I can’t understand what the government has to do with banning cloning. They don’t ban other things that should be banned, or have laws regulating medical things that should be regulated. For instance there isn’t any law that says doctors should administer enough pain killer to kill pain instead of worrying about addiction, or even about killing the patient if necessary to stop the suffering, especially in terminally ill victims.
The law and the government and the bigshots in charge of everything don’t concern themselves with anything that is important in medicine, such as the overcharging that everybody knows and even admits goes on routinely in hospitals, the tangle of confusion of our whole medical insurance system, the fact that doctors have their favorite money-making operations and lead patients into them when it isn’t necessary, and on and on and on. Instead everybody is so concerned about cloning, oh dear what if a millionaire clones himself, wouldn’t that be awful or keeps a liver cloned off him in the closet in case he needs it
I think I’ll worry about cloning after they do something about something that matters.
I think they should ban HUMAN cloning for now. There is no real need to clone humans right now without more reserch. Chimps have a 97% similarity to human DNA, lets clone chimps. See what happens to them. Let the scientific community test the possible genetic problems that could occur, any biohazard that may develop, see if it improves the quality of life or degrades it, study any possible avenues of medical relief like stem research, cloned organ farming, cloned blood production and auto-immune support thru cloned innoculations, gene specific clone replacement thru viral carriers. Why rush into this very significant scientific breakthru just to be first?
don willard, is there a limit to how many clones of myself you can tolerate?
Have you ever heard of the Irish potato famine?
Geez… why NOT ban cloning?! I don’t understand why anyone is in such an all-fire hurry to eliminate sexual reproduction. Besides creating more genetic diversity by recombining alleles in new ways, keeping us from all becoming genetically heterogeneous and as a result extremely susceptible to being wiped out by any tiny change in our environment, it sure is a lot of fun 
“Not banning cloning” does not equal “eliminating sexual reproduction”. “Not banning cloning” equals “not putting people in prison who choose to make clones”. As you point out, sexual reproduction is a lot more fun than cloning, and as long as human beings continue to fall in love with each other, I suspect the appeal of “let’s make a baby together” will, in the vast majority of cases, outweigh the appeal of cloning.
Personally, I would support a legal moratorium on cloning human beings until and unless the technique can be proven safe for the offspring of such an experiment, which, given the observed and potential problems reported in other experiments in mammalian cloning, I think is still a ways off.
I have to go MEBuckner here- cloning of mammals in general is new, and there is possible health problems that could crop up in a cloned human. I say once we get do it successfully most of the time in chimps and other primates, then we should do the cloning of humans.
Dolly was born only after 276 failed attempts at a sheep-clone, and since then most scientists will tell you zero progress has been made in making the process more reliable. With that in mind, just imagine how many dead, mutated, or deformed embryos it took to get the recently announced human-clone. When you consider that aspect of cloning, it really falls into the same category as stem-cell extraction and abortion. The ethical issues raised by this necessary part of cloning are immense.
Also, it is believed that when an animal is cloned, it is “born” at the same age as its parent. Cellular “age” is believed to be governed by ever-shortening strands of DNA in a cell called telomeres (I think). In natural reproduction, telomeres are replicated over and over and restored to their full length; in cloning, however, this process does not take place, meaning that the clone will age much faster and die sooner, raising even more ethical dilemnas.
I think until cloning is made more reliable it should be banned, at least in humans.
The acid-test will always be human experimentation. Drugs may be tested on animals, researched for years, but eventually, we just have to give them to a test group of humans and see what happens. Given the recalls over the years of different drugs, even this method isn’t fullproof. Animals react very differently, in some cases, to a drug than a human would. Their phisiology is just too different to be completely sure of what the results of any experiment will be.
Chimps may be 97% similar to humans, but that 3% is huge. . We could figure out how to successfully clone chimps, and clone them for years before trying it on a human, and find that the human experiment is a dismal failure, due to that difference. Or vice versa.
Honestly, the only way we’ll ever know if human cloning will be successful is just to do it and see what happens. If Baby Eve grows up to be a healthy taxpayer, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. If not, perhaps we will be able to figure out what went wrong. While a lot of people say it’s wrong to experiment on humans, we do it every day with drug testing. Sometimes we find out that ten years after using the drug, horrible things happen. But we never know until we test it on a human.
I’m hesitant to call for banning any new medical technology simply for reasons of morality, because over the years, morailty fluctuates. Many years ago, birth control research was immoral, and politicians struggled to outlaw and suppress it.
