How much can be said about behaviour (future) based on bloodgroup?

Question

My bloodgroup for example is A+. How much information is knowing my bloodgroup? How much information can be known from a blood sample? I expect you to be able to clone if known a complete DNA sequence but how much would I recognize myself from a clone you make from my DNA e.g. behaviour?

Answer 1

The neurological basis of behavior is still unclear, and the genetic basis of behavior is even less clear. What can be said is that genetics may predispose you to certain behaviors, but what the predisposing factors are, and how much they determine your behavior (and how much is due to environmental factors), is unclear. And this varies for different behaviors -- if you want to read more about a particular behavior, you can try looking up the genetics of addiction.

If we want to examine the genetic basis of behavior, I don't think anyone would be looking at blood group, which is due to some physical characteristic that is not obviously linked with behavior (versus a differently structured neurotransmitter receptor, which is possibly more related). It's like using your height to explain your behavior.

EDIT: On cloning: I should also mention that human reproductive cloning has not been successfully attempted, and if it were, you wouldn't get an exact copy of the donor of the genetic material (by the current technologies). The most famous example of reproductive cloning, Dolly the sheep, required more than just nuclear DNA:

Dolly or any other animal created using nuclear transfer technology is not truly an identical clone of the donor animal. Only the clone's chromosomal or nuclear DNA is the same as the donor. Some of the clone's genetic materials come from the mitochondria in the cytoplasm of the enucleated egg. Mitochondria, which are organelles that serve as power sources to the cell, contain their own short segments of DNA. Acquired mutations in mitochondrial DNA are believed to play an important role in the aging process.

The source also has more information about cloning: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/cloning.shtml