Cloning man new friend or gods worst enemyCloning can mean a couple of different things. In 1993, Dr. Jerry Hall and Dr. Robert Stillman, infertility researchers at George Washington University, successfully split a human zygote into two separate zygotes with the same genetic makeup, essentially the same process that occurs naturally with identical twins. They had created a clone, a second individual with the exact genetic blueprint of the first. Hall and Stillman didn’t have the technology to allow their “twins” to survive full term.
The birth of Dolly, though, changed all that. Dolly, the cloned lamb, was a very unique kind of twin. Her genetic double was an adult born years earlier. A team headed by Dr. Ian Wilmut, an embryologist at the Rosland Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, evacuated the genetic material from the ovum of a sheep. When the nucleus from a cell of an adult sheep was electrically fused to the egg, it developed normally into a fetus, and eventually into a lamb.
What is remarkable about Dolly is that this is the first time an animal has been cloned from an adult. It is also the first mammal that has no biological father. Dolly is a time-delayed twin. Virtually all of the confusion about the morality of cloning can be clarified once we answer two very basic questions, one factual and one ethical. First, what manner of being does cloning produce? Is it human? Would it have a soul’second, what are our moral obligations to a clone? Can we use clones to create a race of slaves or as a living warehouse of human parts?Rejuvenation, suggests that it may someday be possible to reverse the aging process because of what we learn from cloning.
Human cloning technology could be used to reverse heart attacks. Many scientists believe that they may be able to treat heart attack victims by cloning their healthy heart cells and injecting them into the areas of the heart that have been damaged. Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States and several other industrialized countries. Another reason why cloning is important Is because Its a breakthrough with human stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells can be grown to produce organs or tissues to repair or replace damaged ones. Skin for burn victims, brain cells for the brain damaged, spinal cord cells for quadriplegics and paraplegics, hearts, lungs, livers, and kidneys could be produced. By combining this technology with human cloning technology it may be possible to produce needed tissue for suffering people that will be free of rejection by their immune systems. Conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, heart failure, degenerative joint disease, and other problems may be made curable if human cloning and its technology are not banned.
Cloning can also help with Infertility. With cloning, infertile couples could have children. Despite getting a fair amount of publicity in the news current treatments for infertility, in terms of percentages, are not very successful. One estimate is that current infertility treatments are less than 10 percent successful. Couples go through physically and emotionally painful procedures for a small chance of having children.
Many couples run out of time and money without successfully having children. Human cloning could make it possible for many more infertile couples to have children than ever before possible. Furthermore human cloning can help find and detect Defective genes. The average person carries 8 defective genes inside them. These defective genes allow people to become sick when they would otherwise remain healthy. With human cloning and its technology it may be possible to ensure that we no longer suffer because of our defective genes.
Cloning may help us in the research for a cure for Cancer. We may learn how to switch cells on and off through cloning and thus be able to cure cancer. Scientists still do not know exactly how cells separate into specific kinds of tissue, nor to do they understand why cancerous cells lose their isolation. Cloning, at long last, may be the key to understanding what makes a cell become cancerous. Finally cloning can help patients fully recover from spinal cord injury. We may learn to grow nerves or the spinal cord back again when they are injured.
Quadriplegics might be able to get out of their wheelchairs and walk again. Christopher Reeves, the man who played Superman, might be able to walk again. Words/ Pages : 757 / 24
