Isn’t it part of science to learn new things. Why ban it?
Well, some consider human life of all forms to be sacred. To create a clone is akin to mocking the “natural process” or something.
Beyond that, cloning leads to clone wars, which leads to Sith Lords becoming Emperor, which leads to Death Stars, etc. etc.
Or, if you don’t get into clone wars, it leads to genetic engineering, so the next thing you know you’ve got Khan Noonian Sing running around taking over the world.
Didn’t anybody learn anything from Jurassic Park I, II, or III, aside from the fact that Stupid White People can be Really Stupid White People if they try really hard?
Oh, and Tea Leoni can come rescue me off a desert island any time, but that’s a whole different thread, I think…
Anyway. We’ve got a whole huge library full of speculative fiction concerning the awful things that can happen if scientists are allowed to research unchecked. In the real world, there have been relatively few apocalyptically bad inventions. Whatever the newest thing is, it gets to pick up that label. Cloning, fluoride in the water, nuclear power, flight, gunpowder, sailing around the world, fire, pointed sticks (you’ll put your eye out!).
Don’t we have enough people on this planet as it is? 
I have to admit there’s a hint of irony in that people who oppose cloning are likely to think of sex as something that’s “dirty”. (Wouldn’t cloning be a “cleaner” way to procreate? snicker)
In theory, I personally think creating a human clone would be no more wrong than any more than artifical insemination (which some people probably oppose, too). In practice, I imagine there are some sticky situations that could arise, especially if human being could be, at some time in the future, “grown” outside the womb, but I don’t think the questions raised would be insurmountable.
IMHO, people are scared of new and different things, so they say it violates “the natural order” without really thinking about what the natural order really is. (We should go back to hunter/gatherer days, right? That’s natural.)
if TV/movies/books have shown us anything:
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Clones are evil
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Cloning has no benefit for man other than creating dinosaurs, giant vegetables and animals, super-soldiers or Hitlers brain.
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Any clone mentioned in 2) will run amok because of 1).
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People would create clones of themselves so they wouldn’t have to go to work, thus disrupting the economy.
Serious answers:
There are actually some legitimate reasons for placing controls on cloning:
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What are the ethical implications of creating a clone for the purpose of harvesting spare parts? Keep in mind that a clone is essentially the same as an identical twin. Unlike in scifi, a completely grown xerox copy of the original is not created.
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There is nothing wrong with genetic engineering in and of itself. The problem is that if only the wealthy can genetically engineer smarter/stronger/better looking children then you will see an even greater inequity between classes.
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Many cloned animals show long-term health problems and other defects. Because of that, it’s too dangerous to try to clone a human.
to keep me going an extra 1000 years or so. Just keep downloading (or is it uploading?) my mind into new bodies, man.
Lazarus Long Rules!
stoid
[hijack] Yeah but he was able to live so long because of good genes, a result of some rather…old fashioned genetic engineering technology.
[/hijack]
Only partly, Weird Al. Don’t you remember that he got uploaded into a new body at least a dozen times, and once he was really pissed off about it.
stoid
Only a thousand years? You’re so short-sighted.
Anyhoo, is it really necessary to clone yourself in order to download your mind? Theoretically, it should be possible to do that to ANY body.
What’s wrong with it? They’re terrible evil people who love to torture small children and many adults. Everyone knows they’re all killers deep down inside, just waiting for people to let their guards down so they can attack. No one is always happy like they pretend to be. They’re cruel, yet smile eerily even when they’re trying to kill you. And that face paint, there’s something wrong with those painted on faces.
Oh, ** clones.** Oops. Clones are wrong because they limit the gene pool, and it’s playing [insert diety of choice] when we probably shouldn’t.
No. It would be absolutely immoral for you to download your memories into a clone’s brain, unless the clone could give informed consent to such a procedure. Even if a clone agreed to such a procedure, I imagine that it would be very difficult to find a doctor/psychiatrist/whatever who would perform the procedure, since almost all would consider such a procedure unethical.
A clone is not a copy of you, it is a human being. You couldn’t kidnap a baby and download your memories into the baby, could you? No, that would be a violation of the baby’s human rights. For the same reason, you couldn’t download your memories into your clone.
All these ethical dilemnas about cloning become easy to resolve as long as one realizes that cloning creates a human baby, and that baby should not have a different ethical status than any other human baby.
So, you cannot harvest spare parts from a clone, any more than you can harvest spare parts from any other child. Clones would be able to donate organs to their clone relations under the same guidelines as conventional relatives do today.
But, at present cloning is a difficult and unsafe practice and should not be attempted on humans until it is perfected. After that, why not? Clones are just human babies.
Oh, and cloning doesn’t limit the gene pool any more than not having a conventional child would. Many people chose not to have children, thus limiting the gene pool. That isn’t immoral, and so having a cloned baby would not be immoral for that reason.
Didn’t you see The Sixth Day?
Hey, if it’s good enough for Emperor Palpatine, it’s good enough for me.
You people are completely missing the danger of cloning technology, which is this:
Bill Gates would have access to it.
I calculate that at a hypothetical $5000 a pop bulk rate, he could afford to create over a million copies of himself. That’s the populations of Vermont and Wyoming combined.
And my god, I don’t even want to know what Michael Jackson would do with the technology.
“Real or artificial, a person is a person!”
