Cloning 10 Essay Research Paper Cloning

Cloning 10 Essay, Research Paper

Cloning: Fact Vs. Fiction

Millions of people pour into movie theatres every weekend. There are movies about sports, romance, politics, and Science Fiction. They are meant to entertain people, however many people actually leave a theatre believing what they just saw. There are movies where some evil genius devises a cloning machine, where someone just walks into and out he comes along with his clone. This might have made the movie enjoyable, but have put the idea of cloning in a bad light. There are many reasons why the public fears cloning, however, most fears are unsupported. People are afraid of cloning just as they are afraid of anything new in their lives. When artificial insemination was first introduced to the masses, it was frowned upon. That fear not only inhabited the citizens of the United States, but also congressional representatives. That fear led to an immediate ban of all research and practice of cloning. Cloning ought not be banned, merely regulated.

The instantaneous cloning might be entirely crucial to the plotline of a movie, but this cannot actually happen. Cloning is actually a long process. In order to clone a baby, an unfertilized, enucleated egg cell is needed. Enucleated simply means that no genetic material remains inside the egg cell. In addition, some genetic material is needed; usually this is taken from any cell by extracting the nucleus. After injecting the egg cell with the genetic material, an electric shock is applied. After the cell goes through several divisions, it is placed inside a woman. Afterwards the cloning process is carried out like any other pregnancy. The immediate cloning is just one of the many misconceptions that people in society believe.

Many people argue that cloning is an insult to human dignity. Usually people who make this argument are unable to explain why cloning offends human dignity. The argument is supposed to be self-evident. The argument is based on “genetic essentialism”, or “genetic determinism” a belief that one’s unique humanness is entirely a product of one’s DNA. The argument is reductionist and itself an affront to human dignity. It is somewhat ironic that the UNESCO Declaration on the Human Genome, after stating clearly that people should not be equated with their genes, goes on to say, without explanation, that cloning is an affront to human dignity (Hollinger 48). Nothing is more of an insult to human dignity than believing that one s individual ness is based on one s DNA. There are people in every field of science who assert that clones will be treated as second-rate, because they are “carbon copies”. Is this not an affront to dignity. This is a “science fiction” view. Do twins feel “second rate” because each looks like the other.

People also claim that cloning is unnatural. Nature creates clones all the time, as identical twins. This happens in about three and a half to four births per thousand births. Twins ordinarily think of themselves as individuals, not as carbon copies of someone else. Identical twins differ in many respects. They have different life expectancies, fingerprints, IQ’s (by up to 20 points), risks for schizophrenia (if one has schizophrenia, there is a 30% chance that the other will not), sexual orientations (concordance for homosexuality ranges from 0% to 100%) and chances of criminal behavior (concordance is about 50%). Identical twins differ for the many reasons. An embryo may divide at any time up to about 14 days after conception. X-chromosome inactivation (lyonization) in early female embryos randomly turns off one X-chromosome in each cell. The halves may contain different proportions of paternal and maternal X-chromosomes when an embryo “twins”. “Genetic imprinting” (the process that marks which genes are be activated) in early embryos is variable (Hollinger 59).

Even conjoined twins are different from each other. Eng and Chang Bunker, the original “Siamese twins”, had different personalities. One was a depressed alcoholic, the other a cheerful teetotaler. They married separate wives, alternated living in separate houses, and fathered 21 children. Abigail and Brittany Hensel share a common body below the neck, but feel sleepy or hungry at different times and may get different grades in school. Clones would not be as alike as twins would, because clones would have different developmental signals from the different eggs from which they develop, different mitochondria from the eggs, different prenatal environments (e.g., maternal nutrition, toxic exposure), and different postnatal environments, including family and historical period (Hollinger 59).

It is all right if nature makes clones, but if we do it, we are “playing God” (Colvin 39). Modern medicine rarely leaves matters to “Nature”. In Vitro Fertilization, they try to keep 700-gram newborns alive, and, where culture and religion permit, use donor sperm, eggs, or embryos. Why is cloning different from other reproductive technologies.

Clones will become increasingly inferior, as more copies of the same individual are produced (Wakelee-Lynch 55). This is the “photocopy machine” argument. There is no scientific evidence for it. What people fail to realize is that a clone is not necessarily a copy of someone else. It can be the synthetic combination of genetic material. Even if all of the genetic information is taken from one person, th