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Ethical Concerns of Human Cloning
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Human cloning becomes more and more controversial now that the scientists are technologically ready to undertake this revolutionary step in human reproduction. There are many proponents of human cloning who find justifying arguments. They argue that cloning would alleviate trauma and grief for people who lost someone close in an accident because a “replacement” could be created. Further, infertile couples could use cloning techniques to have children. Next, human cloning would terminate genetic faults in people. Additionally, people who want an image of them to live on forever could preserve their life in clones of themselves. Human cloning in general would contribute to research and experiments on human body and scientific limits. Cloning could also become a new source of economic activity. The arguments to the contrary include equally strong ideas. First, cloning humans is ethically questionable because it may have unpredictable social and psychological consequences. Second, a cloned individual would be genetically identical to the cloned individual, but she/he would not be the same as the cloned individual to replace her/him. Moreover, cloning is illegal in the US. The opponents of human cloning insist that no scientist should do everything she/he CAN do. There are certain ethical boundaries for scientists to abide by. They should not do things to harm other people in any way especially that scientists’ knowledge and abilities could be dangerous to human race. A situation who-CAN-do-what could create an unhealthy competition among the scientists, who would care more about their personal benefit and fame than about the benefit of humanity. In the light of controversy on human cloning, past and current findings in this field elicit many ethical questions for future research. The idea of human cloning takes its beginnings from animal cloning. The procedure of cloning is wildly understood as extracting a nucleus from one cell and implanting it into another cell, for example, egg cell. This process would create offspring identical to the donor of the nucleus because DNA genetic encoding is wired into the nucleus of a cell. The procedure is so universal that it can be applied to any cells regardless of their complexity. Thus, although cloning was originally utilized for cloning simple organisms, now, it can be applied to duplicating human cells as well. The cloning history started in the middle of twentieth century with cloning fairly uncomplicated creatures like frogs; and from there it spread to other species, including human cells. The cloning takes its roots in 1950s, when the first formal frog clones were created by Doctors Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia (Stalzer). The next successfully cloned frogs came to being in England in 1970s (Evans). At that time, the scientific achievement sparked some ethical concern, but cloning frogs was so much simpler than cloning mammals that nobody believed then that cloning mammals would ever be possible. Although the trial studies on cloning frogs expanded greatly to the other species and more complex organisms, scientists still believe that the technique used to create the frogs could be adapted to grow more complicated organisms and human organs such as hearts, kidneys, and liver. The research continued, and in 1996, a great achievement was accomplished; the first successful mammal clone, Dolly the sheep, came into being. The achievement was considered the most significant thus far.
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