Commentaries Assessment: Attack of the clone debate

Some people think that cloning is cool, to have an exact replication of you next to you. Think of the endless possibilities of, literally, controlling the world! You can use your clone to get away with crimes, set up a decoy to fool the authorities and let them be confronted with a more subtle version of the 1956 movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". All these herald great wealth and power that greatly appeal to these people. These people, however, are really wrong. As far as I'm concerned, cloning is a technology not worth investing. It is a potential disaster for our world, if it leads to cloning of humans. It's morally and ethically wrong, and disrupts the natural order of events in our future, mainly due to these factors: it affects health by disrupting the root of life, the DNA; it's conflicting against many, if not most, religions; and it's tempting possibilities that might lead to humanity issues.

A major downside to cloning is that it is harmful to health. In 2002, researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reported that the genomes of cloned mice are compromised. In analyzing more than 10,000 liver and placenta cells of cloned mice, they discovered that about 4% of genes function abnormally. The abnormalities do not arise from mutations in the genes but from changes in the normal activation or expression of certain genes. (Human Genome Project) Problems also may result from programming errors in the genetic material from a donor cell. When an embryo is created from the union of a sperm and an egg, the embryo receives copies of most genes from both parents. A process called "imprinting" chemically marks the DNA from the mother and father so that only one copy of a gene (either the maternal or paternal gene) is turned on. Defects in the genetic imprint of DNA from a single donor cell may lead to some of the developmental abnormalities of cloned embryos. In short, the action of cloning leads to two major biological problems: diversity loss, and health risk. The former is a result of cloning being a process of replicating a genetic constitution, thus hampering the diversity in genes. While lessening the diversity in genes, we weaken our ability of adaptation, lowering the survivability of humanity in the future years. Think about it: let's say cloning of humans is researched, discovered and perfected, and people start to make clones of themselves to let their legacy live on. As cloning replicates the gene data in exact proportions, the clones would be susceptible to the same diseases, and if everyone starts to clone themselves, one disease could devastate an entire population of people. How can this help us? Furthermore, let's look at the harmful effects cloning has on animals, its current target. There is a risk of disease transfer between transgenic animals and the animal 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. (Kayotic Development) This will increase the possibility of a worldwide pandemic, and it won't benefit us at all. Another point is clearly shown in the following statistics; more than 90% of cloning attempts fail to produce viable offspring. More than 100 nuclear transfer procedures could be required to produce one viable clone. In addition to low success rates, cloned animals tend to have more compromised immune function and higher rates of infection, tumor growth, and other disorders. Japanese studies have shown that cloned mice live in poor health and die early. About a third of the cloned calves born alive have died young, and many of them were abnormally large. Many cloned animals have not lived long enough to generate good data about how clones age, leading to the concern that research done on human cloning might be based on weak foundations of data that might lead to a global catastrophe. This is, obviously, detrimental to us.

The second downside of cloning is that it is already conflicting with many religions. Any research into human cloning would eventually need to be tested on human specimens. The ability to clone humans may lead to the genetic tailoring of offspring. The heart of the cloning debate is concerned with the genetic manipulation of a human embryo before it begins development. It is conceivable that scientists could alter a baby's genetic code to give the individual a certain color of eyes or genetic resistance to certain diseases as requested by the human bearing the original DNA code. This is viewed as inappropriate tampering with "Mother Nature" by many ethicists. Because clones are derived from an existing adult cell, it has older genes. Will the clone's life expectancy be shorter because of this? Studies done on the famous cloned sheep Dolly might just prove this point. Dolly's life was ended at the age of 6 (about half the life expectancy of her breed) when a veterinarian confirmed she had a progressive lung disease. (The Lab Rat) In January of 2002 her condition caused concern when she was diagnosed with a form of arthritis. Dolly yielded new information about the cloning process and how it can affect the clone and could add data to the idea that telomere length is connected to growing older. The researchers reported that Dolly's telomeres were 20 percent shorter than those of sheep who are not clones. The cells were taken from a six year old sheep and Dolly lived six years. It is probably to early to tell at this point if it is merely a coincidence but the health problems Dolly had at its young age (arthritis and progressive lung disease) would be extremely rare in a middle-aged sheep. This suggest that cloning might potentially cause serious health problems, and this causes great displeasure among ethical activists. Allow me to show you a few statistics:

A 1997-FEB CNN poll conducted among 1,005 American adults has a margin of error of 3%. They found:
-93% felt that cloning humans is a bad idea
-66% felt that cloning animals, such as sheep, is a bad idea
-69% are scared of the possibility of cloning humans
-74% believe that human cloning is against God's will; 19% say that it is not. 8
A subsequent Time/CNN poll, conducted on 2001-FEB found:
-90% felt that cloning humans was a bad idea
-67% felt that cloning animals, such as sheep, was a bad idea.
-45% believe that it will be possible to clone a human within the next ten years.
-69% believe that human cloning is against God's will; 23% say that it is not. (time.com)

These evidently show that a large number of Americans adamantly believes that cloning is about to develop into a bad idea, mainly attributing it to the possibility of human cloning.

