Cloning

Imagine just being a copy of someone who already exists! Imagine being

a clone, a carbon copy of your brother, sister, father or mother. Who

would you be, how would you feel? Imagine being grown in a laboratory as

a replacement for a dead sibling. Imagine being grown to supply spare

parts for an ill family member. The cloning of human beings is a real

and distinct possibility. The genes really are out of the bottle.

It seems that there is no end to human ingenuity. Science continues to

advance but at what cost to mankind? Cloning is no longer the stuff of

science fiction. It has been the dream of science for decades to

somehow find a way to prolong and extend human life. However, the brave new

world has once more turned out to be nothing more than a nightmare

scenario. The questions and the ethical issues raised are far from resolved.

Dolly the sheep was the first animal to be cloned and survive. Six

years later the same miracle of science was dead. At a young age she was

already crippled with arthritis and suffering from lung cancer. The

scientists made their excuses. The experiment was declared a qualified

success. After her death they muttered theories about the possibility of

prematurely ageing and the many unknowns.

Since then, other animals from different species have been cloned. If

science could successfully clone a large mammal, then the next step

became very quickly clear. The doors were open to the cloning of humans.

Yet the scientists in Scotland urged caution. Trials on human cloning

should not happen, they said. The risks were too high, the research still

in its infancy. The reasons for their scepticism did not receive as

much coverage as the event. Few knew about the 276 failed attempts, nor

the 30 embryos that did not live.

You'd have thought that any sensible and vaguely moral society would

have drawn the line right there. Sadly, this was not the case. Since

Dolly, there have been many more attempts to clone animals. From mice

through to pigs, horses, deer and cats the scientists have been spurred onto

clone and clone. There have even been reports of headless frogs and in

China, success in fusing human DNA in the egg of a rabbit. Korean

researchers have now successfully cloned a dog. Every day the road that

leads from mice to men is getting one step closer. The scientists behind

these often weird and disturbing experiments cite the possibility of

fascinating research at the end of the tunnel. Science fiction has now

become a reality. It is now possible using animal cloning to develop pig

body parts that can be used on humans. It is now possible they say to

produce steaks that are more nutritious and milk that can help fight

cancer. The benefits to human kind they claim are infinite.

What is the cost in terms our ethics and even our lives? Everyone

involved knows the real goal. It is not the preservation of rare species.

Nor is therapeutic cloning supposed to bring about the end of disease. It

will and can only lead to the eventual cloning of human beings. Cloning

is nothing more than an experiment with the sanctity of life.

Our governments are supposed to be united in their opposition to

embryonic cloning. The reality is we have no consensus at all, while

experiments on human embryos are happening now. Recently there have been

unverified claims that such cloning has successfully taken place. Although

these cases have not yet been proven, it will surely not be long until

someone succeeds. The door is open and our governments have not acted

quickly enough.

Many still argue that this is all somehow necessary. They say that we

might be able to fight the onset of our diseases by being able to grow

replacement parts for ourselves that would be a perfect match. Yet as

admirable as the cure of disease is, the process for this is the same as

for cloning people. Surely we should be focusing on the prevention of

these terrible diseases rather than the growing of spare body parts for

our repair.

Who knows what the price of human embryonic cloning will be. We already

live in a society that allows women to sell their embryos for

experimentation. Men in white coats are right now hunched over their microscopes

trying to fuse DNA and grow human beings. There are many psychological

issues we have not even to begun to consider.

Even if we managed to overcome the fact many embryos that would be

killed, terminated or self aborted during the