Human Cloning

– How Close Are We. Essay, Research Paper

A debate is currently raging throughout the world, from the halls of the United States Congress and the President’s Oval Office to the United Nations and the World Health Organization. The issue: the cloning of human beings.

Ever since researchers in Scotland cloned an adult sheep named Dolly over a year ago, the issue of applying this technology to reproducing human duplicates has been paramount in scientific and social circles. The debate is not merely confined to scientists; everyone from world leaders to the neighborhood barber are engaging in the debate. So where are we now.

As of March 1998, almost all major government and world institutions have frowned upon and have even tried to legislate bans on the cloning of human beings. Most major religious sects have also publicly condemned any attempt to clone humans as an ethical and moral violation and the general public, while somewhat split in opinion polls, also tends to favor banning human cloning. A Chicago physicist, Dr. Richard Seed, has been the target of many political attacks for his publicized plan to clone a human within the United States in two years. The debate furiously rages on.

IS HUMAN CLONING POSSIBLE.

A good place to start would be analyzing the practicality and possibility of physically cloning a human being rather than hypothetically. The first area to look at is how far the technology has progressed as of March 1998 and recent advancements in this exciting scientific field.

In January 1998, the Washington Post reported that for the first time scientists (in Texas) had cloned genetically engineered calves. This marked a major advancement in the science of

genetic cloning because the calves were not merely cloned, but were actually “genetically engineered in advance so that all of their cells contain(ed) an extra gene” (Washington Post, January 21, 1998). The gene scientists Dr. James Robl and Dr. Steven Stice incorporated into the clones did not produce a noticeable physiological effect, but rather was used as a .marker’ for the scientists to track its presence.

The scientists produced four calves (one of whom died within a week of birth) with a much more effective technique than the one used to clone Dolly. “Dolly was the result of 277 (cloning) attempts; each of the four calves were the result of about 50 tries” (Post, 1998). Not only is cloning proving to be more successful, it is also becoming more useful. The hope of the scientists is that their research and experiments will lead to the genetic production of herds of cows that will “produce medicine in their milk” (Post, 1998.) The goal of this research team is to specifically make large quantities of “human serum albumin . . . used to treat hospital burn patients whose treatment requires an increase in blood volume” (Post, 1998).

Although progressive, these calves are not the first farm animals to be cloned with a marker gene. In December, “Dr. Ian Wilmut and his colleagues . . . cloned two sheep carrying extra copies of a gene called Factor IX” (Post, 1998). The real achievement in Texas is that these are the first cloned calves and that cows produce milk in much larger quantities in sheep. Factor IX gene “allows the sheep to make a blood-clotting factor needed by some hemophiliacs” (Post, 1998). The two challenges to these new methods are the “unknown expense of extracting these

medicines from livestock milk and the challenge of satisfying regulators such as the Food and Drug Administration” (Post, 1998). However, the rapid success in this field is astonishing.

Another recent find is that researchers can produce embryos using “cow eggs as hosts”

(Dallas Morning News, January 19, 1998). But as of March 1998 there have still been no successful pregnancies reported by using this technique. The hope, however, is that cow eggs could be the “universal recipients for cloning valuable farm animal and endangered species” (Morning News, 1998). The entire discovery came about by “accident,” according to Dr. Neal First who led the biological research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The team wanted to attempt to replicate the cloning of Dolly but it was the “wrong season to get sheep eggs” (Morning News, 1998). After another worker suggested cow eggs, the experiments began and the researchers found some intriguing results. As already stated, no successful pregnancies have resulted from the use of cow eggs as host thus far, but the technique involves removing the nuclei of the egg and introducing skin from the animal desired to be cloned into the egg.

Dr. First believes that the introduced genes dictate the development of the embryo, which have so far grow “according to the schedule” of every introduced gene’s host species. But according to Dr. Piedrahita from Texas A&M University, this new technique of using cow eggs as a universal host “dos not . . . simplify human cloning at all” (Morning News, 1998). Dr. First emphatically stated that no experiments on cloning humans or human genes “had been or will be conducted” (Morning News, 1998). This is good for Dr. First, because one of the agencies that funds his work, The National Institutes of Health, has come out and publicly stated that “any experiments that would use a human nucleus and a cow egg to start and an embryo would not

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