Philosophy: Ethics - to Clone or Not to Clone?

Philosophy: Ethics

To Clone or Not To Clone?

Cloning is the production of a group of genetically identical cells or organisms, all descended from a single individual. All clones have exactly the same characteristics and precisely the same DNA as their host cells. Their have been many debates about the moral ethics of cloning in recent years. Many people believe that cloning is immoral and that we are “playing God”. Most people do not know the true story behind cloning and do not realize the possibilities that cloning possess for out future and many others futures to come. Over 100 million Americans and two billion other humans worldwide suffer from diseases that could eventually be treated by the research of cloning. There are thousands of unused embryos in labs that will never see life so why should we not use them for research? Cloning should not be considered immoral because the knowledge that could come from this research would save millions of lives.

Many people believe cloning is immoral for multiple reasons. One of the main reasons people oppose cloning is because they don’t know what exactly it is or how it even works. They believe that cloning is just basically the creation of another human that is identical to another. This is a widespread misconception because cloning has many more advantages than just the creation of a person. There are several different types of cloning that all hold their own possibilities for the advancement of research. I will briefly discuss each type of cloning and the advantages that each could bring us in the future. One type of cloning is recombinant DNA technology or DNA cloning. This type of cloning is described by www.orln.gov as “the transfer of a DNA fragment of interest from one organism to a self-replicating genetic element such as a bacterial plasmid. The DNA of interest can then be propagated in a foreign host cell.”(www.orln.gov) This type of cloning is for the reproduction of DNA for further research and does not harm anybody. With this type of research we can learn more about other types of cloning by knowing more about the DNA strands. Another type of cloning is reproductive cloning which is what we heard so much about when Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996. In this type of cloning orln.gov describes it as “In a process called "somatic cell nuclear transfer" (SCNT), scientists transfer genetic material from the nucleus of a donor adult cell to an egg whose nucleus, and thus its genetic material, has been removed. Once the cloned embryo reaches a suitable stage, it is transferred to the uterus of a female host where it continues to develop until birth.”(www.orln.gov) Another type of cloning is therapeutic cloning or “embryo cloning”, this is also the most controversial type of cloning we can do right now. The goal of this type of cloning is not to clone humans but to harvest stem cells for the research of human development and diseases treatment. This type of cloning uses stem cells and orln.gov states, “Stem cells are important to biomedical researchers because they can be used to generate virtually any type of specialized cell in the human body. Stem cells are extracted from the egg after it has divided for 5 days. The egg at this stage of development is called a blastocyst. The extraction process destroys the embryo, which raises a variety of ethical concerns.” Stem cells are very unique cells that can be coaxed into developing into most of the 220 types of cells in our body. These are the three main types of cloning that are possible today and each one would help us live safer, longer, and healthier lives.

There are many concerns about the moral ethics of cloning and whether stem cell research is morally viable to perform or not. Most people do not fully understand what stem cell research is because they believe what they are told. When most people are asked about why they do not support stem cell research the most popular answer is because in order to do it we must kill babies and that is morally unethical. This is not true the embryos that would be used in stem cell research are stored in research labs and are excess from women who were trying to have babies from in vitro fertilization. Otherwise these nucleated eggs are going to be unused. This form of cloning is not the type of cloning you see in movies where there are multiple copies of people. This form of cloning would be used as a means to cure disease and create organs for transplant. This is a viable solution for everybody that needs organ transplants. With the ability to create new organs for transplantation the wait for a donor is eliminated. The price of organ transplantation would be reduced due to the availability of new organs and the ease of production of them. The way these organs would be created is described by orln.gov as, “DNA would be extracted from the