Human Lives for Human Life

Human Lives for Human Life

I fail to understand how there can possibly be arguments in support of human cloning. It took Scottish scientists two hundred seventy- seven attempts to successfully clone Dolly, the first identical genetic twin produced from the mixing of genes from an older sheep's utter and "the reproductive machinery of a sheep's egg" (Sanchez-Sweatman, 13). Human genetics are more complex than animal genetics and considering the amount of attempts it took to produce Dolly, how many human abnormalities and miscarried feutuses will be necessary to successfully clone a human? This only leaves doubt about the safety and physical harms of human cloning, and not to mention the violation of two characteristics that helped our founding fathers define our nation, individuality and uniqueness.

At the current time it is understood that cloning humans is unsafe because attempting so will result in miscarriages and abnormalities of the genetic twin for an unknown number of attempts until success is reached. Dolly was the only surviving embryo of two hundred seventy seven and the rest died or were thrown away. That is a very high failure rate to produce one healthy embryo. Now, because human DNA is more complicated than animal DNA, imagine the number of embryos, the start of human life, that will be thrown away, miscarried, or die all for the sake of producing one healthy embryo.

Credited with the most notable achievement towards cloning humans, Woo Suk Hwang's lab from Seoul National University reported the transfer of several human donor cells into two hundred forty two eggs with the nuclei removed. "The batch produced 30 blastocysts (an early stage of embryonic development), of which only one yielded a self-renewing stem-cell line" (Delude, 1). Hwang is quoted saying, "We had to start from the bottom and open every door" (Delude, 1). With the results of his labs experiments and his statement, this just proves the lack of knowledge to clone humans is far too great and the required fields to gain the proper knowledge are inhumane and unsafe.

An argument posed in support of cloning humans is that since parents are permitted to carry a known abnormal fetus until birth then cloning should be permitted because the fetus will be healthy and that is better than an abnormal fetus. First of all, the reality of the predicted failure rate of human cloning should be enough evidence to stop any further advancement in the area of human cloning.