To Clone or Not to Clone

To Clone or Not to Clone

Research Paper

Have you ever wished you could have a clone of yourself to do homework while you hit the skate park or went out with your friends?

Imagine if you could really do that.

Where would you start?

In our research paper we try to understand and explain the evolutionary

inevitability of cloning.

Contents

History

Although the possibility of cloning humans has been the subject of speculation for much of the twentieth century, scientists and policy makers began to take the prospect seriously in the 1960s.

Nobel Prize winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg advocated for cloning and genetic engineering in a seminal article in The American Naturalist in 1966 and again, the following year, in The Washington Post.^[1] He sparked a debate with conservative bioethicist Leon Kass, who wrote at the time that "the programmed reproduction of man will, in fact, dehumanize him." Another Nobel Laureate, James D. Watson, publicized the potential and the perils of cloning in his Atlantic Monthly essay, "Moving Toward the Clonal Man", in 1971.

The technology of cloning mammals, although far from reliable, has reached the point where many scientists are knowledgeable, the literature is readily available, and the implementation of the technology is not very expensive compared to many other scientific processes. For that reason Lewis D. Eigen has argued that human cloning attempts will be made in the next few years and may well have been already begun.

"By waiting until the first clone is among us or about to be born, we complicate the problem immensely and guarantee that we will not be able to have the national and international conversation and debate to arrive at particularly good decisions like using protection."

Theory

Identification

There are three primary cloning processes, each with a different objective.

1. DNA cloning happens when the genetic material from a donor cell is implanted into the nucleus of an egg cell, producing a genetic duplicate of the donor cell. The donor material is fused into the egg cell using electric current.

2. Embryo cloning involves removing cells from a fertilized egg and allowing them to grow into duplicate embryos. This is how twins, and triplets come about.

3. Therapeutic cloning, or somatic cell nuclear transfer, is similar to adult DNA cloning, except the stem cell material is removed before the embryo matures. This material is then implanted within the tissue or organ substance of the donor, and a new healthy tissue formation is grown.

Function

The cells used in cloning research are called stem cells, of which there are two types. Embryonic stem cells are capable of developing into a full grown organism if left to grow on their own. Adult stem cells grow into specific parts of an organism, like a liver, or a brain, or muscle tissue. The problem with using embryonic cells is the embryos are destroyed in the process of cloning. This has given rise to much controversy in terms of the rights of the embryo. Many believe life begins at conception, and so consider the cloning of an embryo to be equivalent to murder. As a result, federal legislation prohibits funding for embryonic stem cell research studies, however states are able to draft their own legislation, either for or against research.

Significance

In the case of accident victims, or transplant patients, obtaining the needed tissues, or organ parts in a timely manner can mean the difference between life and death. In situations like this, being able to "grow" needed tissue materials and organs in the lab would provide a timely source of treatment. In addition, diseases classified as untreatable, such as Parkinson's, Altzheimer's, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and heart disease would be treatable, using new healthy tissue transplants to replace the diseased, or malfunctioning areas. A full understanding and use of stem cells could, in fact, revolutionize the way in which medical professionals diagnose and treat illness and disease.

Considerations

Adult DNA cloning is particularly in demand in the case of couples who are infertile. This method, while providing couples with the chance to conceive, is basically a genetic duplicate of the donor's DNA cells. This scenario brings up issues that ask whether or not a donor would be classified as the parent, when in fact the offspring is a genetic twin. Also at issue is the capability to determine the gender of an embryo, which would make it possible to select which embryo lives and which one dies depending on its gender. Currently, little legislation exists to regulate the reproductive method for cloning, so clinics which specialize in infertility cases are free to cater to their patients' requests provided the patients can pay for these costly procedures.

Warning

While cloning has advanced considerably since 1997, it's not a perfected process. The possibility that a specimen will become contaminated during the cloning process is still there. When contamination happens, mutations are likely to occur. In terms of a transplanted organ, or a developing fetus, a mutation would be a catastrophic error. Opponents to cloning have their proof in the case of Dolly, the infamous cloned sheep, in that over 200 failures were required to produce a healthy result.

The Pros and Cons of Cloning

The pros and cons of cloning is a huge subject, which scientists and ethicists have not fully uncovered. One issue when discussing this matter is the different types of things cloned. People might see more benefit in cloning plants or animals than they do in cloning whole people, for instance.

