{"id":168,"date":"2003-01-23T15:45:25","date_gmt":"2003-01-23T15:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mikegerhardt.com\/mg\/?p=168"},"modified":"2003-01-23T15:45:25","modified_gmt":"2003-01-23T15:45:25","slug":"japanese-clone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mikegerhardt.com\/mg\/2003\/01\/23\/japanese-clone\/","title":{"rendered":"Japanese Clone?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Raelian cult recently announced the impending arrival of yet another cloned baby, this one a Japanese boy.
\nRaelians’ latest claim: Japanese clone is next<\/b><\/a>
\nJapan Times Online
\nNeither the Raelians nor Clonaid — their scientific partner — has offered any proof of this or the two previous cloned baby claims.
\nThe Japanese baby is supposedly a clone of a boy who died 18 months ago in a traffic accident.
\nAlthough the baby will be born outside of Japan to a surrogate mother, the soon-to-be parents say they plan to live in Japan. This raises some interesting questions, to say the least.
\nHuman cloning brings such an overwhelming raft of questions and quandaries — ethical, moral and practical. The first thing that came to mind when I read about this latest claim was the relatively pedestrian question of citizenship.
\nWhat will be the baby’s citizenship? He comes from a deceased Japanese citizen, and will be born outside Japan to a non-Japanese surrogate mother. What kind of paperwork will the parents have to show when they bring the child to Japan? There’s no way they’re going to be able to sneak him back into the country considering the advance warning. And then the Japanese media will be all over this like… well, like the Japanese media.
\nHuman cloning is banned in Japan. But there is no law covering cloning of or for Japanese citizens outside of Japan.
\nWhat kind of birth papers are created when a cloned baby is born? Are the Raelians resorting to forged documents to make the baby appear to have come into existence through traditional means? Or will there be some kind of special birth records for cloned babies, whether they were born legally or not?
\nIf these claims turn out to be true, it’s going to be the beginning of a very strange and fascinating time. It will be interesting to watch the attempts to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. It’s going to become more and more difficult to control science through law, for better or worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Raelian cult recently announced the impending arrival of yet another cloned baby, this one a Japanese boy. Raelians’ latest claim: Japanese clone is next Japan Times Online Neither the Raelians nor Clonaid — their scientific partner — has offered any proof of this or the two previous cloned baby claims. The Japanese baby is… Continue reading Japanese Clone?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-japan","category-politics-policy-culture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5heLP-2I","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mikegerhardt.com\/mg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mikegerhardt.com\/mg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mikegerhardt.com\/mg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mikegerhardt.com\/mg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mikegerhardt.com\/mg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.mikegerhardt.com\/mg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mikegerhardt.com\/mg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mikegerhardt.com\/mg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mikegerhardt.com\/mg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}