The Ethics And Safety Of Cloning Animals

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The idea of cloning animals, people, or even objects has been around for over a hundred years. Cloning is the process of making a perfect duplicate of an animal, and this was artificially accomplished for the first time in the year 1902 by a man named Hans Spemann. The science of cloning has only grown from that first successful experiment. Although cloning can be seen as having many benefits, it also comes with many dangers. After many successful cloning experiments on increasingly complex animals, scientists have begun thinking about human cloning. This has raised many debates about the ethics and safety of experimentally cloning humans. While some advantages could be gained from human cloning, it should not be performed due to significant medical, societal, and religious concerns.
The most successful cloning results were produced using a procedure known as Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, or SCNT. SCNT cloning processes are performed by removing the nucleus with genetic material from an unfertilized egg, then replacing it with genetic material from the adult cell being cloned. However, despite the advances that have been made in the science of cloning, there are still major medical risks that should not be taken simply for research. “The chance of abnormal offspring is high,” says Roger Pedersen, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco (Kestenbaum). “Genomic imprinting abnormalities and disorders of imprinted genes result in syndromes or symptoms in which there is abnormal tissue or organ growth,” (Warrington). Cloning has a high probability of a mutation or disease occurring in the clone. Some of these conditions brought on by cloning include Parkinson’s disease and protein sequence errors. Cloned humans are s...

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...o try and replace a person’s kidney, but the new kidney had a disease from the cloning process, the new kidney could end up killing the person. By attempting to save the person’s life, they would only create new problems.
It is because of these medical, societal, and religious concerns that human cloning should not be performed. Medically, we are not sufficiently advanced enough to safely perform cloning on humans. Societally, our government is unsure of what to do about the situation, and the people are unsure about cloning’s effectiveness. Finally, on the religious side of cloning, Christians, Catholics, and other religions are against the use of cloning for the fear that people will become too prideful in their ability to essentially design life. Until something is done to rectify these issues, human cloning will continue to be unethical and should remain unused.

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