Steve Stauff

Grade: B+

Biochemistry in the Real World

Ethics of cloning

Most of us should know of the new scientific technology that has allowed us to clone mammals. First a sheep that was cloned in Scotland, and then a small monkey in Oregon. All this talk about cloning has forced people to think about other possibilities with this new breakthrough.

Most people have come to think about the possibility of cloning humans. Which brings us to the point. Just thinking about that is a little scary. However scientists have proclaimed that within less than a year, cloning humans will be possible. When I think about that it bothers me. It’s not an easy thing to accept. The strange thing is, usually, when there is a technological breakthrough people are interested in what the product can do and they accept the new idea and the new thinking that has come up. However with cloning, I do not think people are handling it the way they handled other things when they were first invented.

All these new computer developments are accepted by people because they help us do our work more efficiently or they make tasks easier for us to do. But I do not sense this same thing with this issue. I do not think people are accepting it as well as they have accepted past developments.

The reason for this is that the issue here is different for us. It deals with something new, something that you read about in books and see in movies.

When people saw Jurassic Park and the idea of cloning dinosaurs from DNA found in mosquitoes, I do not think that many were thinking about the possibility of cloning humans just a few years later. I personally did not think it would come at least for another 10 years. Many scientists are skeptical about the issue though and they do not seem to believe that these human clones could happen. These scientists have also considered the health factors of cloning humans.

Cloning humans could lead to the birth of abnormal children. One of the problems with cloning people is that when scientists are cloning a human, they are picking up all the different things that that person has been subject to. The person’s cells would have been exposed to chemicals and bacteria and environmental radiation. All of these things could affect the clone and affect the process. Another problem would be that it would be very unpredictable as for how the clone would come out. We would not know about the mutations that it could have gone through and even then, I am sure there would be a hundred other things that would make us think twice.

One scientist said that trying to clone an adult person would be playing genetic Russian roulette. I agree with this statement. What could cloning do?

History has also shown us that we humans do not handle things like this well. Anything that gives us the ability to create and associate power has not worked out well for us. Take nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons enabled us to enter the next level of warfare. But what else did they do? We completely destroyed two Japanese cities and they also led to the beginning of the Cold War.

They created feelings of jealousy and greed and everyone wanted to learn about them and the power that they had. Now if cloning humans became possible, then many, many more of these problems would be created.

The notion of power would be redefined and knowledge of cloning and any advances in it would spread quickly. I think that if they put some limit on cloning like if it was only used for scientific purposes, then it would not be that bad.

I can see how one can say that cloning humans is really great. It shows how far humans have come that they can clone themselves. It could also prove to be an effective tool in different ways.

I think that right now, at this state, cloning is something that we really do not need. In the past we have shown that we do not handle things like this very well and the cloning of humans could very well screw a lot of things up.

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