If human cloning could be performed safely and reliably, the end result is just an identical twin. If someone wanted to clone, isn’t that a personal reproductive choice that should be respected as a human reproductive right?
So why the uproar over human cloning? Is it some sort of moral imperative trumped up by the religious right, or is there a real ethical problem with human cloning?
Twins are creepy.
But seriously, I think it’s because people see it as “playing god” still, like they did with stuff like heart transplants and other stuff that is routine now.
One of the ethical issues is organ farming. On the one hand, it would seem to be nice to have a perfect clone of yourself in case you ever needed a new heart, liver, lungs, etc with almost zero chance of rejection (after all, it’s you!), but that scenario wouldn’t be so nice for the clone.
And with the failure rates of animal cloning, going through that process producing flawed human clones that die rapidly or have deformities would be pretty awful.
I’ll have a go at some wild-ass speculation.
“Bringing back Hitler” or whatever. Obviously this probably wouldn’t “work” but the ethics of creating people just to fulfil a particular role makes most people uneasy.
Human variety. Possibly in the future humans may become less genetically diverse due to cloning. As well as being undesirable in itself, this could cause an increase in genetic abnormalities when babies are produced “normally”.
Integration. I suppose you could imagine a community of clones finding little incentive to integrate with outsiders, because they get on so well with their own kind. This is a problem for humanity already, but it could become far worse with widespread cloning.
Kind of a spin-off of 3. Extreme behaviours. Imagine you make a hundred clones of a person. Later it transpires that this person had a gene that made them enjoy watching people mutilate themselves (bear with me).
The original, template, for the clones repressed her desire because it was obvious that such a desire was extremely rare and she’d never meet people who thought the same way.
But in the cloned community, it could all kick off, and the rest of society could find it abhorrent.
And last, and definitely least to an atheist like me, religious reasons.
Most of this stuff is just “what if cloning got out of hand”, the slippery slope fallacy, but still, slippery slope arguments are very common when discussing new scientific technology.
on edit: I see FoieGrasIsEvil came up with much better answers. Oh well, I’ve added a few 
You have your answer in your first sentence. IF human cloning could be performed safely and reliably. It currently cannot produce an end result that is “just an identical twin”. It produces a telomere-truncated twin, and the process is not even too reliable at that. And it is not really clear what health effects result from the shortened telomeres.
Until there is more data on the results of animal cloning, and the process is more reliable, human cloning will continue to be banned.
Even without the religious hand-wringing that the thought of human cloning brings up.
I know you’re just speculating as to the reasons for folks’ aversions, but…
You couldn’t bring back Hitler. Even with a viable sample to clone from, and taking as a given that we’ve achieved the level of technical sophistication required to successfully clone a human being, the result would simply be a guy who’s the genetic twin of Hitler. He’d have his own personality, his environment and influences would be different than his donor’s, and because of diet, exercise (or lack thereof) fashion, and other factors, he probably wouldn’t even look much like the Hitler we know.
I don’t believe the world’s population would be clammoring to be cloned or have clones of their children, so significant increases in genetic abnormalities in the general pool of humanity is unlikely.
Do adoptees do this? Why would a clone? I don’t know what you mean by “get on so well with their own kind.” It’s not like there’s any visible attribute that would stigmatize a clone. A clone would never even know he/she were a clone unless they were told, and even then it’d probably be difficult to convince them of it.
Too many assumptions.
I agree with this point. The aversion to cloning is consistent with other illogical stances taken by the religious.
Yep
The one rational reason is that, given the present state of the art, the clone would probably suffer various health problems (e.g. premature aging); this raises obvious ethical red flags.
Other than that, it’s peasant superstition and squick.
Last I heard it’s very expensive to clone anything, it would be cheaper to raise an army the old fashioned way.
But it can’t be. And it can’t be made that way without trying. And if trying results a severely debilitated human, most people find that unethical.
Dolly the sheep died prematurely from cancer. And if there’s one thing the world doesn’t have enough of, it’s kids dying of cancer. :rolleyes:
Humans have been playing God since our ancestors first domesticated wild plants.
It’s a big world. Someday human cloning, and human genetic engineering, will happen. And those countries that ban even research along those lines will find themselves behind the power curve.
The short answer:
“Ew.”
Everything else, pretty much, is after-the-fact rationalizing.
Note that the argument about making an identical twin of yourself doesn’t make any sense, either. Any cloned human will be many years younger than the person who provided the genetic source material. Even if you cloned an infant at birth, the clone will still be a minimum of nine months younger than the source human. Until we’re able to “force grow” an adult body from DNA, “making a twin” is a nonsense argument.
What he said.
Because of the ultimate perversion and ego event. You can finally go f**k yourself. Sends shudders through the ethics and morality geeks.
What is “telomere-truncated?”
I just hope I’m sexually compatible with Antinor02.
Plus, they’d probably end up turning on you, and execute the regular, non-clone soldiers. And who do you use as the template?
If cloning were to become perfected, I would be uncomfortable with having a group of “second class” humans that had their rights restricted, as they might be with the clones created for the sole purpose of being organ farms or back up memory banks if the original model died.
If clones were granted all of the same rights a natural born human had, then I don’t have as much aversion to the process.
Apparently the cancer that kilt Dolly was not linked to her being a clone. The wiki article explains.
That was me, in a hurry, using that as shorthand to note that the current methods of cloning being used (e.g., as on Dolly the sheep) create an embryo with telomeres that are already shortened, as though the cloned embryo had gone through the aging process that naturally shortens telomeres during cell division.
So the clone created has telomeres just as short (if not a bit shorter) as the person it was cloned from. That is considerably shorter than the telomeres would be in a “normal” embryo. So there is much speculation that this would result in some kind of accelerated aging of the clone, maybe like progeria syndrome. Although, as noted in wiki above, Dolly the sheep showed no sign of this. Dunno if other clones have.
Thanks. I actually don’t even know what a telomere is, but I’ll bet I can Google that part.
It’s because people have watched too much bad science fiction and simply don’t understand what cloning is.
A clone is not a copy of a person. A clone is an identical twin of a person.
Cloning produces a human baby. Babies are not the property of anyone, so the idea of using cloning to produce laborers, organ donors, super-athletes, or super-soldiers is nonsensical, because slavery is illegal.
My sisters are clones. Just because K was born 10 minutes before T doesn’t give K the right to cut out T’s heart if K’s heart goes bad. It doesn’t give K the right to force T to work as a kitchen slave. It doesn’t give K the right to force T to enter professional sports, or the army.
As long as we remember that cloning produces a human baby, and that baby has exactly the same human rights as any other human baby, then 99% of the objections to human cloning vanish. Child abuse is illegal, and unfit parents can have their parental rights terminated under our current law.
Of course, as everyone has said, human cloning is presently unethical, because it is too dangerous, would require too many human eggs (100 or more eggs needed to produce one viable embryo) and animal clones typically have numerous health problems. It would be unethical to use a procedure that was likely to create a baby with numerous health problems.
Only if the technical hurdles are overcome, and cloned babies don’t face health risks greater than IVF babies, would human cloning be ethical.