The genetic engineering of animals has been done the whole last century, however applying it to humans is a controversial debate - how beneficial would cloning really be to humanity?
The general idea of clones may bring to mind an image of two symmetrical organisms. Nevertheless the identical features would only consist in the corresponding nuclear genes. On the fifth of July of 1997 Cloning had its turning point. The announcement by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and his colleagues revolutionized medical-and-scientific history. At the Roslin Institute in Midlothian in Scotland the team succeeded in giving birth to a cloned sheep named Dolly. The process for this achievement is called “somatic cell nuclear transfer” (SCNT). This type of cloning is called reproductive cloning. It is used to generate an organism that has the same DNA as another organism. The medical procedure starts with the enucleation of a donor egg. A Cell of the organism that is supposed to be cloned is collected and placed in the donor egg. The fusion is made by chemicals or electric current in order to stimulate it, so it can develop itself into an embryo. After reaching a specific stage it is transferred to the uterus of a female host where it can develop through birth. For the creation of Dolly it took 277 embryos, for achieving the embryogenesis (development phase of embryo). While scientists have succeeded in cloning a sheep, many think it is just a matter of time before trying to clone humans. Therefore many celebrities have started copyrighting their cells afraid someone could create a being identical to them. But does this truly mean humans could start to copy any person in the world? What would the consequences of genetic manipulation be?
Human Clon...
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...on D. Levine
“The ethics of human cloning”
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Picture a world where every baby is born healthy and everyone could live longer and healthier lives. Genetic engineering and cloning would let this almost perfect world to happen. Humans around the world could be free from deadly diseases and dying young. Genetic engineering according to Merriam- Webster, is applied techniques of genetics and biotechnology used to cut up and join together genetic material and especially DNA from one or more species of organism and to introduce the result into an organism in order to change one or more of its characteristics. A clone is defined as a person or thing that appears to be an exact copy of another person or thing. Cloning and genetic engineering will not only help humans, but it will
In the movie Gattaca the main character Anton was discriminated against because of his gene makeup. Anton never even had a chance in the society in Gattaca because the potential employees of companies were not tested on their skills or knowledge but on their physical and mental possibilities. The same society also used derogatory terms for people like Anton. Just because his parents decided that he would come into the world naturally instead of through gene therapy or alteration. Terms like “faith birth'; and “invalid'; were used against Anton. I think gene therapy has it promises, but when used in the fashion as it was used in the Gattaca I think its progress should be carefully monitored. Right now sheep and other animals are being cloned. Soon primates and Humans could be cloned. I think we should further investigate human cloning for research on the parenting process and other physiological experiments that can only be used now on identical twins separated at birth. These experiments when used could be used to gain insight on what our genes determine in our personalities. I also think that the achievement of us humans cloning ourselves would be a great achievement for the entire human race such as it was when we landed on the moon in 1969.
Human cloning is the process by which genetic material from one person would be artificially transferred into a human or animal egg cell, thereby beginning the life of a new human individual who has only one parent and who is genetically identical to that parent. The once impossible idea of cloning became a reality in 1997 when Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced that a cloned sheep named Dolly was born. Dolly was created by removing the nucleus from a sheep egg cell and replacing it in the nucleus of a cell taken from the udder of another sheep. This said might sound good, but there are other pieces of information that need to be known about this process. ...
Long after Shelley wrote her classic masterpiece Frankenstein and Huxley wrote Brave New World, the ethical controversy of cloning conflicts with modern artificial intelligence research. The question that challenges the idea of negative or positive behavior in a replicated machine relies on its similarity to the source of the clone, whether it emulates human behavior or acts as a “superintelligence” with supernatural characteristics void of human error. Humanity will not know the absolute answers concerning behavioral outcome without creating a physical being, an idea portrayed in Shelley’s Frankenstein in which the creation of a monster emulates from his creator’s attempts to generate life. At the time of the novel’s publication, the idea of replicating a soul portrayed a nightmarish theme with little consideration for the potential scientific advancements to facilitate in reality. It lead the genetic idea of manmade intelligence and its ethics emerging from the relativity of space, time, and original life on the planet. The debate of the existing possibility of sentient machines continues to progress, but the consideration of ethical questions such as “Should we create these artificial people?” and “How does this enactment define the soul and mind?” warranted from primitive questions about machine learning within the last century. After the initial proof of possibility for sentient machines, the perfection of cloning will generate “good” behavior at its perfect state several generations from now. The perfect machine portrays the potential for sensible human behaviors including compassion, mentality, empathy, alertness, and love. Humanity of the twenty-first century possesses the knowledge to fantasize the idea of artificial ...
Have you ever imagined what life would be like if we could eliminate human problems? This is the question that arises when the issue of human cloning or human cloning of the organs is brought up. Cloning is the process where organisms, cells, or microorganisms are copied to produce an almost identical genotype. In other words, the cloning process involves taking a cell from the tissue of a live animal or human, inserting all or some of the genes from that cell into an embryo, which is then placed in the womb of a living creature. There, this embryo is hoped to reproduce into a child, and be born as a clone of the living being from which the cell is taken. Cloning is also called "somatic cell nuclear transfer," it is the transfer of a nucleus of a somatic cell to an egg that has had its nucleus removed. Cloning is beneficial to humanity, and it can help solve organ limitations, cure diseases, and take a giant step toward immortality (Anderson, 60).
