Clonaid is Trying to Go Mainstream, with Discount Cloning

This morning on the sixth anniversary of the birth of the first human clone ,”Baby Eve”,  an annoucement was released.  Dr. Brigette Boisselier, head of the company, which the Clonaid project is a part, was quoted on the newswire this morning as saying , “As of now, the Clonaid and Stemaid teams are ready to facilitate the cloning of one or more additional individuals at a reduced rate, provided they would agree – under contract – to go public after being cloned”.  The company claims to have produced almost 100 healthy human infants already, but is looking for someone to participate in the process openly.  The efficiency of the process has improved vastly, and this seems like a play at a more mainstream audience.  While my heart goes out to those, desperately trying to have a family, I fear expansion of this process, could lead to problems.  Regardless of the ethical and religious issues raised by cloning, an abnormally high influx of genetically  identical people should raise a little concern. The possiblity of deterioration in the genetic material  being used is my biggest concern, though.  We have far more experience in animal cloning, and have seen higher incidence of premature death, as well as, immunity problems in cloned animals.  The early deaths have been associated with the normal fraying of dna strands, as we age.  A baby with old dna, already has the deteriorated genetic code of  his or her donor.  I fear that steps to make this a more “mainstream” infertility solution, may lead to some rather sad consquences.  With approximately, half of Americans polled, stating that they would not knowingly eat cloned meat, I am a bit surprised that this obvious attempt to expand the usage of the cloning process on humans, has not been reported on.  The press release title gave no indication of what it was about, perhaps it slid by many.