Quote:TO CLONE, OR NOT TO CLONE

Let Us Clone
After a couple has had their first child, to their disappointment they become infertile and cannot have more children. Cloning would enable such a couple to have a second child, perhaps a younger twin to the child they already have. This example has a very good argument. Many couples have difficulties having children, and sometimes it is impossible for couples to have children because they are infertile. Cloning would allow these couples to have children. Also, occasionally a woman is born without a uterus or has other complications and cannot produce eggs, then with the help of a surrogate mother; she can have a child of her own using her own DNA or her husband’s.

This is an argument that some have made in promoting cloning. It is hard to tell someone that they cannot use cloning to have children when no other possible ways to produce offspring are available. This is one reason why it is difficult to decide if cloning is ethical or not. The following are some of the reasons why cloning should be allowed.

As just discussed, cloning can be used to help benefit those that are sterile and cannot have children through the normal, natural way. It is the desire of most couples to have children and when it is impossible to bare children of your own, some are willing to do anything to have a child. Cloning will allow them to have a child or many children that have the genetic pattern of one of the parents.

Cloning was first done with Dolly the Sheep, using the fusion cell cloning method, which involves replacing the nucleus of an unfertilised egg with the nucleus from a different cell. The replacement nucleus can come from an embryo, but if it comes from an adult cell, it is called adult cell cloning.

However, it is now possible to use an embryo transplant. A developing embryo is removed from a pregnant animal at an early stage, before the embryo’s cells have had time to become specialised. The cells are separated, grown for a while in a laboratory and then transplanted into host mothers.

When the offspring are born, they are identical to each other and genetically related to the original pregnant animal. They are not related to their host mothers because they contain different genetic information. This is an important factor, because if the host mother had the same genetic code as te offspring, the process would have been asexual reproduction, not cloning.




Through cloning, research can progress. It is hard to say what we can learn from cloning if cloning is not allowed. We possibly can learn more about cell differentiation. We can learn enough to produce human organs without having to produce human beings. We may develop technology to allow easier genetic testing and fixing problems such as spinal cord injuries, cancer, Tay-Sachs disease, and many more. Cloning organs for organ transplants is one of the major practical reasons that cloning should be allowed. There is always a high demand for organs. Some argue for the cloning of humans to create spare body parts. Others talk of just wanting to clone an organ to replace a defective organ. However, there are some issues with this, which I shall move onto later.

Furthermore, The FDA, which is the US food and drugs aministration, approved the use of cloned organisms in 2008 for production of meat because the clones were found to be identical to the animal of origin. Cloning meat is an excellent example of how cloning is useful to the world, as it can cure a lot of the world's food problems. The FDA was not very well backed up in Europe however. The Food Standard Agency of United Kingdom takes into mind of the FDA's decision, but has decided The Food Standards Agency is the UK body responsible for the assessment of novel foods and it will not assess the safety of using cloned animals and their offspring in the food chain unless it is asked to do so. Therefore, these ideas are being introducuced too slowly in Europe.



Thou Shalt Not Clone
One of the main goals of the government is to protect human life. Some people want the government to regulate cloning and not allow it. Cloning could lead to the loss of individuality because one’s genetic predispositions and conditions would be known. If raised by a clone-parent or as a sibling to the cloned, one may have great expectations to live up to. However, the human clones could differ greatly in personality and even grow up with different conditions than the cloned. This could be a great stress to the clone and possibly even the loss of ability to chose for itself (Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs 5).

Not only this, but science still has only a partial understanding of the expression of one's genetic profile on the cellular level. Even if researchers could enumerate the entire set of cellular characteristics that trigger an immune response, medical technology is decades away from producing an effective and cost-effective way to permanently eliminate these characteristics from every cell in a hundred-million-celled organ.

Therefore, many in the biotechnology industry see cloned organs (literally, organs grown from the patient's own stem cells) as the most expedient approach toward solving the autoimmune problem in organ transplantation. A cloned organ would presumably be genetically and phenotypically indistinguishable from the existing, damaged organ. Thus it would possess none of the as-yet-undiscovered cellular immune response triggers.

