We Must Educate Ourselves Before Passing Laws Restricting Cloning and Genetic Engineering

Biotechnology and genetic engineering involve the cloning of animal cells and organisms, but they also involve the alteration of an organism in an effort to make it more perfect, whether it is a crop, an animal, or even a human being. Obviously the cloning of humans or the cloning of human cells is much different than the cloning of genetically superior livestock or a better quality, higher yielding food crop, and people throughout the world realize this. The cloning of human beings has become one of the worst fears in our society today and for that reason many laws have been passed throughout European countries and North America in an effort to ban human cloning. For most people, it becomes more of an issue of ethics and moral values more than anything else. Just as it is morally wrong to kill another person, to most people it is also morally wrong to create an exact replica of another person unless it is naturally occurring, as identical twins are. This is not to say that cloning is in fact morally wrong. In fact, some forms of human cloning could in fact help people who need an organ transplant in order to live. Of course, this again raises the question, “Are we playing God?”. That is a question each person must decide for him or herself, and no one knows exactly what is right and what is wrong. The governments of virtually every country in the world believe they know what the right answer to that question is and in the subsequent paragraphs, the history of cloning and the legislation that these countries have passed during the last few years or even months to regulate it will be addressed.

Some of the first cloning experiments were attempted by two developmental biologists in 1952, Robert Briggs and Thomas …

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…ou will find that it is not such a terrible thing and is instead a way to ensure humankind’s continued prosperity on this planet.

Works Cited

1) Washington, D.C. : Report and Recommendations of the U.S. National Bioethics Advisory Commission pg. 104. “Cloning Human Beings.” June, 1997

2) McCuen, Gary E.. Cloning: science

Human Cloning Should Not be Permitted

According to Richard Seed, “cloning is inevitable. If I don’t do it, someone else will. There’s no way you can stop science” (qtd. in Kadrey 2001). Depending on one’s personal opinion about cloning, human cloning in particular, a quote such as that will most likely either anger a reader or excite them. Human cloning is one of the hottest topics for debate in society today-the lines are very strictly drawn between those in favor of continuing cloning research and those who are staunchly opposed to it. Meanwhile, despite public opinion, science trudges on behind closed doors working to clone the first human. This paper will first provide a thorough, but brief, introduction into the topic of cloning itself, including its history and its mechanisms; then, through a series of carefully thought out points, it will illustrate why human cloning should not be allowed to continue at this point in time.

Part A.

The “origins” of cloning are vague and variant from source to source. It has been suggested that cloning began in 1952 when a team of geneticists removed a nucleus from an embryonic frog cell and placed it into an egg cell from which the nucleus had been removed. To the amazement of the scientists, a frog was hatched from the egg cell with the embryonic nucleus. The research was furthered in 1975 when embryologist John Gurdon of Britain attempted to do the same thing with an adult cell. While his research was not fruitful, it started the ball rolling for later cloning attempts. Research with embryonic cells continued into the 1980s and led to the creation of cloned cows and sheep (Reilly 2000). Finally, in 1997, scientists were able to take an older cell, that of an adult sheep, and successfully creat…

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….” CNN Online. 29 August 2000: n. pag. Online.

http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/08/29/pope.cloning/index.html 12 April 2001.

Reed, Susan. “My Sister, My Clone.” Time Magazine. 19 February 2001: 51.

Reilly, Philip R. Abraham Lincoln’s DNA and Other Adventures in Genetics. Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2000.

Thomas, Cathy Booth. “Copydog, Copycat.” Time Magazine. 19 February 2001: 57.

“Vatican leads chorus objecting to human cloning.” CNN Online. 18 April 2000: n. pag. Online.

http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/08/18/vatican.cloning/index.html 12 April 2001.

Whitehouse, David, Ph.D. “Cloning humans: Can it really be done?” BBC News. 9 March 2001: n. pag.

Online. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1211000/1211136.stm 12 April 2001.