Question by Kim: Who owns the DNA of the dead child?
A child dies and one parent decides to clone the child from a lock of hair or saved baby teeth. However, the other parent does not want to do this. Who owns the DNA of the dead child? If one of these parents goes through with the cloning, how do you think you would feel when you learned you were a clone from your sibling?
This is for a class I’m taking in college.
I would appreciate all opinions/answers.
Thanks.
I have to research others opinions too.
Best answer:
Answer by ScSpec
It would seem you should write an opinion of your own. Personally I would think that both parents would have equal rights to any DNA remaining from the child. A human “clone” would have the same appearance as the child at first, but experiences, nutrition, education, etc. would cause them develop into a person who was unique. I really have no idea how I would feel, probably that my parents were very attached to the dead child and had the unrealistic expectation that I would be a replacement, an exact copy, and that wouldn’t be the case.
What do you think? Answer below!
I would think whichever parent went to the cloning lab and gave them the babies DNA would have custody of it; since the DNA would be preserved there. Also they probably sign some legal contracts to perform the cloning.
If I were a clone, I guess it wouldn’t matter everyone is born one way or another. Just so long as the people who had me cloned didn’t expect me to behave exactly as my sibling.
Legally this is murky. Technically the DNA of the dead child is owned by the dead child, whose possessions go to both parents equally after death. As with any possession that is jointly owned, it may not be legal for one parent to clone the child over the objections of the other.
The DNA belongs to the child. Being both dead and presumably a minor, then it belongs to the parents.
So it would be a civil suit of some sort along the lines of a custody battle. Since there’s no precedent, who knows.
Your question opens up a legal Pandora’s box of mine-fields. Unfortunately, no humans have been cloned, that we know of. As such, the legal details (likely to be far reaching) have not been addressed and worked out. Because we have not cloned any human beings, we do not know anything for certain about what cloning a human actually means. People think they know what the results would be, but until it is carried out and evaluated scientifically, we cannot be certain. Cloning humans, is very different than that of cloning animals. Because consciousness phenomenon, there are elements of classical and quantum physics, as well as chaos theory involved that most people are simply unaware of, and must be considered.
Based upon human twin studies and on an area of quantum mechanics called “entanglement,” as well as elements of chaos theory, there exists a very good possibility that as the cloned individual matures, they and their genomic donor will become one and the same person; one and the same consciousness. If that proves to be the case, and I feel strongly that it will, then that fact complicates legal issues significantly — and well beyond just the courts. In fact, human cloning changes everything.
Who owns the original DNA? Of course the dead donor owned the original DNA. It’s almost a right to die type of issue. Did the child know about cloning? Did he/she want to be cloned upon death? What is in the best interest of the child? What is in the best interest of the clone of the child? Parental rights to the child and the following clone of the child? And on and on.
Even if original consciousness does not get expressed in the resulting cloned person, there will be the same inherent tendency and temperament style which will likely remain the same. In all likelihood, that cloned child would respond to the world in exactly the same fashion as the original child. Entanglement physics suggest that because the child was cloned, the clone would be entangled with the child’s DNA in a “system” like fashion. Now, human twins are also “entangled”. However, they are entangled differently. Their quantum entanglement in more on the level of individual atom and molecule. That is a significant difference.
See: Human Cloning Commetary
http://www.reproductivecloning.net/open/zavos_antinori.html
Biosystems as conscious holograms
http://www.emergentmind.org/PDF_files.htm/conscholo0302.PDF
Chaos, Quantum-transactions and Consciousness A Biophysical Model of the Internal Mind
http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/~king/Preprints/pdf/CKbrainpaper.pdf
The Quantum – Classical and Mind-Brain Linkages: The Quantum Zeno Effect in Binocular Rivalry
http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/Quantum-Neuroscience.pdf