11/1 Research Paper

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. Most people don’t understand what cloning is or means to scientists. The three types of cloning, gene, reproductive, and therapeutic each have there own benefits and draw backs. 

Scientist Lee Silver said during an interview with NOVA, “95 percent of them said they were against human cloning” referring to a survey he had given. He says people just don’t understand what it means to scientists when you clone something. They see cloning as a way to replicate a human being and it soul. People were scared that scientists had gained control over the human life. This is not how Silver sees human cloning though. To him the only thing that a clone is is an organism that has the same genetic information as another organism. He continues to say that people eat clones all the time. Bananas are all produced by cloning and so are seedless grapes. Silver explains that cloning can benefit humans by lowering the risk of birth defects the kids are born with. A UK national health panel found a way to swap chromosomes between eggs so the offspring don’t inherit disease causing mutations from their mother’s mitochondria. This process is considered a type of cloning and is just the first step to making humans less perceptible to many common birth defects. By adding in the genes of a third person who doesn’t have a history of the target birth defect and removing the parent’s 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 another 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 stored 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.

Reproductive cloning is what everyone thinks about when they hear the term cloning. While reproductive cloning is a one of the three types of cloning it’s not the only form. The other two types of cloning are called gene and therapeutic cloning. Reproductive cloning produces an exact copy of the whole animal. This type of cloning is used when you want to use only one set of genes instead of splitting two sets which is how babies are formed naturally. Another form of cloning is gene cloning which produces copies of segments of genes in DNA. This type of cloning can’t be used to clone humans and it has not been used to clone any animals as of 2016. It allows scientists to take parts of someone’s DNA and replace it with another person’s DNA to see how that segment effects the specimen’s behavior. The third type of cloning is therapeutic cloning which produces embryonic stem cells for experiments aimed at creating tissues to replace injured or diseased tissues. The possibility to create parts of the human body such as a heart or liver could help people who need transplants greatly. Cloning could be used to create a new superior human race, one capable of higher feats are less prone to dieses and injuries.

 “In 1979, researchers produced the first genetically identical mice by splitting mouse embryos in the test tube and then implanting the resulting embryos into the wombs of adult female mice.”  In 1996, researchers succeeded in cloning the first mammal from a mature adult animal. It took 276 attempts but Scottish researchers finally produced Dolly, the lamb from a cell of a 6-year-old sheep. Since then cattle, cat, deer, dog, horse, mule, ox, rabbit and rat have all been successfully cloned. There is also some belief that a human clone named Eve was created back in 1998 but the company Clonaid didn’t provide any information that could prove if she was. It was believed Clonaid also cloned 12 other people after Eve but there was still no information proving this theory. Besides the 13 theoretical human clones, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human embryo, but the experiment was shut down early due to ethical reasons. Another reason human cloning isn’t happening is because of the difficulty in successfully cloning a human. The process is much more complicated because our genetic structure is slightly different from most mammals. A protein known as the spindle protein is located close to our chromosomes in the eggs and when removing the nucleus to replace it with another the proteins are removed which causes the cell to not be able to divide.

As you can see, there are still many problems with human cloning ethically and technically. While most people continue to believe that cloning is wrong and immoral, scientists continue trying to find better ways to successfully clone humans and other mammals that may have become extinct. Human cloning has a place in our future and I don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon. It holds the solutions to many of our current problems such as cancers and organ failures. It could potentially be used to replace lost limbs of soldiers and people who were born with defects. Cloning is becoming a part of the future reproduction of humans and animals whether people want it to be or not.

Citations

"Cloning Fact Sheet." National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). NIH, May 2016. Web. 29 Oct. 2016.

By Veronique Greenwood. "Genetically Engineering Babies With Less Disease-and 3 Parents-Seems Safe - 80beats." 80beats. N.p., 21 Apr. 2011. Web. 29 Oct. 2016.

"Human CLoning." PBS. PBS, 2001. Web. 29 Oct. 2016.