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Example research essay topic: Reproductive Cloning Sexual Reproduction - 1,706 words

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Human Cloning There is no other issue throughout American history, which has produced such controversy across opinion of the general public. Not slavery, prohibition, or abortion has aroused such a significant dispute regarding specific dilemma, than cloning did. Human cloning debate united and simultaneously separated scientific convictions. While one group of scientists seems inhospitable to particular research goals, such as cloning to produce the genetic duplicate of an existing person, others clone press conferences - since they have not been able to clone babies - to announce that they will "go offshore" if cloning is outlawed in the U.

S. The most bizarre example is from a prominent American researcher and infertility expert, Jamie Grifo, who at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, announced an experiment he sponsored in China because the research could not legally or ethically be conducted in the United States. The Chinese researchers and their American collaborator took the nucleus from a dozen human oocytes (donated by a young fertile woman) and replaced them with the nucleus of early embryos created by using the oocytes of an infertile "patient. " The five reconstituted zygotes which developed to the four cell stage were transferred to the patient's uterus. The five embryos produced three pregnancies. However, to label this a success and to state that it proves that this technique will be established as an "aid for human reproduction" based on the serial destruction of three viable fetuses is ghoulish.

It is easy to see why this type of premature "trial and error" research on fetuses is outlawed even in the U. S. With the resulting publicity, it did not take China long to outlaw it as well. What remains inexplicable is the inability of the infertility industry itself to set any limits to the lengths American physicians can go, including going to other countries to evade our almost nonexistent legal and ethical constraints. In commenting on the Grifo China experiment, the Wall Street Journal, in a front page article, described it as a type of "cloning" (Regalado & Leggett, A 1).

Although no cloning was involved in the experiment (each of the embryos created was genetically distinct from each other and from the woman), cloning seems to be about the only reproductive technology people consistently worry about around the globe. Even the American Society of Reproductive Medicine believes reproductive cloning, cloning to make a baby, should be outlawed. And this is what makes cloning such an important bioethics issue on the international scene: it provides the world with an opportunity to come to agreement on a bioethical issue, and by adopting a treaty outlawing cloning, to set a precedent that the world can build on to develop universal principles of bioethics, especially in the area of human reproduction and human experimentation. It is not that reproductive cloning per se is the most important or pressing bioethics issue internationally - the "right to health" itself is more critical.

Nonetheless, because of what cloning will do to children, and because of what it will likely lead to, such as experimentation with germ line alterations, cloning is a critical issue to every member of the human species. From the critical standpoint, it makes perfect sense to begin international bioethics regulation with a cloning treaty: we believe it should outlaw any attempt to make either a child who is a genetic duplicate, or a child whose genetic code has been purposely modified so as to make a "better baby. " The United Nations's tep's toward an international convention to ban human reproductive cloning are important primarily because they mark the first attempt to develop an international framework for responsible social governance of a human genetic technology. That the stakes are high is well illustrated by the February 2004 announcement of a South Korean team that they had derived an embryonic stem cell from a human embryo created by somatic cell nuclear transfer, the first in the world. The announcement almost immediately led the South Korean government to suspend further cloning research until national regulations had been decided upon. The lead researcher, veterinarian Woo Suk Hwang, initially threatened to exercise the regulatory arbitrage option, saying, "If Korea were to prohibit therapeutic cloning, we would go to other countries where it is permitted - Singapore, mainland China, maybe Great Britain. But my hope is that the Korean government will give us the license to do this kind of research.

If they don't, we will move" (Dreyfus, D 1). Two weeks later, however, Hwang suspended his work and was waiting for the government to determine if he could continue it, saying that he wanted ethical guidelines and that he and his team had agreed that they would not transfer the cloning technology overseas without the government's permission. Three months later, in May 2004, serious questions were raised about the ethics of the cloning experiment itself, including the sufficiency of IRB ("institutional review board") ethical review, and the quality of consent given by the women who donated their ova to the project. The Korean researchers have denied any wrong doing - but both they and leading scientists understand that if research cloning has any future anywhere in the world, the researchers will have to follow what are already generally accepted ethical guidelines.