Some pros of cloning plants are cited fairly often. For instance cloning could help reproduce plants that are more disease-resistant. Reproducing superior plants, especially those with nutritional superiority, could help address world hunger issues. Cloned plants also are more predictable, which could help save millions of dollars in farming costs, and plants near extinction could be saved through the right cloning programs.

Similar pros apply to the cloning of domesticated animals, like those providing food sources. Cloning could help produce superior food, create more disease resistant animals and address issues of world hunger. Rare animals might be saved from extinction, especially those animals that do not reproduce well in changing environmental circumstances.

Many people see fewer deeply conflicted pros and cons of cloning plants and animals, but there are some cons to consider. First, efforts to genetically engineer or fully clone plant and animal species could result in lack of needed DNA diversity. Diversity helps to improve survivability in the future, especially when unpredictable things come along. Scientists cannot predict potential development of viruses or other agents of destruction to which a cloned species might need to react in the future.

For example, perhaps scientists decide to clone all the rice in the world. They gradually produce only one type, much more nutritional than other kinds. Other rice is no longer produced and its DNA variants disappear. Some time in the future, a disease hits the rice crop and completely destroys it, and the world suddenly lacks rice. This is perhaps the biggest “con” to cloning, and the one most frequently cited. Cloning can underestimate the possibility of the need for genetic variation in the future, under unpredictable circumstances. Similar issues could arise for cloned domesticated animals, particularly if they fully replaced animals that created genetic variation through normal breeding methods.

Another of the cons of cloning animals is potential cost. Presently, it is far more expensive to clone than to reproduce animals by other means. Failure rate remains high, though this is likely to be reduced, in addition to cost, if cloning is undertaken on a wider scale. Cost affects another of the pros and cons of cloning food supply animals. Some people feel great reluctance to eat cloned meat, which might lower the value of animals that are cloned.

Pros and cons of cloning humans are more complex. Potential benefits of cloning certainly exist. Among these is the possibility of cloning parts of humans, like vital organs to be used in transplants, which would be likely to nullify organ rejection issues. Some people feel that cloning humans unable to have their own children or who lose children at a very young age is among the “pros” of developing human cloning.

Cons include the methods for cloning, which when they involve fertilized embryos, are considered morally repugnant by some. Others feel that the idea of cloning humans is “playing God.” Another fear exists if people decide to genetically engineer super kids. What would happen to the average person not produced by cloning methods? This is fodder for legitimate scientific, legal, and ethical debate and plenty of science fiction films.

Cost is an issue too, and it would be hard to know if a health insurance company would pay for a person to have an organ cloned, or if these prices would be so prohibitive as to make the process unaffordable or available only to a few. Again, the issue of genetic diversity is an important one. Would cloning eliminate a gene or a piece of DNA today that doesn’t seem important, but might be in a different world some time in the future?

Discussions of the pros and cons of cloning are expected to continue with many people conflicted on what is the best way to proceed. Some cloning already exists, and more is likely to as science continues to develop this technology. Once cloning technology reaches its full capacity, humans will still be left with the question of when and how to apply it.

Ethical implications

Advocates of human therapeutic cloning believe the practice could provide genetically identical cells for regenerative medicine, and tissues and organs for transplantation. Such cells, tissues and organs would neither trigger an immune response nor require the use of Immunosuppressive drugs. Both basic research and therapeutic development for serious diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes, as well as improvements in burn treatment and reconstructive and cosmetic surgery, are areas that might benefit from such new technology.

Proponents claim that human reproductive cloning would also produce benefits. Severino Antinori and Panayiotis Zavos hope to create a fertility treatment that allows parents who are both infertile to have children with at least some of their DNA in their offspring. Some scientists, including Dr. Richard Seed, suggest that human cloning might obviate the human aging process. Dr. Preston Estep has suggested the terms "replacement cloning" to describe the generation of a clone of a previously living person, and "persistence cloning" to describe the production of a cloned body for the purpose of obviating aging, although he maintains that such procedures currently should be considered science fiction^[and current cloning techniques risk producing a prematurely aged child.

In Aubrey de Grey's proposed SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), one of the considered options to repair the cell depletion related to cellular senescence is to grow replacement tissues from stem cells harvested from a cloned embryo.

Human cloning also raises implications of a socio-ethical nature, particularly concerning the role that cloning might play in changing the shape of family structure by complicating the role of parenting within a family of convoluted kinship relations. For example, a female DNA donor would be the clone's genetic twin, rather than mother, complicating the genetic and social relationships between mother and child as well as the relationships between other family members and the clone.

