Cloning has many more advantages than disadvantages. The definition of cloning is to duplicate an organism. Through cloning, you could help thousands of people and animals. Cloning can totally reduce organ donor lists. Cloning can also bring back endangered species. “Advanced cloning is going to happen, just as long as somebody can fund it,” says Dr. Esterverks, a biology teacher at Nantucket High School. This quote almost makes cloning undebatable because cloning appears to be inevitable. Debating about it does not make too much difference if cloning is going to happen, but it does make sense to debate when cloning should be used and when it should be prohibited.

Cloning offers many medical advancements. Cloning allows dairy products to be enriched. For example, cloning provides scientists a method to engineer cows to produce certain medicines or enzymes in there milk. The Company Infigen Inc. says, “Cloned cows will be producing human drugs here within five years, under a plan by scientists at Infigen Inc.” (Cow) Scientists have speculated that a dairy cow could produce 175 pounds of human albium annually. This enzyme benefits humans who have lost lots of blood because albium makes up human plasma. (Cow)

3.) Cloning could also cure life threatening diseases and repair cosmetic defects. Through cloning, we could produce new, fresh tissue for burn victims, or new nerve tissue for burns or back injuries.

Burn victims or those with spinal cord injuries might be provided with replacement skin or nerve tissue grown from their own body cells. The damage done by degenerative disorder such as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, or Alzheimer’s disease

might be reversed. (I, Clone)

Cloning can also produce new heart cells for people with bad hearts. “The American Heart Association reports only 2,300 of the 40,000 Americans who needed a new heart in 1997 got one.” (Growing New Organs) Cloning could revolutionize the study of cells. With cloning, there is even a possibility that cancer cell production could be halted.

Cloning could also benefit animals. One benefit cloning provides to animals is that by cloning new laboratory animals, researchers would require fewer animals from the wild for testing. Cloning also provides another benefit to animals: Fewer animals would have to be hunted because with cloning, you could just create new wild animals instead of hunting them. In India, the city of Hyderabad is adopting cloning techniques to preserve endangered species such as lions and tigers. A satellite center comprised of scientifically designed enclosures is being set up near the Nehru Zoological Park as part of a larger conservation effort to preserve the endangered species. (Cloning to Help Preserve Lions, Tigers) With cloning, the diversity of animals could be increased because you could splice the genes of one animal into the genes of another animal and create a new species.

Cloning could also solve many problems that exist in the world today. For example, we could clone many farm animals and solve world hunger. Dr. Ian Wilmut, the embryologist in Scotland who made history by creating a lamb from the DNA of an adult sheep says we cannot cure world hunger immediately, “But if we can maybe make animals resistant to some diseases—to the tsetse fly, for example—it is quite possible that we can contribute to a whole range of things. (Dr. Frankenstein, I Presume?)

. Cloning could also prevent humans from having genetic defects. This could be accomplished through cell therapy. “ Such therapy—the actual correction or replacement of defective gene sequences in the embryo or the adult—is the holy grail of genetic medicine.” (I, Clone) Cloning is also the best lead we have to cure cancer. Cloning could cure cancer because with cloning, it is much easier to study cells because you could create new cells in the laboratory instead of taking them from humans or animals. Human cloning could be used to from life saving bone marrow for children with leukemia within three years, a leading scientist has predicted. Dame Anne McLaren, head of the Wellcome Institute of Cancer and Developmental biology at Cambridge, predicted the technique, known as in-vitro cloning, could lead to scientists creating spare-part tissue from a patient’s own DNA in the laboratory. (BBC News Online: Health)

Cloning could also be used to bring back lost pets, friends, or family members. In San Diego there is a canine cryobank. “Cells are harvested from a pet dog and are then transferred to the lab and grown to a particular stage of development where they are then cryopreserved for future cloning.” (Cloning And Your Pet) It is a known fact that cloning increases the probability of having the same pet or family member by 25% to 100%. (Electric L) Cloning could also create a whole new line of jobs for unemployed people. Through cloning, marriage partners could have a baby by the insertion of a body cell into the egg. “If a male totally lacks sperm or the testicular cells to make it a nucleus from one of his body cells could be inserted into an egg from his mate that has had its nucleus removed. The child she would bear would be an identical twin of its father.” (I, Clone)

Overall, cloning is extremely beneficial. It can cure cancer, eliminate donor lists, and do away with world hunger. Cloning can also advance the study of cells, which could lead to the cure of cancer. 30% to 40%(electric L) of Americans think that clones would be completely the same. That is far from the truth because clones would have different personalities. In the end, cloning has many more advantages than disadvantages. These facts prove that cloning should never be outlawed. This scientific process should be used by

responsible scientists to benefit all people.

Bibliography

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Caugin, Jennifer. “What’s the Thing About Clones.”

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March 31, 2000.

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1996, Volume 4, pp. 684, 685.

______. “Good Bye Dolly?” Discover,

August 1999, p.10.

_______. “How Those Cloned Calves will Help People,” Farming

March 1998, Vol. 96, No. 4, p. 36.

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www.humancloning.org Human Cloning Foundation,

April 4, 2000.

Wilmut, Ian/ Macklin, Ruth, Cloning, San Diego,

CA: Greenville Press, 1998.

www.librarythinkquest.org “Is Cloning Right? The Pro’s and Con’s,”

April 3, 2000.

www.bbc.co.uk/law/english/health “Cloned Embryos Could Treat Leukemia,” May 2, 2000.

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