The year was 1997. Ever since this year, marking the birth of Dolly, the first successfully cloned sheep, man has been in a debacle on whether or not to clone a human being (Evans 1). Imagine walking into class one day, only to find the entire room filled with people who strikingly resemble each other in every genetic way, from the strands of hair on their head to the sole prints of their feet. Telling all of them apart would take forever, not to mention the amount of confusion that would occur in the process of doing so. For the next few paragraphs, this paper will elaborate upon key points of the scientific, ethical and religious issues of cloning. Each one of these issues is relevant i ...view middle of the document...
The term "nt" here, refers to nuclear transferableembryos. This being the case, the scientific community should really weigh out all the risks and factors involved before ultimately deciding on whether or not the outcome of cloned human embryos will match the mice or cattle in post-implantation growth (399). Though the science involved in cloning is relative theory for anyone in the field, implementing them on humans is not as easy as cloning the bovine or any other species. The results could be catastrophic.According to an article in the scientifically well-known magazine Nature, a statement expands upon the fact that in the near future, the United States Senate will vote on a bill to ban the research on therapeutic cloning. The term, "Therapeutic Cloning," can be described as the extraction of embryonic stem cells from a created cloned human embryo. There are also several unpublished scientific claims of the fusion of human and animal genetic material in the process of creating these cloned embryos. Though supporters of this scientific atrocity claim that the nation could reap benefits economically, scientific communities on the whole are disgusted by the fact and are not willing to risk playing God (Beyond The Cloning Debate P1-3).From an ethical point of view, an exceedingly high percentage of people have been "disillusioned" to agree that the pursuit of medical advances through therapeutic cloning can help millions who suffer from diseases and injuries. The real problem at hand though is the fact that scientists don't try and manipulate human genetic material for their own personal gain instead (Moran 1). The chances and possibilities of creating a perfectly cloned embryo toArthur 3extract enough genetic code to find and determine cures for various diseases, does definitely sound a little far fetched and also to most in the scientific community, is highly improbable toachieve. Azim Surani, in a web article that talks about "Nuclear Transfer into Human Oocyte," critiques that a famed fellow researcher's publication overestimates the rate of success in which an embryo is formed, and Surani states that based on the overall results of his other contemporaries experimentations and his own experiments, that the 'success rate' is indeed very low. He also goes on to say that even most of the successful creations have abnormalities (Reproductive BioMedicine Online P1).The current methods of reproductive human cloning have also raised other various ethical issues and concerns (Sanchez-Sweatman 30). These can be categorized into 3 distinctive parts: physical harms, psychological harms and societal concerns. In regards to the first part, the potential harm to the development of a cloned specimen is virtually unknown. For example, it cannot be foreseen whether the specimen would have premature aging or be more vulnerable to disease since the clone has been created from cells donated by an older individual. Scientists still continue to have a differe...
