Survey-type-thing

I find scientific issues such as cloning interesting topics, as they provide a great deal of discussion. The fact that cloning, being based in science, has such strong ethical and philosophical ramifications is fascinating. The issue of cloning reminds me of the ethics of the dropping the atomic bomb on Japan: do the ethical issues it presents outweigh the benefits of the act or not?

I feel strongly about this issue, as I believe that cloning a whole human being is extremely unethical. The cloning of a full human being would present far too many physical, moral, and philosophical issues to be ethical. A cloned person would be liable to a short lifespan, as I said earlier. Also, the philosophical problems of identity and humanity come into play. It is likely that if a human was cloned, they would be treated as a second-class citizen, resulting in discrimination, despite Buddhism’s efforts to say otherwise.

This isn’t to say that I don’t agree with therapeutic cloning. I believe that in most cases therapeutic cloning would help save lives, advance medical knowledge, and reveal more about the way humans work. I believe just as strongly that reproductive cloning of a human being is unethical, as stated above.

The United Nations held a General Assembly on the issue of human cloning during December of 2001. Many countries called the ban of all forms of cloning, including therapeutic cloning (as they saw it as a breach of human dignity). However, the debate continued, and in 2005 a non-binding convention requesting the banning of all forms of human cloning was passed. While it is clear that most people don’t support reproductive cloning of humans, therapeutic cloning still remains to be seen.

The Australian seems to agree more with my perspective. In the past, Australia had a ban on all forms of human cloning. However, as of December 2006, therapeutic cloning was legalized. Also, in this bill, the creation of human embryos with the purpose of stem cell research was also legalized. I agree with their appraisal of the issue, therapeutic cloning should be legalized.

One of the major issues of reproductive cloning is its inefficiency. A famous example of this was the cloned sheep “Dolly”. It took 277 attempts to clone Dolly . That’s 276 lives wasted. Bad enough as it is for animals, that number of wasted human lives is extremely unethical.

As it stands with today’s technology, only taking 177 attempts to clone Dolly was actually lucky; the University of Utah believes that reproductive cloning has a range of 0.1-3% success rate . It could have taken nearly a thousand tries before a successful clone was produced. A process that plays with life like this, which is as inefficient as it is, is clearly unethical.

There is also the issue of biodiversity that cloning would effect. If we were all clones, the first pathogen to make its appearance would affect everyone, no-one would have the immunity that some would in a biodiversity world. The same applies to cloned crops: while cloned crops may be easier to manage, they would be affected by disease a lot more easily. While decreased biodiversity isn’t necessarily unethical, it is something to be avoided.

It is guaranteed that someone will take advantage of cloning, for the profit of it. This is something I find extremely unethical. People will sell clones into slavery, as they could easily be mass produced. For this reason, it is also likely that clones would be used to perform dangerous or unsavoury tasks in society, why should we take special care to keep someone alive when we can make another identical copy?