Human Cloning

Introduction

The cloning of human beings has been an issue that many people believe strongly in. The cloning of animals such as cows and sheep have already been successful, and many people think that the cloning of human beings is just the next step. The government should instead implement rules and regulations to regulate and police cloning research and development. Cloning is not a horrible science experiment, but a monumental scientific development (Williamson, Pp. 97).

Background

Cloning, from the Greek klon meaning a cutting such as is used to propagate plants, is essentially a form of asexual reproduction. The initial stages were first successfully achieved in rabbits. In essence the technique consists of destroying the nucleus of the egg and replacing it with the nucleus from a body cell of the same species -either a male or a female. This provides the egg with a full complement of CHROMOSOMES and it starts to divide and grow just as it would if it had retained its nucleus and been fertilised with a spermatozoon. The vital difference is that the embryo resulting from this cloning process owes nothing genetically to the female egg. It is identical in every respect with the animal from which the introduced nucleus was obtained (Willadsen, Pp. 65).

In 1997 the first mammal to be cloned from the tissue of an adult animal was born. A technique that scientists have been trying to perfect for decades, the success of the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, in producing 'Dolly', a cloned sheep, has profound implications. Already some scientists are talking of cloning humans, although this has great medical, legal and ethical consequences. The key to the scientists' success in producing Dolly was the ability to coordinate the fusion of a donor cell (from an adult) containing all its DNA with a recipient egg from which DNA had been removed.

Discussion

Cloning occurs naturally in humans in the form of monozygotic, or identical, twins. Monozygotic twins are derived from a single fertilized egg and hence share their basic genetic makeup. But they are of course not identical as the English term seems to imply. The idea of human cloning in the sense of creating or copying a person has surfaced in myth, religious discourse, and popular culture for a long time. In a context of the general techno-scientific optimism in the 1960s and 1970s, human cloning as a potentially beneficial option was put forward by scientists such as Nobel laureates Joshua Lederberg and James D. Watson (Kawase and Yanagimachi, Pp. 57).

At the end of the 20th century, the birth of Dolly shifted the possibility of cloning humans from science fiction to science practice. A distinction was introduced with regard to what happens after the application of nuclear replacement technology to human cells. The creation of a cloned human embryo for use (and eventual destruction) in research is now distinguished from the reproduction of a human being.

Therapeutic cloning is also referred to more critically as research cloning to indicate that the therapeutic prospects lie far in the ...