Cloning: Not What You Think

Just about everybody sees cloning as a boon to mankind. And many supporters of cloning are saying that human cloning will benefit mankind through scientific discoveries. For instance, Dr. Richard Seed, a leading proponent of human cloning technology, suggests that it may someday be possible to reverse the aging process because of what scientists can learn from cloning. Scientists also believe they will be able to clone organs, such as livers and kidneys, thereby saving many lives because it is rare to find compatible transplant organs. It is even possible that the cloning process could help cure diseases by allowing us to remove genes that are prone to illness. But, in spite of many possible benefits, cloning humans is objectionable because it is unethical, it would take away our individuality, and it would likely increase our susceptibility to disease.

Cloning humans is unethical because we could be tempted to destroy cloned life and because only few could afford it. Any kind of human cloning would eventually have to be tested on a human. The ethics debate is whether we should be able to choose the sex of our baby as well as other traits, such as the color of eyes, hair, and skin. Such altering of the genetic code, if put in the wrong hands, could cause a number of problems. Parents could be tempted to terminate the life of a cloned child if they aren’t happy with the outcome of the cloning. This is viewed as inappropriate tampering with Mother Nature by many ethicists.

Cloning requires a lot of biological expertise and is expensive. Ian Wilmut and his associates tried 277 times before producing Dolly, the first successfully cloned animal, a sheep. A new cloning technique has been developed, but even this technique has only a 2-3% success rate. Not everyone has the kind of money it would take to make cloning a reality for the everyday person. Only those people with a lot of money will be able to have cloning within their reach. I see cloning becoming an indulgence for people who would use it for petty reasons, like creating pretty child. Cloning is too expensive for the people who really need it for things like preventing the passing on of family diseases genetically.

Human cloning would take away the individuality we treasure and may have a detrimental effect on relationships within the family. A child born from an adult DNA cloning of his father could be considered a delayed identical twin. We can only imagine how a child might react to that circumstance. We have the opportunity to grow as individuals. We should be valued according to who we are and not who we were cloned from. A clone would have a hard time finding a sense of his or her own identity. Those who would have us all look the same and have the same genetic makeup were once considered to be followers of Hitler. We, as a nation, value our differences and our ethnic diversity. We can’t let our precious individuality be slowly taken away by human cloning.

Human cloning could create a population that would be more susceptible to some diseases. Cloning could reduce genetic variability, which could make the population of humans and animals more susceptible to disease. This means that one disease or virus could devastate the whole population. 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 affect the entire population. The result could be catastrophic food shortages in that nation. Also, there is a risk of disease transfer between transgenic animals and the animals from which the transgenes were derived. If an animal producing drugs in its milk becomes infected by a virus, the animal may transmit the virus to a patient using the drug. The risk of transferring virus this way is too great and should be avoided. We would like to avoid cloning a population that would be susceptible to disease.

Human cloning poses a huge risk to society and nature. We can’t take the chance of losing the ground of our ethics system out from under us. We can’t let go of our individuality and diversity of culture and race. We certainly should not take the risk of disease transfer between genetic clones. With all the problems that could be facing us, we should be more hesitant to jump into research on human cloning. There may be a few benefits, but these are not guaranteed, either. The ban on human cloning should not be lifted. We are a country of risk takers, but what price would we be willing to pay for the few benefits of cloning humans? We all have the right to decide whether human cloning is beneficial or detrimental to our well-being as individuals and as a united nation.