Ethics

Cloning, is it the thing of the future? Or is it a start of a new

generation? To some, cloning could give back a life. A life of fun, happiness,

and freedom. For others it could mean destruction, evil, or power. Throughout

this paper, you the reader, should get a better concept of cloning, it's ethics,

the pro's and con's, and the concerns it has brought up. You will hear the good

of what cloning can do and the bad that comes with the good. Most of the

information you will read about in this paper is what might become of the future.

Even though the cloning of humans can not be accomplished. When it is the

possibilities are endless.

What is cloning? How did it get started? Well, it is like this. A

clone is a genetic copy or a replica of an living organism. But, when you gear

cloning doesn't a Si-Fi movie come to mind. Like when they take a nucleus, place

it in a egg, put the egg in a incubator, and when it hatches it's an exact

replica of the original being (Lawren). Though this has been done with frogs it

has not yet been accomplished with mammals (Lawren). Another way to make a

clone, as they do in the cattle buisness, is to split the cells of a early

multi-celled embryo which will form two new embryos (Lawren).

For it to get started into practice it took more than fifty years of

questioning and testing. The first successful cloning experiment involved a

leopard frog. It took place in, 1952 with group of scientist from the

Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia (Lawren). To clone the frog they

used an embryonic frog cell nucleus(Margery). 1962, John Gurdon of Cambridge

University cloned a toad that survive threw adulthood and was able to reproduce.

He was also the first to take a nucleus from a fully contrast tadpole intestinal

cell and cloned toads(Robertson). As you can see we are getting close to the

cloning of humans. 1981, Steen Willadsen was the first to clone a artificial

chimera. He did this by mixing a sheep and a goat getting the result of a "geep"

(Lawren). It had the body shape and the head of a goat, and a dappled coat

which had large patches of sheep's wool. 1984, Willadsen cloned the first

verifiable mammal, using embryonic nuclei transplant into an unfertilized sheep

egg. Also in, 1986, when he worked for Texas bioengineering company (Lawren).

By using the embryonic nuclei, he produces the first cloned calves from cattle.

The cloned cattle that were produced were super-elite, high production dairy

cows and bulls who had a high breeding rate (Robertson). 1987, James Robl of

the University of Massachusetts was the first to clone rabbits also using

embryonic nuclei. But who can say when we will be able to clone human organs or

complete "biocopies" of human beings by using just the nuclei taken from a skin

sample (Lawren).

What's so good about cloning? Lets look at this at a different scenario.

Ned and Stacey are in a hospital. The both of them have a kidney that is

failing them. For Ned this is no big deal, since he has a clone. All the

doctor has to do is remove the cloned kidney and switch it with the bad one.

With this cloned kidney you don't need to worry about the body rejecting it

because it is made from the same DNA and the cells will react to it as if it was

the original one. On the other hand for Stacey she doesn't have a clone. So,

all she can do is pray for a donor's kidney to arrive before she dies. Another

good thing is we could create farm or "pharm" animals genetically engineered to

produce valuable drugs (Resenberger). Like scientist are creating an animal

that will manufacture anti-clotting drugs for humans in their milk by gene-

spliced sheep and mice (Resenberger). With this breeders could make formerly

expensive drugs in large quanities at a low cost. Doesn't all of this sound

good to have? Or are we just overlooking the bad possibilities. Lets just say

some freak wants to make an army of one hundreds Adolf Hitlers. Or try to clone

Einstein. Also people could go out and buy a son that will grow up to be

Micheal Jordan or Mike Tyson. But in a way this is good for people who are

unable to have children. Some thought of the future is immortality. When you

make