Also, the long term genetic effects of cloning may cause more problems than can be imagined. The question of what can go wrong in cloning needs to be discussed. In an evolutionary standpoint, cloning is not good. Evolution relies on a continual mixing and matching of genes to keep the gene pool alive. With cloning, the natural process of selection of genes would be bypassed and evolution would be impaired

The fear that clones will be treated as second-class citizens is also present. If a clone is created to act as bone marrow or kidney donor, the question arises if they would be treated like the first child? Would the parents even love this child the same? If not, this would lead to negative self-esteem and/or other physiological problems.

From a Latter-day Saint point of view, the Proclamation on the Family clearly does not agree with cloning. The Proclamation states: “We . . . declare that God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife. We declare the means by which mortal life is created to be divinely appointed. We affirm the sanctity of life and of its importance in God’s plan.” In other words, the power to create humans is only to be used in a marriage between husband and wife. Cloning only involves one parent, therefore it is not following God’s plan in which a man’s sperm and a woman’s egg are needed to create life.

Overall, there are many advantages of cloning, such as being able to clone and process meat, or placing genes into other substances to change there property to our liking. However, the main disadvantage to this is that the biotechnology is simply not advanced enough for cloning to be successful at a highly continuous and successful rate. Other disadvantages like less variation are also important factors that come into cloning, and how it affects our survival. Thus, you can conclude that cloning can be a very useful addition to human life, yet it can also be a downfall to our survival in life.

(Oct. 02, 2013  8:22 PM)Lazer Wrote: wow @jacolal this is a really good essay hopefully you'll get a A+ oh and if I see anyhting that nneds to be change I'll let you know

(Oct. 02, 2013  8:22 PM)Lazer Wrote: wow @jacolal this is a really good essay hopefully you'll get a A+ oh and if I see anyhting that nneds to be change I'll let you know

oh and I 100% agree with the article that says Thou Shalt Not Clone due to my family's religous beliefs and mine were kinda christian

(Oct. 02, 2013  8:30 PM)madness Wrote: i hope the clones have no emotions and cant feel pain or that would be a complete disaster

(Oct. 02, 2013  8:22 PM)Lazer Wrote: wow @jacolal this is a really good essay hopefully you'll get a A+ oh and if I see anyhting that nneds to be change I'll let you know

oh and I 100% agree with the article that says Thou Shalt Not Clone due to my family's religous beliefs and mine were kinda christian

(Oct. 02, 2013  8:52 PM)madness Wrote: wow that would be a complete disaster what if the world runs out of food because of the sudden increase of population

Quote:For the Aff, the argument of infertility is a rather weak one. The term 'cloning' does not only have to refer to humans, but it can refer to any organism. One of the greatest strengths of cloning is in the ability to replicate genetic material (techniques such as PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) and DNA sequencing) for usage in real-world problems. We cloned the gene for insulin and inserted it into plants and other animals, and thus were able to create the insulin shot commonly used by patients with Type I and II diabetes mellitus.

Quote:Also, cloning the genetic material of one parent to raise as a child is not a good idea. We call that asexual reproduction...

Quote:Now, for the Neg, bringing in religion into a scientific discussion is a very, very bad idea. There is a very good reason not to do so, as it is extremely controversial and would lead to unnecessary, futile and weak arguments. Making it the focus is not a good idea at all. You can have ethical questions, but not through religion.

Quote:I think what you mean by your concluding statement was 'The question of cloning is an issue of either scientific advancement or morality.' "Not cloning" isn't a good way to put it.

Your concluding statement is fine, but the justification is shaky. Basing which argument is better based off of the viewpoint of a single aspect has an amount of bias. The better way to evaluate the arguments would be to weigh the importance of each issue in the modern world (where you can then say that regulations on science (see the IRB and IACUC, reforms around the 1970s or so) have allowed scientific progress to be made without worrying as much about the ethical aspect of the research) and then draw the conclusion from that.

Quote:There isn't really a concluding statement to the Aff argument, you end it with a point that could've been expanded upon more. Growing organs is an excellent example of the uses of cloning. Don't just leave it hanging.

(Oct. 04, 2013  10:10 PM)GaHooleone Wrote: Sure, I'll edit this post later tomorrow with a draft of a conclusion. If I don't get to it by tomorrow, just remind me via PM or something.

Quote:Ah, the way your essay was worded, it didn't look like an embryo transplant.

You can always use the GMO argument then, instead of the genetic material. Both are very viable contentions for the support of cloning.