10/20 Rough Draft 30%

Cloning describes the process that can be used to produce genetically identical copies of a living body. The copied thing, has the same genetic makeup as the original and is referred to as a clone. When considering to clone something there is a lot of ethical reasons that prevent people from justifying it’s alright to clone it. Human cloning is the most talked about when considering if its ethical. Clones can occur naturally in some specimens such as plants and single celled organisms. There has never been a human clone that occurred naturally, twins which seem to be close to being clone are actually just as far from a clone as we are. A clone is someone who is identical to their parent or person they were created from. There are three types of cloning, the frist called gene cloning which produces copies of genes of segments of DNA. Reproductive cloning produces an exact copy of the whole animal and Therapeutic cloning produces embryonic stem cells which are used to create tissues. When people think of cloning they only consider reproductive cloning, they don’t think about the other two types of cloning which can benefit the human race very significantly. The possibility to create parts of the human body such as a heart or liver could help people who need transplants greatly. Gene cloning could be used to create a new superior human race, one capable of high feats are less prone to dieses and injuries. These are just some of the possibilities from cloning.

A UK national health panel found way to swap chromosomes between eggs so offspring don’t inherit disease causing mutations from their mothers mitochondria. This is just the first step to making humans less perceptible to many common birth defects. By adding in a the genes of a third person who doesn’t have a history of the target birth defect and removing the parents gene that does, you can reduce the risk that the child is born with the targeted defect. Some of the dieses that can be prevented are type 2 diabetes, deafness, blindness, and neurological problems. This process of swapping chromosomes is currently being tested on people after being successful in attempts on other animals. But there’s an ethical quandary here, it involves the destruction of the donor egg after it’s been fertilized. Also some people see the egg donor as a third parent which is not completely true. The child may be receiving new mitochondria from a third person but the mitochondria don’t affect the genes of the child which are tested when determining who the parents are. Mitochondria are similar to a battery in some technological device and your genes are the information on the device. When you change the battery, you are not effecting the information store on the device. This is also true for when swapping the mitochondria in humans. This procedure of swapping mitochondria can make it possible from women with high amounts mitochondrial dieses to have a healthy baby.