Human Cloning – Medical Breakthrough or have Scientists lost their Minds?
A woman, at the rightful age of 24, has decided to have a hysterectomy. She lives alone by herself, has no kids or a boyfriend. One year after she has the surgery, which strips her of the ability to have children, she meets the perfect man for her and they get married. Now since she had the surgery she is unable to have children with her husband. Human cloning can give that ability back to her! Along with relieving infertility, human cloning will hold the potential for immortality, and be able to cure many “incurable” diseases. That’s why Human Cloning and its research and technologies are necessary and should be continued.
Cloning could make it possible for many more infertile couples to have children than ever before by increasing efficiency through nuclear transfer (Cohen 6), sperm from the father could be transferred into the mother’s egg, thus creating a child. This is the same procedure used to create “Dolly” the first cloned animal, a ewe, in recorded history back in 1997. Artificial insemination, embryo manipulation, and more were once strongly opposed by the world but we have grown accustomed to them and have accepted them as forms of reproduction. “Cloning is but one of many high-tech methods of reproduction” (Nussbaum 271).
Right now infertility treatments are about 10 percent
Graves 2
effective(272) and the couples go through an intense amount of physical and emotional pain and suffering just for a slim chance that hopefully they will be able to produce a child. And in most cases they run out of time and money with little or no success. Infertile men are made to feel like they are not “holding up their part of the deal,” while women are made to feel as if they are useless. Banning human cloning is just like banning life. It would be depriving those couples who wish to raise a child of their own genetic traits. This kid could be the next great President of our country or he could develop the cure for cancer and if we banned human cloning we would never know what could have happened.
As far as curing cancer, human cloning technologies could hold the key to that question as well as developing a cure for many other “incurable diseases.” Embryonic Stem Cell research is taking a human cell, and basically killing it until there is almost nothing left. Then we take out the nucleus of the cell and implant it into another cell which has no DNA and we “trick” the cell into growing into whatever organ it originated from, just like it was a stem cell, the first basic cell of every organ in our body (Haney AP Newswire).
With this technology we could grow an unlimited supply of organs, which means no one would have to die from not having an exact match for organ transplant. Also burn victims could have skin grown for them. Christopher Reeves, Superman, could have spinal cord cells grown for him. Some diseases we are already born with which are deemed permanent defects. Doctors expect to “offer expectant mothers an option to diagnose and treat the future early enough to correct disorders such
Graves 3
as Downs Syndrome, miscarriages and genetically induced sensory diseases like blindness or deafness” (Chellam, 13).
If human cloning is banned then millions of people around the world will continue to have pain and suffering from diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, cancer and their lives will end short of what is expected of them and could leave behind a family who will have no one to provide for them anymore.
Lives ending short will no longer be a problem, because human cloning research has unlocked the “fountain of youth” and could make humans immortal. If we clone a cell, its DNA is erased and re-written so it believes its 0 years of age. Dr. Richard Seed, a physicist who graduated from Harvard University with three degrees, hopes that cloning will help us understand how to reverse DNA back to age 20 or whatever age we want to be. He ultimately wants to reprogram his DNA to become immortal. (Cole 77) With this technology we could sustain the lives of the great people in our society and keep learning from their knowledge. All this and more could be lost if we ban human cloning.
Cloning can become a reality; like flying was for the Wright Brothers or walking on the moon for Neil Armstrong, today’s scientists are fueled by the excitement and adventure of a vast new field of study – Human Cloning. We can change lives with cloning, allow infertile couples to have children, end pain and suffering for people with incurable diseases and develop the pleasure of being young again.