Anonymous ID: b0a457 Aug. 24, 2021, 7:28 p.m. No.14450382   🗄️.is đź”—kun

>>14450351

Maybe that's the cover story.

Do we fund a cloning lab in Hanoi, like we fund gain of function in Wuhan?

 

The Human Clone Market

 

Imagine the following scenario. A few years from now, those who can afford it will contract cloning labs to grow clones to supply duplicate organs or replace body parts. Clones will be genetically matched to clients so they can be used in transplants without being attacked by the client’s immune system. To side-step the ethical argument of what is considered human, the client’s clones will be grown as headless embryos, without a brain or a central nervous system. Destined never to leave the lab, these cloned embryos will develop all the necessary body parts, including a heart, a circulatory system, lungs, and a digestive system. For those without deep pockets, the cloning labs will offer economy clones featuring one or more specific organs. Using embryo cloning techniques developed in Britain in the late 1990s, the cloning labs will grow these headless clones to match each stage of a child’s or adult’s development, so that organs will be available throughout the client’s life.

 

Keywords: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, Giant Panda, Medical Tourism, Nonhuman Animal

 

For those at the lower end of the income scale, cloning labs will store human organs culled from the general population, inventoried by blood type and approximate genetic match. The supply of these organs will come primarily from the black market, fuelled by an underclass willing to be paid money to donate a kidney, a lung, or an eye. After all, in this imagined future, Organ Donor Centers are as common as Starbucks. The system works well, but sometimes the demand for organs exceeds supply, mirroring the problems of the 2010s. This poses no problem for the cloning labs: they employ procurement agents who scour the streets to gather new products. When the agents find a victim, they inject a sedative, rendering the unsuspecting prey unconscious. The victim is taken to the nearest cloning lab where an organ or two is harvested. Thanks to the latest anti-scarring procedures, the victim is returned to the street with little or no awareness they are missing a kidney or a lung. They wake up in the gutter and may notice they are shorter of breath than usual or they may glance in a mirror and realize the colors of their irises no longer match. They shrug their shoulders and put it down to sleeping in the gutter. If the procurement agents can’t find what they’re looking for in the ghettoes, they turn to another rich supply source: motor vehicle accidents. They monitor the emergency services’ communication channels and, when an accident sounds promising, they’re first on the scene to scout for “donors.”

 

In this potential, rather troubling, future, business is booming. Cloning labs have doubled their facilities in just 5 years and there is demand for more. In fact, the cloning labs have been so successful they have built a family alliance facility, where poor families are paid to breed children for the purpose of organ harvesting. Most of these “donors” are purchased when they are physically mature, but some are sold earlier to supply the growing need for baby organs

 

Black Market Organs

If this all sounds too implausible then it’s worth highlighting two main issues affecting the organ market. First, most countries depend on altruistic motives for obtaining organs, which means depending on people becoming organ donors voluntarily. Unfortunately, despite increasing efforts, the gap between the number of people who need organs and the number of organs available is steadily increasing. In most countries only about a third of the population are donors, which means thousands of patients end up on transplant lists every year and thousands die while on the waiting lists because of the lack of donor organs. Many more die because, for whatever reason, their name never even made the list. Clearly the altruistic method isn’t working. Also, even if a person is lucky enough to be matched with an organ, there is always the risk of rejection: without anti-rejection drugs, such as cyclosporine, most who undergo transplantation (Fig. 4.1) will reject their new organs and die a short time after—some people die even with anti-rejection drugs.

 

full

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7122979/