Cloning and Mind Zombies

Cloning and Mind Zombies

Cloning, is it the thing of the future? Or is it a start of a new

generation? To some, cloning could give back a life. A life of fun, happiness,

and freedom. For others it could mean destruction, evil, or power. Throughout

this paper, you the reader, should get a better concept of cloning, it's ethics,

the pro's and con's, and the concerns it has brought up. You will hear the good

of what cloning can do and the bad that comes with the good. Most of the

information you will read about in this paper is what might become of the future.

Even though the cloning of humans can not be accomplished. When it is the

possibilities are endless.

What is cloning? How did it get started? Well, it is like this. A

clone is a genetic copy or a replica of an living organism. But, when you gear

cloning doesn't a Si-Fi movie come to mind. Like when they take a nucleus, place

it in a egg, put the egg in a incubator, and when it hatches it's an exact

replica of the original being (Lawren). Though this has been done with frogs it

has not yet been accomplished with mammals (Lawren). Another way to make a

clone, as they do in the cattle buisness, is to split the cells of a early

multi-celled embryo which will form two new embryos (Lawren).

For it to get started into practice it took more than fifty years of

questioning and testing. The first successful cloning experiment involved a

leopard frog. It took place in, 1952 with group of scientist from the

Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia (Lawren). To clone the frog they

used an embryonic frog cell nucleus(Margery). 1962, John Gurdon of Cambridge

University cloned a toad that survive threw adulthood and was able to reproduce.

He was also the first to take a nucleus from a fully contrast tadpole intestinal

cell and cloned toads(Robertson). As you can see we are getting close to the

cloning of humans. 1981, Steen Willadsen was the first to clone a artificial

chimera. He did this by mixing a sheep and a goat getting the result of a "geep"

(Lawren). It had the body shape and the head of a goat, and a dappled coat

which had large patches of sheep's wool. 1984, Willadsen cloned the first

verifiable mammal, using embryonic nuclei transplant into an unfertilized sheep

egg. Also in, 1986, when he worked for Texas bioengineering company (Lawren).

By using the embryonic nuclei, he produces the first cloned calves from cattle.

The cloned cattle that were produced were super-elite, high production dairy

cows and bulls who had a high breeding rate (Robertson). 1987, James Robl of

the University of Massachusetts was the first to clone rabbits also using

embryonic nuclei. But who can say when we will be able to clone human organs or

complete "biocopies" of human beings by using just the nuclei taken from a skin

sample (Lawren).

What's so good about cloning? Lets look at this at a different