Human Cloning

Human Cloning

“And the lord god formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed in to his nostrils the breath of life; and ma became a living soul. The lord god then took one of his ribs and closed up his flesh instead thereof: and with the rib from which the lord god had taken from man he created woman."

Recently, the controversy around human cloning has received a lot of news coverage; yet unsurprisingly, a clear and thorough examination of both sides has been lacking from the news media. Basically, human cloning is the artificial process of making a genetic twin of a person. This means a person could literally become the parent of their own twin sibling or the parent of anyone’s twin.

Early in 1997 Scottish scientist Ian Wilmut revealed to the world that he had successfully cloned an adult sheep, known to the world as Dolly. With this invention the world made a collective gasp at the realization that cloning was no longer an element of a science fiction movie. Since then the cloning of human beings has been one of the most largely debated topics in the world. From the schoolhouse to the White House discussions have begun regarding the ethical implications of cloning. “In several recent polls by Time magazine (The Ethics of Human Cloning 1998) it was shown that 75% of the responding population thought that human cloning was a bad idea. Furthermore, 74% of the respondents believed that cloning was against gods' will, and when asked if they would clone themselves if presented with an opportunity, 91% responded with no”.

Scientists are either very close at being able to clone human beings, or scientists have already done so. Human cloning has already become illegal or restricted in a variety of degrees in several countries, thus scientific research has been greatly reduced throughout the world. Furthermore, there has been quite a bit of legislation proposing to completely ban human cloning, and a large amount of legislation proposing to allow human cloning. Unfortunately, I have not seen or heard a holistic explanation of both sides with all the reasons for and against human cloning.

The most important argument of persuasion for the banning of cloning is that the risks in human cloning are far too great and that human cloning would be cruel since the process would result to a huge number of destruction of human embryos just to successfully have a live cloned baby of which has no certainty of growing up healthy during the later stages in life.

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