Human cloning: scientific marvel or ethical disaster?

As the evolution of modern biotechnology makes the unthinkable possible, the debate over human cloning is heating up. This article explores what human cloning is, what it could be, and weighs the arguments for and against.

 

“If it can be done, should it be done?” In the rapidly developing and evolving world of biotechnology, things that were unimaginable a decade ago are now possible. Gene cloning is one such example. Dolly, a cloned sheep born in 1997, caused a lot of controversy. As the first perfectly cloned animal, Dolly raised many expectations and concerns, and sparked a debate about whether cloning could go beyond animals to humans. Human cloning is a sensitive topic because it deals with human life, and it raises many issues. Personally, I am against human cloning. Considering the risks of experimentation and ethical issues, I think it would do more harm than good. In this essay, I’ll first look at what human cloning is and what the possibilities are, and then I’ll examine the arguments for and against it, comparing and contrasting the points made by both proponents and opponents.
First, we need to define what human cloning is. A common scenario in movies and novels is the creation of a physically and mentally identical human being through human cloning, which is not possible with today’s technology. Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical human being. When a person is cloned, the cloned creature does not have the thoughts or memories of the original human being. Technically, human cloning is the cloning of human genes. The press and media have often presented horrifying scenarios, such as cloning the dead to bring the dead back to life, mass cloning people to use them as slaves, and commoditizing human beings, which has given the public the misconception that it is possible to create cloned humans. Basically, human cloning technology involves extracting the nucleus of a body cell from Person A, removing the existing nucleus from an egg, inserting the nucleus of Person A’s body cell, and growing it into a cloned embryo.
One of the main arguments in favor of human cloning is that it can help people with terminal illnesses and infertile couples. For example, if a couple with a recessive gene for a fatal disease has a child through natural means, the child may be born with the disease. But with cloning, they can have a child with only one parent’s genes. Another example is that human cloning allows infertile couples to have children. Even an absolutely infertile couple with anzoospermia and azoospermia can have a child with the same genes as them through an asexual reproduction method called somatic cell nuclear transfer.
Most of the arguments against human cloning are based on the fact that it is unethical. The first is that human cloning is still technically limited, and innocent lives could be sacrificed on the road to success. There have been no official cases of human cloning yet, so we don’t have any real statistics, but the low success rate of animal cloning makes it even less likely that human cloning will be successful. In the case of Dolly, a cloned sheep, there were 276 failures before she was successfully cloned, including stillbirths and the birth of deformed lambs. Given that sheep have four times the fertility of humans, it would take nearly 1000 fertilizations to create a single human clone. Fertilized eggs are created and implantation occurs, but not all of them implant, so only about 100 are successful. Most of them are miscarriages, and it is estimated that even one cloned baby born will suffer from many side effects, including defects in the heart wall, spinal defects, hydrocephalus, partial lung agenesis, and immune deficiencies, leading to death. With so many sacrifices, it’s hard to see why we would ever want to clone a human being.
Even if successful, there are limits to how long a clone can live. Genetic senescence can cause a cloned creature to die prematurely. In fact, Dolly, a cloned sheep, lived for six years before dying. The average life expectancy of a sheep is 12 years, but the sheep that provided her genes was 6 years old, so the genes she inherited were already aging. This happens because of DNA structures called telomeres that specify the number of times a cell divides. When genes are duplicated, telomeres are also duplicated, so even in newborn organisms, the lifespan of genes is already shortened. In addition to this, Dolly showed signs of arthritis and progressive lung disease, conditions that are usually seen in aging sheep. “What scientists have realized since Dolly is that cloning is an imperfect process,” Time reported.
Second, cloned humans could disrupt the social order. Normally, humans inherit their genes from their parents and become part of a family as their children. However, this concept does not apply to cloned humans. From a biological point of view, a clone is just an identical twin born later in time than the original human. From a social perspective, it’s more complicated. Since they are genetically modeled after the original human, should they call their original human parents or siblings? This fundamental identity issue would be confusing and would have a disruptive effect on the family, which is the basic unit of society. The social order would be disrupted. Ultimately, any technology that would disrupt social order should be banned.
The overwhelming opposition in the debate for and against human cloning comes from religious groups, especially Christian groups. Unlike the opposing arguments mentioned above, Christians are opposed for religious reasons. Conservative branches of Christianity argue that many recent advances in biotechnology, but human cloning in particular, should never be realized, and the reason is simple. Human cloning is a challenge to God, the creator of life, and destroys the created order. The created order is that of a man and a woman loving each other, conceiving a child through sexual union, raising that child in a family with parental love, and thus maintaining their identity, the social institution of the family, and the human species. Human cloning, on the other hand, results in a child being born without sexual union and having multiple parents other than a mother and father, thus disrupting the traditional family system. While human cloning disrupts God’s created order, some argue that genetic manipulation itself is not a challenge to God. However, the commodification and instrumentalization of human beings, which is one of the things that can happen through human cloning, is a sufficient violation of God’s law.
As history has shown, scientific and technological developments do not always move in the direction that humans intend. Science is a double-edged sword. Human cloning is a Pandora’s box of possibilities. On the one hand, it could allow infertile couples to have children and prevent babies with disabilities from being born, but on the other hand, it could also turn human beings into commodified, dehumanized objects. Therefore, when we deal with human cloning, we must have ethical and moral wisdom so that we do not harm humanity. As I stated earlier, I am against human cloning. Even if human cloning is not technically feasible today, we should always be vigilant because there are many places where research on human cloning technology is not banned. The opposition must be strong so that innocent lives are not sacrificed for research.