Unlike economic arbitrage, which depends for its success almost exclusively on the possibility of profit, ethical arbitrage, at least in cloning, may be much more complex. It is not just that it seems to be science fiction and horror movies come to life as modern day Frankenstein's strive to create new life forms, although this is part of it. More importantly, the majority of scientists, politicians and philosophers think, is the control proponents of this technology seek over children, a control that is absolute in its genetic form, and which threatens to treat children not as humans with rights, but as products with design characteristics. According to Barry Commoner, most clones exhibit developmental failure before or soon after birth, and even apparently normal clones often suffer from kidney or brain malformations (Barry Commoner, par. 2).

Simultaneously, as January 2004 issue of the Economist justly points out human reproductive cloning is so fraught with technical risks and ethical dilemmas that few respectable scientists will touch it, and parthenogenesis, while occasionally also observed in mammals, never produces viable offspring (The Economist, 53). In addition, by making sexual reproduction optional, cloning actually changes the very definition of what it means to be human. This is why scientists have previously described cloning as an "offense against humanity" itself, something that attempts to change the nature of what it is to be human. Cloning is asexual reproduction, which is something no human being has ever done.

Likewise, genetic engineering could add different characteristics to humans that they have never had before, changing, again, the definition of what it means to be human. For those who are unsure of the human rights arguments, and this includes many scientists, agreement to ban cloning can nonetheless come from its inherent dangerousness to resulting children. Today and probably forever, human cloning is unsafe and dangerous to the resulting child. There is no way to predict what this kid is going to be like. Every animal model, so far, has resulted in major physical deficiencies in the offspring.

There is no legitimate scientist who actually thinks there is a way out of this. In sexual reproduction, when mother's and father's genes come together there is a mechanism by which the genes decide which one is going to express itself, called imprinting. In cloning, imprinting cannot happen because it is started with an already fully formed cell. And geneticists just cannot even imagine how that cell can actually grow a whole creature without having some major problems and figuring out how to produce the organs or produce the brain.

No one has even begun to conceptualize that. Maybe someday they will. But right now, there is universal scientific agreement that it is dangerous to attempt this. Another common and powerful argument is that reproductive cloning, assuming it could ever be safe, commodities children. It treats children as goods, made-to-order kids with a pre-programmed genome that you " ve already seen grown-up, which is dehumanizing to children. Because reproductive cloning commodities children, it tends to undercut their human rights.

The Europeans have a term called human dignity, and their position is simply that cloning is an affront to this human dignity. Americans are not that comfortable with the term of human dignity, although it is the basis of human rights and the basis for all the international covenants on human rights. The concept of human rights is not interchangeable with the notion of human dignity; however, these terms are closely related. And, historically, there would be an argument that humans have rights because they have dignity. Nonetheless, articulating what human, dignity actually means remains a challenge. The core argument is that by com modifying children we dehumanize them and treat them like pets; like interchangeable products we can manufacture to our specifications and theoretically reject if they do not meet with our specifications.

Ultimately, the central argument in favor of an international banning of human reproductive cloning is that it is a potentially species - endangering activity, and no scientist, no corporation, no individual group of people has the moral warrant to put the species at risk for their own gain. If humans are to change the definition of what it means to be human, or to try to develop a new or modified human then that decision should be made openly and democratically by all humans. Outlawing cloning is thus an application of the precautionary principle to modifications in human reproduction. Once a global ban is in place, only the world together can decide whether and when to lift it. Reproductive cloning and genetic engineering raise serious human rights concerns. And precisely because these technologies have the potential of impacting all of us as humans - not just habitant's of any one state, country, or continent - action must be taken at the international level.

Nonetheless, even though there is universal agreement on human reproductive cloning, the countries of the world have not been abl


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Research essay sample on Reproductive Cloning Sexual Reproduction

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