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Cloning As humanity progresses, more and more technologies are becoming available. However, while some of the technologies are deployed without any ethical considerations, there are some technologies that involve ethical dilemmas as well as high extent of public awareness. New reproductive technologies, such as cloning, are the technologies that arise a wide array of legal and ethical controversies. As the mentioned above technology have drawn the most public attention, within the course of this research we will discuss the implications of using this technology.
Personally, I believe that cloning is morally and ethically wrong, however the opposite perspective will also be covered in this report. Attempts to create a human being by cloning should be banned for several reasons. Although cloning has some benefits, attempts to clone a human will bring up many moral and ethical issues. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NABC) concludes that it would be morally unacceptable for anyone in the public or private sector... to attempt to create a child by implanting cloned embryos in a woman. (Kass, p. 86) Cloning has many benefits, but it also poses great risks to the human race. Cloning has been around for decades and scientists have known how to clone in principle for at least two decades.
Scientists have been able to clone both plants and animals. They can grow a whole new plant from a fragment of an existing plant. Cloning has been used in agriculture to produce high quality uniform products. Scientists have cloned frogs for scientific research. In 1997, scientists from Scotland were able to clone a sheep from an adult cell. However, four years after researchers in Scotland startled the world by announcing that they had cloned a sheep named Dolly, scientists say evidence is mounting that creating healthy animals through cloning is more difficult than they had expected. (New York Times Article) Cloning poses great risks to the human race.
Cloning may cause human bodies to stop aging. Then the world would become full of elderly immortals and few children. That would not be good for the world because the world needs the benefit of ideas from young people. Cloning could also cause people to become supernatural. Another risk to humans would be the threat of plagues.
Plagues could develop as a result of cloning. A worldwide epidemic unbalancing the ecology may also develop as a result of cloning. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission has said that the technique used by the Scottish scientists to clone a sheep would pose great risks to humans. Before successfully cloning a lamb, the researchers failed 277 times, producing many abnormal and still born animals. Cloning will not only pose great risks to the human race, but it will also raise moral and ethical issues. (Harris, p. 77) Anti-abortionists feel that life should start at conception. Therefore they feel that cloning should be banned.
If cloning does happen, there is a real potential for developmental abnormalities. Nature is imperfect and so is the potential synthetic human produced by cloning. Cloning humans raises moral issues. Ezekiel Emanuel said a child born of cloning would face an enormous weight of social and parental expectations about what and who that child should be. (Silver, p. 53) The supporters of cloning, nevertheless, say that cloning has many benefits. Cloning may be used to prolong life, maybe even make people live forever. It could also eliminate genetic defects.
If one individual in a marriage has a genetic defect, the partner without the defect could be cloned. The genetic defect would be eliminated and the married couple could have children and not worry about a genetic defect. The acceptance of tissue transplants without rejection among members of the isogonic group is a possible benefit of cloning. Another benefit is that cloning may make it possible to preserve embryo cells or even produce embryo cells from other body cells. The cells could then be placed inside mothers to grow into human beings. Then these living copies could be born when the first individual is old or dead.
Even though here are benefits from cloning, all of these benefits involve risks. If scientists use cloning to clone spare parts, there would be risks to the surrogate mother who would carry the clone. However, if cloning makes people live forever and the world becomes full of immortals and elderly people, then we wont have any young minds. If scientists preserve embryo cells and implant them in surrogate mothers when one individual is old or dead, that then poses a risk to the surrogate mother. Eliminating a genetic defect by cloning also has risks. There are risks to the mothers health.
It is possible for fetal cells to break lose during the gestation and find their way into the mothers tissue. If the cloned cells get into her tissue they may become cancer and the mother could die of cancer related to her pregnancy. Even though there is some good that come out of cloning, cloning should still be banned. (Silver, p. 142) In the debate over cloning, there are those who say that the scientific benefits and advances gained from cloning are beneficial to society; however state legislators do not support that opinion. Currently, the situation in some of the US states is as follows: Five states (Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, North Dakota and Virginia) ban human cloning for any purpose. Three other states (Louisiana, Rhode Island and California) ban cloning for the purpose of initiating a pregnancy. In addition, at least one state (South Dakota) clearly bans use of any human embryos (including cloned human embryos) in research that could harm them. (web) Since ethics is not an exact science, whereas cloning is, ethics has the tendency to generate more controversies than answers.
The ethical issue of cloning should not arise at all at this stage, because society is not there yet to venture in such a task without knowing all of the ramifications. The issue, though, should not be left unattended either. It will be important for cloning to be researched under a well-monitored environment. Unethical concerns at one time could later on become ethical only if society could justify the need to have use for them. What moral considerations deserve our attention and which are the most important in responding to a particular issue? These are questions that arise with every new controversy.
Whether one's ethical beliefs come from theological commitments, philosophical arguments, or from true-life experiences, all voices should be welcome to the conversation. While tolerance is a widely accepted virtue, it is important to remind ourselves that it is built on the idea of mutual respect and the capacity to accept whenever possible, the moral worth of others with whom one may disagree. Tolerance means both agreeing to disagree and accepting the challenge of sustaining a community where moral authority will, to some extent, always be contested. Many people have different views of what is and what is not natural. Out of one thousand people polled, more than forty-eight percent believe that cloning is unnatural. (Kass, p. 117) The true definition of cloning is the production of one or more individual living things that is genetically identical to the living thing that was cloned. All political bets are off if a cloned birth is announced, several Hill observers said.