Current law

United Nations

On December 13, 2001, the United Nations General Assembly began elaborating an international convention against the reproductive cloning of humans. A broad coalition of States, including Spain, Italy, the Philippines, the United States, Costa Rica and the Holy See sought to extend the debate to ban all forms of human cloning, noting that, in their view, therapeutic human cloning violates human dignity. Costa Rica proposed the adoption of an international convention to ban all forms of Human Cloning. Unable to reach a consensus on a binding convention, in March 2005 a non-binding United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning calling for the ban of all forms of Human Cloning contrary to human dignity, was finally adopted.

Australia

Australia had prohibited human cloning, though as of December 2006, a bill legalising therapeutic cloning and the creation of human embryos for stem cell research passed the House of Representatives. Within certain regulatory limits, and subject to the effect of state legislation, therapeutic cloning is now legal in some parts of Australia.

European Union

The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine prohibits human cloning in one of its additional protocols, but this protocol has been ratified only by Greece, Spain and Portugal. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union explicitly prohibits reproductive human cloning. The charter is legally binding for the institutions of the European Union under the Treaty of Lisbon.

United States

In 1998, 2001, 2004 and 2007, the United States House of Representatives voted whether to ban all human cloning, both reproductive and therapeutic. Each time, divisions in the Senate over therapeutic cloning prevented either competing proposal (a ban on both forms or reproductive cloning only) from passing. On Mar 10, 2010 a bill (HR 4808) was introduced with a section banning federal funding for human cloning. Such a law, if passed, would not prevent research from occurring in private institutions (such as universities) that have both private and federal funding. There are currently no federal laws in the United States which ban cloning completely, and any such laws would raise difficult Constitutional questions similar to the issues raised by abortion. Thirteen American states (Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan and others ban reproductive cloning and three states (Arizona, Maryland, Missouri) prohibit use of public funds for such activities.

United Kingdom

On January 14, 2001 the British government passed The Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Research Purposes) Regulations 2001 to amend the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 by extending allowable reasons for embryo research to permit research around stem cells and cell nuclear replacement, thus allowing therapeutic cloning. However, on 15 November 2001, a pro-life group won a High Court legal challenge, which struck down the regulation and effectively left all forms of cloning unregulated in the UK. Their hope was that Parliament would fill this gap by passing prohibitive legislation. Parliament was quick to pass the Human Reproductive Cloning Act 2001 which explicitly prohibited reproductive cloning. The remaining gap with regard to therapeutic cloning was closed when the appeals courts reversed the previous decision of the High Court.

The first licence was granted on August 11, 2004 to researchers at the University of Newcastle to allow them to investigate treatments for diabetes, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, a major review of fertility legislation, repealed the 2001 Cloning Act by making amendments of similar effect to the 1990 Act. The 2008 Act also allows experiments on hybrid human-animal embryos.

Religious objections

The Roman Catholic Church, under the papacy of Benedict XVI, has condemned the practice of human cloning, in the magisterial instruction Dignitas Personae, stating that it represents a "grave offense to the dignity of that person as well as to the fundamental equality of all people."

Sunni Muslims can potentially subscribe to considering human cloning to be forbidden by Islam. The Islamic Fiqh Academy, in its Tenth Conference proceedings, which was convened in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the period from June 28, 1997 to July 3, 1997, issued a Fatwā stating that human cloning is haraam (prohibited by the faith). Importantly, it is not incumbent upon Muslims to subscribe to the Fatwa of any authority they do not themselves choose to accept as legally binding.

Conclusion

Future historians may view the genetic revolution as the one of the most defining events in the history of mankind. In the near future we will have acquired sufficient knowledge, understanding and power, rationally to alter our own and any other species we so choose. We should eventually be able to eliminate many – perhaps

most – forms of disease, extend life expectancy and dominate, even more than we do now, the enviroment in which we live. Are we going to use our knowledge of genetics and all of the other new marvelous technologies to make things fairer and better? Or make a mess of it? No doubt, as usual, it will be somewhere in between. It’s up to you.

Resources

1. Araujo, Robert John, “The UN Declaration on Human Cloning: a survey and assessment of the debate,” 7 The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 129 - 149 (2007).

2. http://www.buzzle.com/articles/pros-and-cons-of-cloning.html

3. http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/tech/cloning/whatiscloning/

4. http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/8435

5. http://www.all-abc.ru/articles_437.htm

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