To Clone, or Not to Clone?

5/12/2010
Jackson Switzer
 To Clone, or Not to Clone?

In the movie Star Wars, the Empire makes thousands of "clones" of

Jango Fett to make an army of "clone" troopers. Have you ever wondered
what a "clone" is? A clone is a genetically identical copy of another
organism. Sometimes cloning is mixed up with genetic engineering. They
are not the same thing. Cloning is creating a copy of an organism, while
genetic engineering involves modifying, taking away, or adding genes.

Cloning is very important; it happens in nature every day. Things like

garlic and yeast clone themselves to reproduce. This is natural cloning.
Another form of natural cloning is identical twins. One way of cloning
actually copies the process of making identical twins. First, a scientist takes
an embryo, which is an unborn human or animal that is just starting to
develop. Then the scientist manually splits the embryo (instead of it
splitting naturally), then lets the two parts divide and develop on their own.

History
One of the first cloned organisms was a sea urchin in 1885. Yes,
cloning has been around for that long. The headline in the newspaper was
"Seeing Double? Sea Urchins cloned!" The scientist who did it was Hans
Adolf Edward Dreisch. He showed that in Sea Urchins, by simply shaking a
two celled embryo, the cells could be split. Then the cells would grow into
two genetically identical sea urchins.

Since then, there have been many more examples of cloning, like
salamanders in 1902, frogs in 1952, rabbits in 1975, cows in 1987, sheep in
1996, monkeys in 1997, and mice in 1998. Cloning is becoming a very big
part of science.

Of all clones, the most famous example is probably Dolly the Sheep.
She was born on July 5, 1996, making her the first mammal to be cloned
from an adult somatic cell. A somatic cell is any cell in a plant or animal that
is not a reproductive cell. An adult cell is from an adult organism, not an
embryo. So Dolly was the first mammal to be a clone from an adult cell that
wasn't reproductive.

Even though we have made many clones of animals, human cloning is

still most likely fiction. There have been a few claims that someone has

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done it, though. In 1998 some scientists in South Korea claimed to have
cloned a human embryo, but the experiment failed when the would-be clone
was only made of four cells. In 2002 a religious group called Clonaid
claimed to have made the first clone of a human, a girl named Eve. Despite
their claims, though, they never provided any real evidence for the existence
of this clone or the 12 other clones they said they made.

Should it be done?
There have been many arguments over whether cloning is right.
Some say no, cloning is wrong. Others disagree.

After researching both sides of the argument, my opinion is we should

clone. Many people (like a lot of politicians and religious leaders) disagree
and answer negatively, saying it would not be ethically or morally right, and
that it would be, in effect, "tampering in God's domain". Some people, who
answer the question positively, say that it shouldn’t be anyone else’s
business if they want to be cloned. One man said, “My decision to clone
myself should not be the government’s business, or Cardinal O’Connor’s, any
more than a woman’s decision to have an abortion. Cloning is hugely
significant. It’s part of the reproductive rights of every human being.
(Glenn, 2000)” I think this is partly wrong, though. Thomas Jefferson wrote
in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness (Jefferson, 1776)”. This means that all men have
certain rights that should not ever be forcefully taken from them by a
human, and three of those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. If Thomas Jefferson is correct, and all men are created equal,
does that include clones? What if a doctor hasn’t perfected cloning and a
clone is born with all sorts of birth defects? Is that human really “created
equal” to all others? And do women really have the right to abortion? What
about all humans’ right to life? The baby that was aborted was killed, and
therefore denied that right to life!

One of the main arguments against cloning is because people say that
it denies individuals a singular identity. They say that humans have the

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right to uniqueness, and cloning makes a copy of a human, so the cloned

human’s right would be violated. The counter argument says that if humans
do have that right, which they may not, cloning would not violate it. Clones
are the same person genetically and physically, but they are not the same
mentally. A clone would not have the same memory of the original, would
not have the same intelligence level, and would not have the same
personality. These things are not caused by genes, so they will not be
identical.

Another argument against cloning is caused mainly by two very

influential movies: Sleeper and The Boys from Brazil. In Sleeper, someone
keeps a dead dictator’s nose intact for nearly a year, and then tries to bring
that dictator back to life. In The Boys from Brazil a Nazi doctor creates 94
clones of Hitler out of cells Hitler donated before death. There is a problem
with something like these becoming a reality, though. Creating 94 clones
wouldn’t only take years; it would cost billions of dollars. So it is unrealistic
for people to be scared of something like that happening.

Sometimes people are also scared of someone creating an army of

mindless clones. This is not possible. Clones are not robots, forced to do
what their creator says, but are human beings, with the same rights as non-
clones, and with separate minds and wills. So this is also unrealistic.

One reason people would want to clone humans is to bring back loved
ones that have passed away. They could pay for a scientist to make a clone
of a dead family member or friend, and it could be done. But the clone
would not really be the same person as the original. As I said earlier, it
would not have the same intelligence, personality, or memory, so the clone
would be very different. But this doesn’t stop some people. They still want
to do it.

