Pros and Cons of Cloning

What are the pros and cons of cloning? Human clones are born every day: identical twins. An identical twin is the product of an egg that divided into two, and each one of those formed an embryo. They’re genetically identical. Since cloning has been done on a number of animals, it is possible to do deliberately do human cloning. Why would anyone want to do this? For a couple of reasons. These are some of the pros of cloning:

- Cloning might be useful for people who have problems with normal reproductive mechanisms. For example, a woman might not be able to make eggs but want a child related to her. She could be a donor to make a clone carried by another woman. This is just another reproductive technology, like in vitro fertilization. You may recall that in vitro fertilization was greeted with horror and now is more or less a routine procedure.

- There might be a desire to perpetuate valuable genotypes. You might have an old woman who never gets cancer. She might be carrying certain mutations and you want to study them. It might be better to study them if the person is cloned

- We could clone a unique individual, like an Einstein, to study the genes that made this person unique.

- Perpetuation of a dying child. There had been movies made of this possibility, where the child is dying and the parents want the child back.

There are several concerns about doing human cloning. These are the cons of cloning:

- The process is not a very efficient one. Dolly was one of 277 tries, all the other failed. Things have improved somewhat, but it isn’t as good as in vitro fertilization.

- In some species, clones have medical problems. Dolly the sheep died young. Scientists claimed that Dolly did not die of anything to do with cloning, but other animals have died young, there have been defects in the immune system and disease susceptibility in clones.

- There are a lot of unknowns. No scientific group is seriously proposing human cloning.

Some Other Advantages of Cloning

There have been proposals to use stem cells to regenerate organs and tissues. The problem with this process is that if I get stem cells from someone else, they’re not mine. Those cells going into my heart, for example, will be rejected by my immune system, just like any transplant organ.

This has led to the proposal of therapeutic cloning. Here’s the case: I have a damaged heart because of a heart attack. My skins are removed and grown for a few days in the laboratory, then sent to a cloning center. In the cloning laboratory, a woman has donated an egg cell. Her egg cell nucleus is removed and replaced by my skin cell nucleus. The egg is then stimulated to divide and forms an early embryo. This is actually possible to do in human medicine today.

After ten days, the embryonic stem cells of this embryo, which are genetically mine, are removed, placed in a laboratory dish, and induced to form heart cells. These heart cells are then implanted in my heart, where they repair it.

So, these are some of the pros and cons of cloning. I particularly I’m pro therapeutic cloning, although, new methods are been developed that are more efficient than cloning, specifically in genetic engineering. I would talk about them in another post.