Genetics/Cloning

Have you ever wished you could have a clone of yourself to do homework while you hit the skate park or went out with your friends?

Imagine if you could really do that. Where would you start?
What exactly is cloning?

Cloning is the creation of an organism that is an exact genetic copy of another. This means that every single bit of DNA is the same between the two!

You might not believe it, but there are human clones among us right now. They weren't made in a lab, though: they're identical twins, created naturally. Below, we'll see how natural identical twins relate to modern cloning technologies.
How is cloning done?

You may have first heard of cloning when Dolly the Sheep showed up on the scene in 1997. Cloning technologies have been around for much longer than Dolly, though.

The greatest moral objection placed on cloning lies in the claim that human beings may be unnecessarily harmed, either during experimentation or by expectations after birth. "John Stuart Mill regarded bringing children into being without the prospect of adequate physical and psychological support as nothing short of a moral crime." Recent polls taken of Americans after Dolly’s announcement showed that two out of every three people find human cloning to be morally unacceptable, while 56% said they would not eat the meat of a cloned animal.

 President Clinton’s first reaction to Dolly was an ethical review; he would not have seen such urgency if an Intel Corporation announced the production of a new computer chip. "The science of life demands a different response, an acknowledgment of anxiety." "Ethical standards define what ‘ought to be done’ or ‘what ought not be done.’"

The ethical considerations of this new technology are rooted in the potential risk to human beings and to the potential human beings. Many fear the possibility of a diminished sense of identity and individuality. There are also concerns about a reduction or destruction of the quality of family life. There are many appeals to human dignity; questions arise when human dignity is threatened. Such questions are like: "whose dignity is attacked and how?"; "Is it the duplication of a large part of the genome that is supposed to constitute the attack on human dignity?"; "If so, we might legitimately ask whether and how the dignity of a natural twin is threatened by the existence of the other twin."

 There are other ethical questions that arise from this issue, such as:

- "If we think that a cloned human being might be troubled by psychological or other problems that would make her or his life less satisfactory than it would be better not to bring that human being into existence."
- "Why are we so prepared to say that it is bad for a child like the one just described to come into existence, if we are not prepared to say that it is good for a child with every prospect of a worthwhile life to come into existence?"
- "How many people should there be?
- "Why assume the worst motives?"

 I am sure this is only the tip of the iceberg as far as the ethical questions involving cloning goes. We do not yet have the answers to these questions and maybe we never will. It is still taking time to simply formulate the right questions. I personally like what Paul Ramsey has to say about the questions that have been raised: "A man of serious conscience means to say in raising ethical questions that there may be some things that men should never do. The good things men do can be made complete only by the things they refuse to do." Report Abuse