Another view to cloning are provided by members of some religious groups, particularly Evangelical Christianity and Roman Catholicism, as they believe that a soul enters the body at the instant of conception, and that the fertilized ovum is in fact a human person with full human rights. Dividing that "baby" in in half during an embryo cloning procedure would interfere with God's intent. It is also human experimentation on live persons. The many cloned zygotes that died after a few cell divisions would be lost human beings; their loss is considered as serious as the death of a new born baby.
These same conservative Christians would probably also be distressed at the use of cloning to weed out genetically defective fertilized ova in therapeutic cloning procedures. The procedure would result in the killing of one of the clones during the genetic testing. Since they regard each of the clones as separate human beings, this would be murder.
Others have questioned whether a cloned embryo will have a soul. A soul is weightless, colorless, odorless, has never been detected by any measurement and may not exist. But it is a concern to some believers. Fortunately, embryo cloning is similar to the natural processes that generate identical twins. And, with the exception of the ancient Hawaiians, nobody questions whether both twins have souls.

More ethical beliefs on cloning are as follows: Richard Nicholson of the British Bulletin of Medical Ethics said that cloning research may well be "sowing the seeds of our destruction." Ann Northrop, a columnist for LGNY (a New York gay/lesbian newspaper), said that human cloning is of interest to gays and lesbians: "...in a time when we're afraid that discovery of a genetic basis [for homosexuality] would lead to people aborting us, cloning would be a way of surviving...this [cloning] has the potential of giving women complete control over reproduction...a stunning possibility that could, carried to its logical extreme, eliminate men altogether." These facts clearly show that cloning might lead to serious ethical issues that will be potentially difficult to solve.

My last factor to be depicted here would be potential humanity issues. In the article Law war: Attack of the clone debate, scientists have voiced concern that cloning might lead to body-part merchants, which seriously bring us humans to an all-new low level of ethicality. Reproductive cloning is expensive and highly inefficient, mainly due to the two points abovementioned in earlier paragraphs, as while cloning allows man to tamper with genetics in human beings, it also makes deliberate reproduction of undesirable traits, a probability. Cloning of body organs might invite malpractices in society. In cloning human organs and using them for transplant, or in cloning human beings themselves, technical and economic barriers will have to be considered. Will cloned organs be cost-effective? Will cloning techniques really reach the common man? Moreover, cloning will put human and animal rights at stake. Will cloning fit into our ethical and moral principles? Cloning will leave man just another man-made being. Won't it devalue mankind? Won't it undermine the value of human life? Cloning is equal to emulating God. Is that easy? Is that risk-free? You might try to counter me that one can use a unconscious clone to provide spare organs if there are so many ethical issues revolving around cloning humans, but look, this depends on our technique. If our technique is good enough and can clone a single organ, it's OK, but if we're going to clone a unconscious clone, how can we tell if it's really unconscious? It's true that the organs of a clone can co-ordinate completely with our body immune system, but maybe it knows full well what's happening, but could not tell us? It would be inhumane to do so, and if we get the organs from the clone, it will die? Are we killing a human being, then? Another possible argument you might pose is if you cloned yourself, your clone will be at the same age as you. I'm afraid it's not the case; if you cloned yourself at a certain age, then your clone would be that many years younger than you, probably a generation younger. This might lead to a generation gap between them. You might be unnerved to know that you're an exact copy of someone older, won't you?

In conclusion, I'm personally glad that human cloning technology has not been perfected yet, as cloning is a technology we shouldn't spend so much resources on. It's morally and ethically wrong, it is detrimental to health, and it might lead to humanity issues. If you'd take a closer look at my abovementioned points, I'm pretty certain you'd agree, even if you do so with a little hesitation (which cannot be avoided, owing to the vague facts the research bodies and government officials provide to the public). Here's hoping that human cloning will stop manifesting itself as a potential herald of doom to the world.