Human cloning ethical and legal issues

In developing science and society, the questions about the acceptability of the use of certain invented technologies arise more frequently. These issues require an unambiguous solution and monitoring of its implementation. One of the most pressing contemporary issues of biomedicine is the possibility of human cloning, the legal regulation of which has not been developed. The aim of the work is to analyze the existing ethical and legal framework of human cloning in the Russian Federation and to develop proposals for its improvement. The authors studied the materials published since the invention of cloning technology, such as speeches by leading scientists, scientific publications on this topic, the work of research groups (both in support of cloning and against it), as well as the results of sociological surveys of the population, legal acts of the Russian Federation, the experience of foreign states in the regulation of biotechnology. The lack of legal regulation of the process of human cloning in the territory of the Russian Federation was revealed. To supplement it, the following proposals are suggested: (1)clarification of terminology in legislative documents and legal consolidation of the concepts of therapeutic and reproductive cloning; (2)establishment of penalties for violation of prohibitions on the use of technology and definition of mechanisms for the enforcement of these penalties; (3)development of the direction of somatic human rights and, with a view to the future, consolidation of human clone rights. The authors believe that in the presence of legal regulation, the development of technology will not bring moral harm to humanity.

Matrophobia and Uncanny Kinship: Eva Hoffman’s The Secret

Eva Hoffman, known primarily for her autobiography of exile, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), is also the author of a work of Gothic science fiction, set in the future. The Secret: A Fable for our Time (2001) is narrated by a human clone, whose discovery that she is the “monstrous” cloned offspring of a single mother emerges with growing discomfort at the uncanny similarities and tight bonds between her and her mother. This article places Hoffman’s use of the uncanny in relation to her understanding of Holocaust history and the condition of the postmemory generation. Relying on Freud’s definition of the uncanny as being “both very alien and deeply familiar,” she insists that “the second generation has grown up with the uncanny.” In The Secret, growing up with the uncanny leads to matrophobia, a strong dread of becoming one’s mother. This article draws on theoretical work by Adrienne Rich and Deborah D. Rogers to argue that the novel brings to “the matrophobic Gothic” specific insights into the uncanniness of second-generation experiences of kinship, particularly kinship between survivor mothers and their daughters.

‘We’re not programmed, we’re people’: Figuring the caring computer

This article intervenes in feminist theories concerning the politics of care, reading this contested notion through its representation in an ‘artificial’ relationship between a human clone and a computer in the science fiction film Moon (dir. Duncan Jones, 2009). Drawing on Joan Tronto’s work (1993), I delineate a conventional, vernacular conception of care, which puts in place problematic, prescriptive roles in caring relationships. Then, reading Moon through Donna Haraway’s theorisation of companion species (2008) and what she terms the ‘touching’ of material histories and contingencies, I show how these hierarchies may be unravelled. This figure of the caring computer represents a capacity for affective impact upon human subjects that is not normally ascribed to ‘emotionless’ technological subjects. It animates a disruption of the linear, instrumental relationships of power between humans and technologies by showing the ways in which ongoing processes of co-constitution are responsible for bringing each participant in the relationship into being. Care here is a manner of activating and making conspicuous those processes and can unravel, rather than prescribe, the roles which respective participants in such relationships are assigned.

Mobile Genetic Elements Provide Evidence for a Bovine Origin of Clonal Complex 17 of Streptococcus agalactiae

ABSTRACT We sought an explanation for epidemiological changes in Streptococcus agalactiae infections by investigating the link between ecological niches of the bacterium by determining the prevalence of 11 mobile genetic elements. The prevalence of nine of these elements differed significantly according to the human or bovine origin of the isolate. Correlating this distribution with the phylogeny obtained by multilocus sequence analysis, we observed that human isolates harboring GBSi1, a clear marker of the bovine niche, clustered in clonal complex 17. Our results are thus consistent with the emergence of this virulent human clone from a bovine ancestor.