Masamune Shirow – Apple seed
The Catholic Church, specially, makes points about the sanctity of life, but I think the real reason they oppose cloning is because they do not want to deal with the can of worms that a cloned person will wring:
That even tough he/she could have faith, the church will say that it is not welcome or saved because it has no soul. I think this dogma, just like the one about the sun revolving around the earth, will crash down, with unpleasant results to church rulers. So, better stop this now before it gets bigger.
Another thing that is implied, but missing from the discussion, is that fundamentalists virtually scream that conception is the beginning of a new life, cloning challenges this cherished belief so it is therefore “evil”.
Well, a clone would still have to have some sort of “starting point” that can be identified as “conception”.
I think the real fear is that, if cloning becomes available en masse, it will soon become THE method of reproduction… and then, logically, rampant sex and “erotic play” will ensue.
Orgy-porgy, orgy-porgy! 
:eek:
Seriously, though, cloning’s going to happen. Wired magazine did a piece on it about a year ago, and they said that in all likelihood, a human has already been cloned! This could be through accident (apparently fertility clinics have all the necessary equipment to clone a person and all it’d take is a slight goof for a clone to be created) or by design. Of course, no one who might actually have done the cloning was talking.
Also according to this article, we’re pretty close to developing clone “blanks” like they had in The Sixth Day, so you could have a fully mature clone ready for you at a moment’s notice.
As a smoker, I’m hoping that the technology for cloning organs comes online pretty quickly, so that when I start hacking my lungs out, I can trade 'em in on a new pair!
As a male, I’m hoping that cloning and mind transfer become legal, so that when I’m 80, I can have myself stuck in an 19 year olds body and boink young girls!
Finally, I’d like to add that I believe the folks who cloned “Dolly” announced that they’d figured out what caused most of the problems with cloning (as far as defectives go) and now know ways to prevent them from occuring.
I don’t know where you got this piece of informatioin from but it is not the dogma of the Catholic Church. The view of the Church that a cloned human would indeed be human and have a human soul. A cloned human being would be no different genetically than an identical twin.
The key point raised by the Church is that the new individual human life would not be the Providential union of egg and sperm with a unique genetic structure. This person would have been denied their own unique genetic makeup. Cloning also dismisses the procreative meaning of the “marital act”.
Would there be different classes of clones? Those for spare parts and those that would be permitted a full human life. As these clones all have the human soul they should not be considered anything than less than fully human. Would society treat them as less than human and violate their fundamental human dignity?
First, the Catholic church would NOT consider a clone to be soul-less. A clone is no more soul-less than any other person.
Second, it is absolutely NOT true that we are close to creating “blank clones”, whatever that means. For this to be even concievable, you’d have to replicate uterine conditions exactly. If we could grow clones in vitro we could grow any sort of baby that way. This is not even on the horizon.
Third, even if it is possible that some in vitro fertillization techniques might possibly create clones this is not a big issue, since the same process happens natually every day. In fact, it happened to my sisters. There was a little egg floating around down the fallopian tubes and somehow it split in two and two clones were created. My sisters don’t mind. Cloning an embryo would of course be much easier than cloning an adult, in fact we could do this right now. All you have to do is split the embryo when it is in the very early stages. Not a problem.
Fourth, even if you could gestate babies in vitro you still couldn’t grow them as adults. How would you even start? How could you bypass the natural growth cycle? I suppose you could pump the baby full of growth hormones, but that would almost certainly produce a deformed baby, not an adult.
Fifth, even if you could do that, we have no idea how memories are stored, much less how to induce or record such memories. So even if you could grow a clone in a vat you still couldn’t implant your memories into it.
Sixth, even if when we eventually understand memory well enough and develop technology for implanting memories directly, it would still be immoral to brainwash a baby and implant your memories into the baby.
Say it with me: A CLONE IS A HUMAN BEING. You cannot brainwash other people, regardless of whether they share your genetic material or not. You cannot brainwash them, you cannot enslave them, you cannot cut them open and take their organs because they are human beings just like all the other human beings.
Grr
Banning cloning is not so bad of a thing. I sure don’t want copies of me in every aspect but my personality running around, but to each their own.
But they want to ban Stem Cell research and end cloning cells for organ growth too. Somehow they find THAT immoral as well. Damn them. I wanted a lab grown heart someday, mabey some new eyes when these things get old and dingy. Which at the rate they are going bad, I estimate 10 years. Ick.
(I tried to find a Web Site for the article that was free. KC star wanted to charge me 2.95 to view it, but no luck, Just check Wednesdays [July 25th] KC star paper for the Cite…It’s a small article, I nearly missed it.)
I was wrong, it wasn’t a year ago that Wired had the article on cloning! It was only a couple of months ago! Anyway go here for the whole article on cloning. I haven’t been able to find the section which talks about “clone blanks,” but I’m pressed for time (sleep calls). Anyways, a “clone blank” wouldn’t be what people would think of as a full-grown human being. Its simply a mass of “protoplasm” (for lack of a better term) without any genetic material. When you wanted a clone of an organ or whatever, you’d simply “fire” the DNA into the “blank” and at some point (the article doesn’t define when) you’d have a fully developed organ or being.
For those of you who are opposed to cloning, I recommend the article as you’ll find it creepy how close we are. A search on Wired’s site will bring up lots of articles on cloning. I have a feeling that the folks who work there want to be cloned as much as I do or more so.