Cloning Around: The Possibilities

Cloning Around: The Possibilities.

Today there is much controversy surrounding cloning and the possible outcomes of experiments involving cloning. Many people are afraid of what might come of cloning human tissue. What if the tissue grows to be a breathing, thinking, and conscious human? What if this human is alive? What if it could be made to be better than those of us that are born naturallyÐ'...? What if the sky were falling? What if something good came from cloning experiments, like a cure for cancer, AIDS, etc? These are common attitudes about this taboo subject. The majority of people are so afraid of the possible negative consequences that the possible positive consequences are ignored. This attitude can be crippling in the advancement of medical technology. Ian Wilmut ponders these attitudes in his essay "Dolly's False Legacy."

Wilmut first points out that the technology to successfully clone a human is still very far away. He states that "the incidence of death among fetuses and offspring produced by cloning is much higher than it is through natural reproduction--roughly 10 times as highÐ'..." (564). surely these high rates of failure will prevent a human from being cloned in the near future, or at least until it has been perfected. But what if it were perfected? This is what Wilmut approaches next. Wilmut proposes several questions about the idea of cloning and cloned individuals. One of those questions involves be the difference between a cloned child and the original of natural birth. What would this clone become in reference to individual rights? Would it be allowed to live its own life or would it be expected to live the life of its original? To attempt to answer these questions would first require an understanding of what the clone is.

A clone would be genetically identical to the original donor. Would the clone act the same as and have the same personality as the original? Most likely not, because believe that personality is developed by surroundings more than genes. Your personality is a product of nurture more than nature. But this thought does allow us to see the implications of cloning and the nature versus nurture argument. If one has two identical specimens that are alike in every way genetically one could observe their mental and emotional development in a more controlled environment. There is a comparison to this and the 1988 movie Twins, starring Danny De Vito and Arnold Schwarzenegger. De Vito and Schwarzenegger play twins who were separated at birth, though they look and act nothing alike. They discover that they are the product of genetic manipulation by a group of scientists trying to produce a perfect human. The experiment took an unexpected turn and the engineered embryo split in two, forming an embryo with all of the potentially unwanted material, or bad, and one of all of the desirable material, or good. De Vito was the result of the bad and Schwarzenegger the result of the good. One of the interesting things in the movie was that though the two brothers were completely different, they came from the same genetic material. There are some differences between the story of that movie and the concept of cloning, but the idea of two beings that are potentially the same can still be different is illustrated in both. So it is obvious that the two subjects will be different in personality, but could there be any other differences? What if the clone could be bettered in the act of production?

With cloning technology comes genetic technology. What if a clone can be altered to be resistant to a specific disease that the original has been susceptible to? We already alter plants to be resistant to disease. Soon we may even have the ability to change our own genetic structure to prevent disease, but that gets into another field. The idea that the clone is better than the original can be scary. It could develop into feelings of inferiority and no one likes to feel inferior. Such feelings can cause fear, anger, hate, and could lead to disastrous consequences. Presumably, altering the clone would threaten the original, but let's look beyond that for a moment. If one were to alter the genes of a cloned person with a disability in order eliminate the disability, then the alteration of other genes could easily escalate uncontrollably. If we eliminate the disability, then we start to standardize people. To do this means we define what is normal. We begin to lose our individuality. We determine what we want in our society. We become no different than those in the past who would kill a child born with a disfigurement.

But before we become too entrenched in the ethics of genetic engineering let's look at the ethics of cloning. The ethics of cloning is the hottest topic concerning cloning. Some would say that cloning is against God and that humankind should not try to create life. In fact,