A group of scientists related to the Raelian religion, which teaches that humans are clones of extraterrestrials, has said it will deliver the world's first human clone before the end of this year. (web) Another issue that has come up about whether it is ethical to clone is the question of how a cloned person would act. Since a cloned person would be an exact replica of the original person he or she would be very similar physically and should be alike mentally. On the other hand his or her personality comes from genes, social influences, and how they were brought up. Because of this the cloned child's personality would be completely different from the original person, unless he or she was raised in the exact same environment. Genes are not destiny, but that will not stop people from thinking that human cloning need to be stopped before it starts. However, since it can not be proven that genes are not destiny, people are convinced that cloning will produce an appalling creature of destruction.
Some of the most commonly cited ethical and moral arguments against human cloning seem to originate from religious perspectives. Politicians and scientists can even make these religious arguments with religious sympathies. Many of these religious philosophies teach, for example, that human life is unique and special and should be created, determined and controlled only by their deity's perspectives. Numerous religions believe in the existence of, and in the individuality of, a human soul. Some people have questioned about whether or not a cloned embryo would have a soul. A soul is colorless, weightless, and has never been detected by any and may not even exist.
But it is a concern to believers. Christians, for example, will be concerned about whether it will be possible to clone the human soul, along with the human. If it is possible to clone the soul, what will this mean? In contrast, if a person is cloned, but not their soul, what will this mean? Can a clone without a soul be destroyed and not offend moral or religious beliefs? Cloning will be defined by many as humans assuming the powers, the providence, and the jurisdiction of their deities or other spiritual powers of their supernatural universe, which should not happen.
However, enforcing a modified cloning ban would be problematic and pose certain law enforcement challenges that would be lessened with an outright ban on human cloning. (web) The biggest worry of cloning is that it took two hundred and seventy seven attempts to create Dolly. Some of those failures resulted in defective lambs that died quickly after birth. Another controversial issue about cloning is the fact that Dolly was conceived using an ewe's egg and only a cell from another ewe's body. It is noteworthy that no semen from a ram was involved.
However, Dolly, the clone has the same status as her identical twin already has, because they both have originated from a single fertilized egg. This technique could also be used to create a "perfect human, " or one with above normal strength and sub-normal intelligence. If the techniques were perfected in humans, and came into general usage, there would be no genetic need for men. This would mean that all males would be allowed to die off. A few people have expressed concern about the effects that cloning would have on relationships.
For example, a child born from DNA cloning of his father would be, in effect, a delayed twin of that parent. Some fear that this may cause disturbances in the family, like a wife seeing an exact copy of her husband growing up and maturing. Or it may help since the father would understand some of the behaviors of his exact copy, his son. One of the other cloning problems is that it may reduce genetic variability.
Producing many clones runs the risk of creating a population that is entirely the same. This population would be susceptible to the same diseases, and one disease could devastate the entire population. One can easily picture humans being wiped out by a single virus, however, less drastic, but more probable events could occur from a lack of genetic diversity. For example, if a large percentage of a nation's cattle are identical clones, a virus, such as a particular strain of mad cow disease, could effect the entire population. The result could cause catastrophic food shortages in that nation. Also, there is a risk of disease transfer between transgenic animals and the animal from which the transgene's were derived from.
If a virus infects animal producing drugs in its milk, the animal may transmit the virus to a patient using the drug. The most problematic issue about cloning legislation is that it cannot include all the aspects of cloning. Thus, it is not that simple to pass the laws that would clearly regulate all the numerous aspects of human cloning as well as gene engineering at large, and many observers agree with President Bush on that issue. After considering carefully all the factual evidence, it is apparent that attempts to create a human being by cloning should be banned. Cloning does have some benefits, but it raises many moral and ethical issues. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission concludes that it would be morally unacceptable for anyone in the public or private sector...
to attempt to create a child by implanting cloned embryos in women. (Silver, p. 131) Cloning poses great risks to humans. The NABC concluded that the technique the Scots used to clone a sheep would be harmful to humans. Those who believe cloning benefits should think about the risk cloning brings to the surrogate mother in order to carry the clone. Cloning also brings a threat of plagues and superhuman creatures. An error or deliberate act could cause a worldwide epidemic by unbalancing the ecology. Cloning should be banned for the reasons above.
There is a real potential for developmental abnormalities. The risk of producing abnormal humans is dangerous to the human race and the moral and ethical issues will continue unless human cloning is banned. Humans have not progressed yet to the extent when they can assume the powers that only God can theoretically have. Although both in the fields of science and medicine there have been miraculous improvements and advancements, playing with a human life (and that is what cloning essentially is) should not be allowed under any considerations. One example can be illustrated to further promote the idea that science is not only beneficial to humanity, and that is nuclear weapons. While those who researched the reactions needed thought that the acquired knowledge would be used for the benefit of the society as a whole, nowadays people are afraid that some fanatics would be able to get hold of nuclear weapons of mass destruction and threaten the entire world because nothing will be able to stop them.
Where is the guarantee that cloning, if totally legalized, would not produce analogical situation and thus endanger humanity at large? Words Count: 2, 386. Bibliography: web web web Harris, J. Clones, Genes, and Immortality: Ethics and the Genetic Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kass, L.
The Ethics of Human Cloning. Washington, DC: The AEI Press, 1998. Kolkata, G. Researchers Find Big Risk of Defect in Cloning Animals. New York Times, March 25, 2001.
Available at: web Silver, L. Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family. New York, NY: Avon Books, Inc. , 1998.
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