The argument isn’t just about cloning humans, either. Some people
argue against cloning animals, too, along with plants. Cloning plants can be,
and usually is, a very good thing. All apples in some supermarkets are
roughly the same size and shape because they are clones. For example, all
modern apple trees that produce “Cox’s Orange Pippin” apples are clones of
one tree planted about 200 years ago. The only big problem with cloning

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plants is if the original gets a disease, the clones are just as likely to get that
disease. Raju Kucherlapati, a genetics teacher at Harvard University, says,
“Genetically modified plants have had a significant impact on our food supply
and as the population of the world is growing it is important that we able to
feed them. Cloning technology is very critical for this effort.”

Animals are also a big argument. Cloning animals can be very good
for agriculture. If a farmer has a cow that is very good for milking or has
very good meat, he could clone it and have a whole herd of that same cow.
Mr. Kucherlapati, speaking about cloning animals, says, “We will understand
much about animal and human development from these studies and will also
help with many medical issues.”

Cloning animals could help endangered species a lot, too. Scientists

could clone an endangered animal, which could very well help get it removed
from the “endangered” list. This has actually (sort of) happened before,
with the European Mouflon, a very small wild sheep. It was cloned in 2001
and lived for about seven months, which made it the first endangered
mammal clone to live longer than infancy.

Also, some people have said they want to clone dead pets. This could
be done in the near future, or even now with a bit of luck and experience. A
drawback from cloning pets, though, is that cloned animals are similar to
human clones: they aren’t exactly like the original. Like human clones, the
animal wouldn’t have the same memory, the same intelligence level, or the
same personality as the original pet.

Another reason for cloning animals is that, technically, you could bring
entire species back to life, if you had enough intact DNA from that animal.
This holds true for dinosaurs too, like in the well know movie Jurassic Park.
It might not be a good thing to have dinosaurs come back to life, though.

One of the main reasons people clone animals is to help fight off
disease. Scientists could genetically engineer an animal to fight diseases,
and then make a clone of that animal. They could also use the clones to
create drugs that help cure diseases in humans. I think this would save
lives, and be a very good thing to do.

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My final reason for supporting cloning animals is for their organs. I

know it sounds a little bit weird, but it’s true. A scientist could genetically
engineer an animal so its organs would work in a human body. After
modifying the animal, the scientist would make clones of that animal, and
use the clones’ organs to transplant into humans. Right now scientist would
most likely use pigs, because they are around the same size and shape as
human organs. In my opinion, this sounds kind of unfair. I know that it
would save thousands of human lives, but it would also kill a lot of animals.

In conclusion, I think cloning can be good, and can be bad. In my opinion,

we should definitely continue cloning plants and animals, and cloning
humans should be limited to things that will not deny the clones or the
original their “certain unalienable rights”. Cloning can be great, for things
like human reproduction, food, endangered species, curing people, and
many other things, but can also be very bad, if done incorrectly.

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Works Cited
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Institute: http://www.genome.gov/25020028#al-8

Cloning. (2010, April 28). Retrieved April 14, 2010, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloning

FDA. (2009, October 28). Consumer FAQs. Retrieved April 19, 2010, from U.S. Food and Drug
Administration: http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/SafetyHealth/AnimalCloning/ucm055516.htm

Fox News. (2010, January 6). Many Expect Organ Cloning Could Be Routine by 2020. Retrieved April 16,
2010, from Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,582127,00.html

Glenn, M. (2000). The Human Cloning Debate. Albany: Berkeley Hills Books.

Human Genome Project. (2009, May 11). Cloning Fact Sheet. Retrieved April 15, 2010, from Human
Genome Project Information:
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/cloning.shtml

In Vivo. (2010, April 27). Retrieved April 16, 2010, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vivo

Index of Genetic Engineering Articles. (2010, April 14). Retrieved April 14, 15, 2010, from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_genetic_engineering_articles

Jefferson, T. (2005). The Declaration of Independence. In J. Hakim, A History of Us: From Colonies (p.
190). New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.

Martha Nussbaum, C. S. (1998). Clones and Clones. London: W.W. Norton & Company.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloned_DNA#Restriction.2Fligation_cloning

Nardo, D. (2003). Cloning. Farming Hills: The Gale Group.

Santa Monica College. (N/A, N/A N/A). Cloning. Retrieved April 15, 2010, from Santa Monica College:
http://library.smc.edu/new/research/topics/cloning.htm

The University of Utah. (2010, April 28). The Clone Zone. Retrieved April 15, 2010, from Learn.Genetics:
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/tech/cloning/clonezone/

The University of Utah. (2010, April 28). What is Cloning? Retrieved April 16, 2010, from Learn.Genetics:
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/tech/cloning/whatiscloning/

The University of Utah. (2010, April 28). Why Clone? Retrieved April 19, 2010, from Learn.Genetics:
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/tech/cloning/whyclone/

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Trivedi, B. P. (2001, October 29). Scientists Clone First Endangered Species: a Wild Sheep. Retrieved April
30, 2010, from National Geographic:
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Tween Tribune. (2009, May 1). Experts claim to have cloned glowing dogs. Retrieved April 15, 2010,
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University of Wisconsin-Madison News. (2007, May 9). Creator of Dolly the sheep to give public lecture in
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