're not looking are like, hey guys, like we created this zygat out of Hannah's DNA And we're going to put it into a mother and it's going to be born and it will be a Dopppel's otic twin. It will be identical genetically to Hannah Fry, though of course it's a newborn baby I think this is one of the things that is so difficult when it comes to creating legislation for future scientific advances I mean, cloning has felt like science fiction for a really I mean, for a really long time, right? People have written stories about this idea. But actually now, especially with things like you know gene editing and there was a really big new story last year, I think of where you could create a new baby using three parents, essentially, combining the genes of three different parents. You know we are really at the stage where you can technically do this, you know, you can technically do this. But how are you supposed to create legislation Cve off. every potential future scientific advance before it even actually happens. I don't think you should because you don't really know exactly what the context will be for future scientific applications. I think you just have to kind of deal with it as it happens. But that means there will always be this vanguard of a few people who are stuck in the middle. We don't have laws yet, but we need them It's going to be my court case that decides the precedent. Interestingly, reproductive cloning, here's where it is not prohibited Besides the US States I mentioned, it's allowed in Iran, Thailand, Turkey, Uruguay, Ukraine, and New Zealand Okay, well of that list, two of them, Donald Trump's invaded. So maybe maybe we he reason. Is that what's going on? Jie Vance wants so many more mini versions of himselves Wait, I think JD Vance Amy We promised we would not be topical in this show. We promised we wouldn't be topical. and yet here we are talking about the most accurate and likely current event, which is JD Vance. creating JD Vance two, three, four, five up to seventy trillion. It's really surprising that Human cloning isn't as illegal as I thought it was. I just think that it hasn't come up enough that anyone's really ready to say, yep, we're going to pass legislation on this I guess whether or not there are laws against human cloning There are already laws about who owns genetic sequences. So you might say, hey, it's not against the law for our company to clone a human. It's like, technically, yeah, that's true, but what human are you going to clone Because, as decided by the Supreme Court in twenty thirteen, in a case called the Association for Molecular Pathology versus Myriad Genetics Human genes and DNA sequences cannot be patented They are products of nature. invent Okay Prior to that court case, a company, a biotech company could literally patent a gene that they had found in nature that's in all of our bodies. Really? The reason was to advance scientific progress. Well, so you could say, for example, MC one R gene, right? the gene that makes people of ginger. You could say, okay, I found it, I own it now Yes, you could do that Why was that allowed? The idea was that, first of all, isolating the gene responsible for ginger hair was not easy and it cost a lot of money and took a lot of time And so if a company's going to try to find it? Why would a company do that? That sounds like a government would do it. A company's only going to do it if they can then recoup all the money that it took, all the resources it took for them to find it. And that means that they need to be able to have rights to study and try different therapies on it or whatever. whatever they want to do with the gene for red hair. Give it everybody. Give it to everybody. whatever they want They want the exclusive rights to pursue that research and sell such therapies and products. And so governments around the world said, fine, you can do that. We'll give you a patent on that gene. and that doesn't mean that they owned the red hairred je and that they could go up to red headaded people and like take it. It's mine. But it meant that they were the only company who could study it, work on it, do all that kind of stuff But in twenty thirteen, in the US, and then I think later on in other countries, they've made similar decisions, which is to say, okay, that's over. L we all did a good job. Thanks for finding so many genes, but like this is weird, and it's potentially very unethical. So you can no longer patent them. But okay, then, in conclusion, if you can't patent a gene, if somebody can't own a genetic sequence, a company can't own a genetic sequence And from that more case, it sort of looks like the cells that have left your body kind of don't belong to you. I mean don't belong to you. they belong to the university, then we're back in the same place as skeletons then, right? You don't own your own anything. Here's the thing Own your skeleton ownwn your cells You Because of that, you don't really own your genome It can't be patented, but someone could still have it. They could physically possess it in se. And buy it. Yeah But here's what you do own, and we have celebrities to thank for this own your right to publicity. Someone could totally have Hannna fy sells and they could do whatever they wanted with them. they could sell them So long as you had given them consent. In the first place,. In the first place. They could have these long after your death and they could sell them to universities and make billions of dollars and never give assent to your children or your grandchildren or whatever Let's say you actually do it then. you go to one of these places where it's technically not illegal could just everybody could could All of these different people just have their own, I don't know, minini David Bowie. Only if David Bowie before he died or the people who run his estate Give someone permission to do that not just to create the clone and to use his genome alsoso to create new publicity around him, to use his likeness to, you know do things in the world looking like him However, I think that if you're going to create a human non reproductively, like completely sci fi future style in a lab Where you have a little machine that puts the base pairs together, onene thing that would be interesting to do would be to just make your own brand new person and not clone an individual like David Bowie, but literally say, hmm, let's make the orbital of the eye this shape and you put in the little base pairs the way you want. And here's what's cool. If you do it that way, not only is it your kid, but it's your It's intellect your property. You have invented their je. Oh, I know that's horrible. In twenty thirteen, it was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court that a je cannot be patented. However, there have been companies that have taken jeans and they've gone in and they've like changed a few of the pieces of it into a thing that doesn't naturally appear, and it's been decided that they can patent and own those. But at the same time, you're not allowed to go in and edit the genome of a baby because that happened in China. remember that? A. So this is once this became possible with CRISPA, which is where I mean you can literally go in And you have like do you have your DNA speakers and you can just go in and you could say, right, snip that bit out, snip that bit out, insert this instead. I mean that's literally what you're able to do And there was a case in China, let me get these details up actually But a case in China where basically a rogue doctor decided to do this to edit the genome of an embryo in advance of its birth. R. And there's like very strict global rules about this and the entire scientific community U really came down very hard about it You're not allowed to do that. If you as a scientist Eit. a gene into something that's now considered an invention of yours That's one thing. But if it becomes part of an individual who has their own like consciousness and rights, then they own it. which is kind of obvious. like I own the rights to my genome However My parents don't, even though they're the ones who invented it Yeah, or if you're doing IVF, you own your embryo until. Boy That's right, That's right. And if you have embryos created, you and your partner have to make a lot of decisions before those embryos are even made about what's going to happen because those embryos contain the genetic sequence for an individual And if both of you die and that embryo is left, you need to decide ahead of time what you want to have happen with it U And you could just decide thaw and discard O Both of us are gone. Donate them to a couple who can't have kids. And in cases like that where only one partner dies, you also have to decide what happens For example, I think in general, veto power rules. So if one partner is like, yeah I want to use them and the other one's like, no, the one who said no gets their way. Yeah, so you can own and patent a gene so long as it's not a conscious living human As soon as it is, it becomes theirs and like, sorry, it's been public domained, or it been it's been transferred, rights have been transferred, and you can't own them if they already naturally exist because then it's just a part of nature that you found. It wasn't actually that long ago that as soon as a person died, they lost all rights to their personality. Like literally, when Marilyn Monroe died Marilyn Monroe became public domain. Okay on her movies, but her lightkeness You could you could make posters of her and not give any money to her family. Many people did. Many people did. and I think she's still public domain in that sense because she died before The law was passed saying that for at first fifty years after death, now it's seventy years after death