The medical benefits and ethical controversies of human cloning technology, and whether cloned humans should be allowed under appropriate sanctions

I cover the advances and controversies in cloning technology since the birth of Dolly the cloned sheep, and raise the medical benefits and ethical issues of human cloning. I argue that human cloning should be allowed under appropriate sanctions.

 

On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep was born, the first living creature to be created through a technique called somatic cell cloning without the fertilization of a sperm and egg. The technique used here is called nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus of a somatic cell is placed into an egg from which the nucleus has been removed, creating an individual that is genetically identical to the existing organism. Previously, cloning had only been able to separate embryos to create twins, but now it is a huge scientific and technological advance to create a single, mature, identical individual. Since the birth of Dolly the sheep, many other species have been successfully cloned, including rats, pigs, and dogs, and there is a growing concern and expectation that cloning technology could be applied to humans, which has sparked debate for and against. I believe that human cloning should be allowed under the right sanctions. In this article, I will explain why I think cloning should be permitted, rebut the human dignity arguments against it, and explain what I think the criteria for permitting cloning should be.
I think cloning should be allowed because it can bring great medical and biological benefits to humanity. By modifying the genes of genetically identical individuals and comparing them to controls, we can advance the science of genetics. Advances in genetics can lead to advances in genetic engineering, as genetic engineering is all about engineering genetics. For example, the use of RNAi technology to treat genetic diseases, in which specific RNAs attach to mRNAs and interfere with the synthesis of proteins, shows how advances in genetics can have a major impact on genetic engineering.
Cloning can also be used to save human lives. Organ transplantation is a technique to restore the function of a failing human organ through transplantation, but there is a major obstacle: immune rejection. Biologically, when an organ comes in from outside the body, the human immune system can recognize whether it’s from its own body or not, and if it’s not, it will attack it. If we could create genetically identical organs, immune rejection would not occur and the patient’s quality of life would be much higher. Currently, there is a severe shortage of organs for transplantation, and human cloning will allow us to create cloned organs to provide customized transplants without immune rejection.
It could also have enormous benefits for drug development. In the United States, new drugs are approved after drug development, animal testing, and clinical trials. Animal testing is not completely reliable, with 92% of animals failing to pass clinical trials due to the vast differences between human and animal species. The downside of clinical trials is that they can have significant side effects on the subjects, or the drug may not work in humans as well as it did in animals. However, cloned human experiments eliminate these problems because they are performed on humans. They can provide more accurate data and reduce the time it takes to develop drugs that don’t work. As such, cloning is vital to the advancement of human medicine and biology and should be allowed.
The main reason given by the opposition is Kant’s Humanity Formula. According to Kant, “We must never treat human beings, whether our own or others, as means to an end, but always as ends in themselves.” Kant believed that human beings are dignified and irreplaceable because they are the ones who give value to things. Opponents argue that human cloning should not be allowed because cloned human life is treated as a mere means to an end. While the arguments for cloning include advances in biology and medicine and the benefit of humanity, they seem convincing, the criteria are actually very vague. Let’s refine Kant’s definition of “means” to include treatment and research. One might think that the cloned humans created for treatment and research are created for the purpose of experimentation and are treated as tools. But let’s bring in John Harris’s argument in Genetic Revolution and Bioethics, where he points out the ambiguity of the word “only”. In his example, the recipient of a blood transfusion uses the blood only as a means to an end. For this and many other medical and biological questions, Kant’s principle does not provide a clear answer. Kant’s principle of dignity is open to interpretation, and it cannot be used to argue that cloning technology should not be used. Kant’s principle of human dignity alone cannot determine whether cloning is right or wrong.
Instead, I will present Singer’s criterion of hedonic capacity as a criterion for cloning. According to Singer, if an entity has the capacity to feel pain and pleasure, or hedonic capacity, then its existence is worthy of equal consideration. Singer included animals in his moral considerations, arguing that they should be respected based on their ability to feel pain, not their intellect. However, he argued that there are differences between humans and animals that give rise to different rights. Suffering is one of the reasons why we are opposed to animal testing, as well as cloned human testing. Therefore, I think that if we set a standard for suffering, we can also clarify the standard for cloning. Borrowing from Singer’s idea, we can add a condition to any experiments or research that the subjects must not have the ability to feel pleasure. According to Singer, non-human beings are not worthy of equal consideration. This would alleviate the public’s discomfort with the suffering of test subjects.
The ethical question of cloning humans for experimentation or research has always been an issue. This is because cloned humans suffer because they are human, and there is a backlash against the idea of them being used as mere test subjects rather than human beings. However, according to Singer, cloned humans without the ability to feel pain do not have the same moral status as humans. Nor do they have the same moral status as animals that feel pain. To give a concrete analogy, on one side is a human being who has no hedonic sensitivity and therefore feels neither pain nor pleasure, and on the other side is a normal lab rat that feels all pain. Would it be more unethical to perform experiments on this human than on a lab rat?
The question of whether humans without the ability to feel pain can actually exist is answered by a 10-year-old child in Pakistan. He was born with a mutation in the gene that encodes the nociceptors that make us feel pain. To summarize, we don’t have the technology to do this yet, but it is possible to create enough humans like this child who are genetically modified to not feel pain because of a specific mutation.
One might ask, can a human being who has been in an accident and cannot feel pain be used as an experimental subject? However, they are in a different position than cloned humans created for experiments. This is the question of consent. In medicine, the consent of the person or their guardian is very important. For example, according to Article 4, Section 22 of the Organ Transplantation Act, organs from brain dead people can only be donated with the consent of the family, and minors under the age of 16 can only be harvested with parental consent. If a person is unable to feel pain due to an accident, their consent is not finalized unless they sign a consent form for experiments during their lifetime. However, in the case of cloned humans, the very fact that the embryos were created for the purpose of experimentation is tacit permission from the embryo provider.
In conclusion, I believe that human cloning should be allowed under appropriate sanctions, which should be the elimination of sentience in the case of experimental or research cloning and the retention of sentience in the case of procreation. Advances in human genetic engineering through cloning would have enormous benefits, including curing genetic diseases, accelerating drug discovery, and creating immunorejection-free human clones. Consider that a human being with the ability to feel pleasure removed is no less ethically wrong than a laboratory animal that feels all pain. We should not be fooled by the word “human” in human cloning, and consider that technological advances made under appropriate sanctions can be of great benefit to humanity.