Perhaps cloning may teach us something that may save thousands of lives. But if we ban outright technologies because they offend our current moral standards, we won’t be able to explore the possibly life-saving potentials until our moral outrage cools over time, and research is once again permitted.
Well, what I’m really saying is we should treat cloning the same as we treat any other medical technology. We don’t allow researchers to just try it out on people right off the bat. We make them work the bugs out on non-human animals first. (Of course the ethics of animal testing is a whole other thread or twelve in and of itself, but never mind that for now.) Then, as you note, we eventually have to take the plunge and test the drug or the surgery or whatever it is on humans. Granted that a lot–the majority, in fact, as far as I can tell–of the public and political calls for a ban on cloning seem to be of the “There are some things Man was not meant to know!” variety, I don’t think we should swing so far the other way that we let cloning get to the human experimentation stage with less scrutiny than we would some new pain reliever or baldness cure. (Of course politically speaking there’s zero chance of that happening, and in fact I think we will soon see an absolute ban on cloning, done in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons.)
I agree with MEBuckner. I’m not saying that cloning in and of itself is wrong, or that it should be banned entirely; just that we need to work at least MOST of the kinks out first, and go into the human aspect of it with something at least a little better than a .36% success rate (on a less complicated organism at that).
i saw the head of Clonaid on CNN a few days ago. She claims the problems in animals is due to inexperience with the IVF process in animals. The cloning works just fine.
She reports that 50% of her experimenst ended in miscarriage but the others (apparently, Eve is just the first born, more are on their way) seem perfectly healthy.
Yeah, right. I’ll believe it when i see it.
Excuse me? Have we forgotten the FDA? Every drug is banned in this country until it is approved by the FDA. I believe there are similar regulations on many other technological medical devices (ex. CAT scanners, IVs, breast implants, cochlea implants, etc.). It would be uncharacteristic and stupid for the government to not take an interest in the technology of cloning. You can disagree with them, but not on precedent.
I agree. I don’t have any moral problem with it but there should be some standards on who can perform it as well as some standard for why it should be performed. It should certainly have all the restrictions of adoption, abortion, and in vitro fertilization that apply.
I wasn’t aware that the problem was with animal in vitro fertilization, and not the cloning process itself. Thanks for pointing that out, Menocchio.
Still, there are other problems to be considered. Doesn’t the idea of a private industry freely experimenting with human clones scare anybody else? Without some sort of government regulation, there’s no way of knowing what companies like Clonaid are doing with or to clones. In addition, I would think that a 50% success rate would still violate the Nuremberg Code, which bans experiments on humans that might result in death or disabling injury.
To clone or not to clone.
This decision should not be guided by politics. Much like abortion, those that want it say “it should be an individual choice” and those who oppose say “the hell with choice, you should do as I believe”.
I personally feel the worst possible way to deal with this issue is to assign it to the politicians.
The best government is the least government
Putting all the moral issues aside, isn’t it obvious that cloning is wrong simply because the world is overpopulated as it is?
Why create people that don’t even have to be there?
(Yes, I know some would say that clones would have as much a right to life as anyone else, but you have to admit it: overpopulation is a crucial issue!)
That’s just what the head of “Clonaid” claims. It isn’t necessarily true. In fact, IVF has a long history of use in livestock breeding, and has been used in humans for over 20 years now, so the statement by the Raelian cultist appears to be fairly ridiculous on its face.
The number of people created by cloning is guaranteed to be miniscule compared to the number of people created by sex for the forseeable future. By this logic, we should tightly regulate sexual reproduction, not cloning.
Well, it would be nice if every couple limited the number of children they have to replacement numbers (two). Of course, they can have more than that if they adopt, since those children have already been born.
As for clones:
Yes, the number would probably be small since cloning is/would be expensive, but who knows–what if there are knew methods that make it cheap? Mass DNA replication, for example, used to be difficult until Mueller came up with the polymerase chain reaction. Now it’s very easy to copy DNA, so who knows what will happen in the future?
And either way why create even a small number of clones. I’m for stem-cell research but against human clones.
By the way, human clones would, of course, only be identical physiologiclly. They would have different experiences and thus, (at least somewhat, depending on how large an effect you think genetics has on personality) different mindsets.
FWIW take a look at this article about a previous cloning attempt by the illustrious Raelians … Anyone have access to the original NY Post article?