Human Cloning Should Not be Permitted

4280 Words9 Pages

According to Richard Seed, "cloning is inevitable. If I don't do it, someone else will. There's no way you can stop science" (qtd. in Kadrey 2001). Depending on one's personal opinion about cloning, human cloning in particular, a quote such as that will most likely either anger a reader or excite them. Human cloning is one of the hottest topics for debate in society today-the lines are very strictly drawn between those in favor of continuing cloning research and those who are staunchly opposed to it. Meanwhile, despite public opinion, science trudges on behind closed doors working to clone the first human. This paper will first provide a thorough, but brief, introduction into the topic of cloning itself, including its history and its mechanisms; then, through a series of carefully thought out points, it will illustrate why human cloning should not be allowed to continue at this point in time.

Part A.

The "origins" of cloning are vague and variant from source to source. It has been suggested that cloning began in 1952 when a team of geneticists removed a nucleus from an embryonic frog cell and placed it into an egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed. To the amazement of the scientists, a frog was hatched from the egg cell with the embryonic nucleus. The research was furthered in 1975 when embryologist John Gurdon of Britain attempted to do the same thing with an adult cell. While his research was not fruitful, it started the ball rolling for later cloning attempts. Research with embryonic cells continued into the 1980s and led to the creation of cloned cows and sheep (Reilly 2000). Finally, in 1997, scientists were able to take an older cell, that of an adult sheep, and successfully creat...

... middle of paper ...

...." CNN Online. 29 August 2000: n. pag. Online.

http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/08/29/pope.cloning/index.html 12 April 2001.

Reed, Susan. "My Sister, My Clone." Time Magazine. 19 February 2001: 51.

Reilly, Philip R. Abraham Lincoln's DNA and Other Adventures in Genetics. Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2000.

Thomas, Cathy Booth. "Copydog, Copycat." Time Magazine. 19 February 2001: 57.

"Vatican leads chorus objecting to human cloning." CNN Online. 18 April 2000: n. pag. Online.

http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/08/18/vatican.cloning/index.html 12 April 2001.

Whitehouse, David, Ph.D. "Cloning humans: Can it really be done?" BBC News. 9 March 2001: n. pag.

Online. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1211000/1211136.stm 12 April 2001.

Open Document