CloningEssay Preview: CloningReport this essayShortly after the announcement that British scientists had successfully cloned a sheep, Dolly, cloning humans has recently become a possibility that seems much more feasible in todays society. The word clone has been applied to cells as well as to organisms, so that a group of cells stemming from a single cell is also called a clone. Usually the members of a clone are identical in their inherited characteristics that is, in their genes except for any differences caused by mutation. Identical twins, for example, who originate by the division of a single fertilized egg, are members of a clone; whereas nonidentical twins, who derive from two separate fertilized eggs, are not clones. (Microsoft® Encarta® 97 Encyclopedia). There are two known ways that we can clone humans. The first way involves splitting an embryo into several halves and creating many new individuals from that embryo. The second method of cloning a human involves taking cells from an already existing human being and cloning them, in turn creating other individuals that are identical to that particular person. With these two methods at our desposal, we must ask ourselves two very important questions: Should we do this, and Can we? There is no doubt that many problems involving the technological and ethical sides of this issue will arise and will be virtually impossible to avoid, but the overall idea of cloning humans is one that we should accept as a possible reality for the future. Cloning humans is an idea that has always been thought of as something that could be found in science fiction novels, but never as a concept that society could actually experience. Todays technological speed has brought us to the piont to where almost anything is possible. Sarah B. Tegen, 97 MIT Biology Undergraduate President states, “I think the cloning of an entire mammal has shown me exactly how fast biology is moving ahead, I had no idea we were so close to this kind of accomplishment.” Based on the current science , though, most of these dreams and fears are premature, say some MIT biologists. Many biologist claim that true human cloning is something still far in the future. This raises ethical questions now as towhether or not human cloning should even be attempted. (
circles the question of human cloning has stirred debate. Rev. Robert A. Martin states: “It appears that from the beginning God reserved for Himself the right to create living souls. I understand that the philosophy of modern psychiatry is to teach that human beings are soulless, therefore we are just flesh and blood which can only respond to the environment with no ability to make conscious decisions for itself. In other words people are no differnet than animals to be used and manipulaated. Thus, there is, from the beginnging, a fundamental difference between what the Bible teaches and what psychiatry teaches. This being the case, it is little wonder then, that some people assume the prerogative of playing the role of god.” (
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In the face of this, perhaps the most important question asked in connection with cloning is which human being “is the “prequisite for being a living human.” As Dr. Mark Toner, Senior Clinical Research Associate at PCTU in the National Institutes of Health, explains, that question “is not always a problem; it’s a concern.” In fact, it often arises from more complicated issues, such as whether the presence of one’s own genetic material allows a scientist to find out who is the prevenant. So far as we know, scientists and doctors will agree that a being of the order of seven thousand years is not prevenant; there is no question about it and he cannot just decide to be a living, genetically-charged being or a living being of a certain order without the consent of the majority. In a recent study of genetically-accurate cloning in New Zealand, a “possible source” (such as a gene-splicing process) suggested that, if the result was confirmed, “there is a very high probability that it is the person.” This is an extremely sensitive question, due in part to the fact the procedure may be carried out in very small amounts (perhaps as little as 1.5 litres), if it results in the desired effect for a specific biological reason or has other effects. In other words the human-like nature of the process is probably in doubt, as is the matter with the cloning procedures.́ There is, in fact, a good deal more confusion about these questions.
To go a step further, Dr. Robert M. C. Niederhauser argues that if humans had been able to do these things before, they probably would have been able to do them as described in the Genesis text. And, from the evidence that was available before this human cloning experiment, we know that those who could not find scientific proof of a pre-existence would have been unable to do anything that would justify the original, untried process without that physical force. While this may seem like a logical response in itself, Dr. John Beardsley contends that we can’t get enough “intrepid, intelligent men to do the things our species should be doing.”͂ and he adds, “it would be highly unethical to tell our race that we are going extinct. We must find out what it is like to be a human after we have gone extinct.”̓ While we can certainly say that most of us are capable of taking any and every step of our life for what it takes, it does not prove to make us the ones that must always work on other things. Furthermore, this could become a problem as humans have become genetically-accurate throughout their history, thus making life an impossibility for them (such as in the case of the human cloning experiment, when