Cloning is a recent innovative technique the National Institute of Health defines as a process employed to produce genetically identical copies of a biological entity. Depending on the purpose for the clone, human health or even human life can be improved or designed respectively. “Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is the most common cloning technique. SCNT involves putting the nucleus of a body cell into an egg from which the nucleus has been removed."^1 From this technique, an embryonic cell is activated to produce an animal that is genetically identical to the donor. Today, human cloning still remains as a vision, but because of the success of Dolly, the lamb, researchers are becoming more confident in the ability to produce a genuine
In the past, cloning always seemed like a faraway scientific fantasy that could never really happen, but sometimes reality catches up to human ingenuity and people discover that a fictional science is all too real. Such was the fate of cloning when Dolly, a cloned sheep, came into existence during 1997, as Beth Baker explains (Baker 45). In addition to opening the eyes of millions of people, the breakthrough raised many questions about the morality of cloning humans. The greatest moral question is, when considering the pros against the cons, if human cloning is an ethical practice. There are two different types of cloning and both entail completely different processes and both are completely justifiable at the end of the day.
A compelling issue that has come into focus in the past several years is the idea of human cloning. Many scientists believe that it is inevitable because the technology is there, and anything that can be done eventually will be done. They preach the value of human clones, dropping phrases like 'cure for disease' and 'prolonged life' to entice the public into supporting their cause. Though these concepts seem beguiling, the notion of human cloning, when looked at as a whole, has serious repercussions and should not be entertained lightly. From a strictly scientific point of view, we are just not ready to attempt the cloning of a human being.
In the essay, Cloning Reality: Brave New World by Wesley J. Smith, a skewed view of the effects of cloning is presented. Wesley feels that cloning will end the perception of human life as sacred and ruin the great diversity that exists today. He feels that cloning may in fact, end human society as we know it, and create a horrible place where humans are simply a resource. I disagree with Wesley because I think that the positive effects of controlled human cloning can greatly improve the quality of life for humans today, and that these benefits far outweigh the potential drawbacks that could occur if cloning was misused.
Cloning humans has recently become a possibility. It is achieved by the production of a group of identical cells or organisms that all derive from a single individual (Grolier 220). It is not known when cloning humans really became a possibility, but it is known that there are two possible ways that we can clone humans. The first way involves splitting an embryo into several halves and creating many new individuals from that embryo. The second method of cloning a human involves taking cells from an already existing human being and cloning them, in turn creating other individuals that are identical to that particular person. With these two methods almost at our fingertips, we must ask ourselves two very important questions: Can we do this, and should we? There is no doubt that many problems involving the technological and ethical sides of this issue will arise and will be virtually impossible to avoid, but the overall idea of cloning humans is one that we should accept as a possible reality for the future. Cloning humans is an idea that has always been thought of as something that could be found in science fiction novels, but never as a concept that society could actually experience. "It is much in the news. The public has been bombarded with newspaper articles, magazine stories, books, television shows, and movies as well as cartoons¡¨, writes Robert McKinnell, the author of Cloning: A Biologist Reports (24). Much of this information in these sources leads the public in the wrong direction and makes them wonder how easy it would be for everyone around them to be cloned. Bizarre ideas about cloning lie in many science fiction books and scare the public with their unbelievable possibilities. David Rorvik wrote a highly controversial book entitled In His Image. In it he describes the story of a wealthy man who decides to clone himself. He is successful in doing this and causes quite an uprise in his community. This book was written in the late seventies and even then, societies reaction to the issues of human cloning was generally a negative one. We face a problem today even greater than the one in this book and it involves the duplication of human beings in a society that has always been known for its diversity. The main issue as to whether or not human cloning is possible through the splitting of embryos began in 1993 when experimentation was done at George W...
1) Robertson, John A. “Human Cloning and the Challenge of Regulation,” The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 339, no. 2 (July 9, 1998), pp. 119-122.
Recent discoveries involving cloning have sparked ideas of cloning an entire human body (ProQuest Staff). Cloning is “the production of an organism with genetic material identical to that of another organism” (Seidel). Therapeutic cloning is used to repair the body when something isn’t working right, and it involves the production of new cells from a somatic cell (Aldridge). Reproductive cloning involves letting a created embryo develop without interference (Aldridge). Stem cells, if isolated, will continue to divide infinitely (Belval 6). Thoughts of cloning date back to the beginning of the twentieth century (ProQuest Staff). In 1938, a man decided that something more complex than a salamander should be cloned (ProQuest Staff). A sheep named Dolly was cloned from an udder cell in 1997, and this proved that human cloning may be possible (Aldridge). In 1998, two separate organizations decl...
The Benefits of Human Cloning In recent years, many new breakthroughs in the areas of science and technology have been discovered. A lot of these discoveries have been beneficial to the scientific community and to the people of the world. One of the newest breakthroughs is the ability to clone. Ever since Ian Wilmut and his co-workers completed the successful cloning of an adult sheep named Dolly, there has been an ongoing debate on whether it is right or wrong to continue the research of cloning (Burley).
What are the principle, ethical issues and experimental procedures used in genetic engineering and cloning? Should Cloning be allowed to continue?
Genetic Engineering may or may not be beneficial. In terms of being an advantage, it can help decrease the death rate by destroying disease and has the potential to increase the lifetime of humans. Based on what scientists have discovered , genetic engineering is used as a beneficial technique to slow down the aging process of people, meaning it helps to store more life existence. Cloning is one of its biggest successful advantages which developed a whole new discovery in today’s life making life more interesting and easier. This cloning process has made it pos...