Human Cloning

Human Cloning

Have you ever had a loved one die of cancer or seen a story about a little boy who was injured in a car accident? If there was a way to prevent this or have a cure for life threatening diseases wouldn’t you want to use it? Human cloning may be the answer to these problems. With today’s technology, scientists are finding ways to clone cells to replace unhealthy cells in the body that have been damaged. Human cloning is now theoretically possible; with the success of the clone “Dolly” the sheep, we are closer than ever to making a human clone, but is it a good idea? The philosophical question of human cloning and the existence of a “soul” are ideas that are thought to be the best arguments against cloning. Although the possibilities of benefits from cloning may exist in the distant future, it would mean whole generations of human beings are doomed to die for the sake of medical research, and, therefore, cloning should be banned.

Dolly is a very familiar name to most people. Dolly was the first successful clone of a mammal, a sheep. These days cloning and stem-cell research, which go hand in hand, have become hot button issues and political platforms. But what exactly is cloning? To most people a clone means an exact duplicate of another animal. Because of movies and television shows, people have come to believe that cloning would allow you to have another “you,” someone with the same talents, looks thoughts, and memories. But this is not necessarily true.

The President’s Council on Bioethics in July of 2002 defined cloning as “A form of reproduction in which offspring result not from the chance union of egg and sperm (sexual reproduction), but from the deliberate replication of the genetic makeup of another single individual (asexual reproduction.” So essentially the accepted meaning of cloning is that a clone is an artificially created animal, or theoretically human, by use of genetic material from one parent.

According to Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) website, there are three different types of cloning”: 1 recombinant DNA technology, 2 reproductive cloning, and 3 therapeutic cloning” (“Cloning Fact Sheet).

ORNL’s cloning fact sheet says that “gene cloning” is a process that involves transferring a certain segment of DNA from an animal to a sort of culture made of cells that self replicate. This allows that segment of DNA to then be cloned in side of another cell. This process is not uncommon in many laboratories and has been used since its inception in the 1970s (“Cloning Fact Sheet).

Gene cloning differs from reproductive cloning, because rather than cloning just a segment of DNA; the entire DNA strand is duplicated in order to create an exact genetic replica of the original animal. The ORNL says that reproductive cloning is the process in which the DNA from a donor cell is transplanted into a host cell from which the nucleus and genetic material has been removed. The host cell is then stimulated in order to make it divide. The created embryo is then allowed to divide until a “suitable age,” when it is implanted into the uterus of a female where it will grow until birth (“Cloning Fact Sheet”).

The “Cloning Fact Sheet” says:

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 (“Cloning Fact Sheet”).

This means that the clone will not age the exact same way the DNA donor did, so it will not be a perfect replica.

The final method of cloning is referred to as embryo cloning. Embryonic cloning uses the same method as reproductive cloning, but instead of growing the embryo until birth it is extracted after only a few days of division. This is done in order to retrieve stem cells from the embryo. Stem cells have the ability to “generate virtually any type of specialized cell in the human body,” says the ORNL (“Cloning Fact Sheet”). Stem cells are thought to have the potential to cure many diseases such as cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and many other such diseases.

Those who favor cloning point out that human cloning technology can be used to benefit health in many ways. Cloning could find the cure to diseases such as cancer, kidney failure, cystic fibrosis, and replace damaged skin from burns or other injuries. Scientists can learn how to switch cells