Human Cloning

What is cloning? It is defined as the creation of an organism that is an exact genetic copy of another. I believe every one know about the presence of Dolly the sheep which is cloned by Ian Wilmot, with Keith Campbell, however he had a team who helped him in Edinburgh in 1997. How about human cloning? Cloning technologies is much more modern than previous years.  These human cloning were not making in lab, it is created naturally. There is couple of ways which is embryo twinning and somatic cell nuclear transfer. Of course, through human cloning, there are still pros and cons about it. Should human cloning be allowed? In my point of view, I disagree with it.

According to the procedures of human cloning, there a unacceptable risks to clone. The procedure is far from the perfected and many trials were run before Dolly was ever created. This causes the death of many clones before it. There are many risks involved including risk to an ovum donor, a nucleus donor and a woman who receives the embryo for implantations, along with all the risks to the clone in this experimental procedure. There is also the problem with chronological age versus biological age. The clone has already gained many years by the time it was born because it was taken out from adult cells. This means the clone does not have as long of a life expectancy. This is an intrusion of the clone’s right to live a long and prosperous life.

Since cloning creates identical genes and it is a process of replicating a complete genetic constitution, it can significantly hamper the much needed deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) diversity in human beings. The lessening of genes diversity will be weakening out adaptation ability. Similarly, cloning will also severely affect diversity in plants and animals. A cloned species may not know how to react viruses and other destructive agents as scientists cannot predict such potential developments.

However, there are many negative aspects about human cloning debating among scientists and critics. One of the aspects is the possibility of physical harm to the human embryo. It seem like the technology is not safe enough to use on humans. The cloned ones will age quicker than the original individual. This is what the scientists are afraid of since the cell used in the cloning procedure has already been used in a real life individual. Psychological harms would occur and fall upon children. They could suffer from a reduced sense of individuality, and a cloned child may feel that their future is worthless as it now rests in a cloned individual. There are also critics argue about that cloning encourages parents to value how well children can genetically meet their expectation rather than loving them for being their child. Some parents and society takes those cloned as object instead of their children or not as human being with realistic feeling. It is also seen that if human cloning occurs it would become a chaos in a reality and a regular social practice for those parents who want to “play the lottery” and not genetically choose their child may be cast out of society. This will eventually lead the cloned ones feel that their life may already be laid out before them and have no choices. They will also face psychological problems and discrimination because of the press about their identity.

Human cloning used on a very widespread basis would have disastrous effect on the human gene pool by reducing genetic diversity and out capacity to adapt to new conditions. Like many cloned plants, human may face extinction if evolution is not allowed to follow its proper course of action.

Moreover, misuse by unscrupulous elements would occur. For example, some unwanted elements of the society may exploit human cloning of the sake of their malicious intention posing in this way a grave threat to the society and state. Number of criminals will be maximise which involved in producing crucial parts of human body, exploiting the cloning are often arrested by the police which reveals how arbitrarily the human cloning is misused internationally.

Violate moral or human rights argue in the issue of human cloning. God creates every human in this universe have their own unique identity and a right to ignorance about one’s future or to an “open future.” This could easily be disputed because of the nature of identical twins. They share the exact same genome but have different lives and futures. The right to ignorance and an open future is a differ issue. There already exists another version of the clone and they already know certain things about themselves and the future they have to live up to. The later clone may lose the spontaneity of authenticity creating and becoming his or her own self. Thus, one will lose the sense of human possibility in freely creating one’s own future.

Human cloning will also cause controversy in kinship relation. Any woman donating her DNA for a cloned has got to encounter a complex situation regarding relationship of mother and child as the human cloning deprives the mother of a privilege of being a mother of her cloned baby. As the mother of a cloned baby is treated as a genetic twin, the significance of relationship between mother and child vanishes.

In the other hand, human cloning would lessen the worth of individuals and diminish respect for human life. Human life would be seen as replaceable. If something happened to a person such as being killed, it can be simply replace it through cloning. In fact, it would create a different child and could never replace the lost ones. Clones would be subject to discrimination based on the fact that they are clone and did not arise because of sexual reproduction.

From the point above I had mentioned, human cloning is disadvantage to occur because it has more negative purpose then the positive ones. Cloning can only help in certain category such as cloning organ and many more but not all. Therefore, human cloning is not beneficial for humans.

Shin Wei