Pros And Cons Of Therapeutic Cloning

There has always been a misconception of what it means to clone. The general idea is that cloning is making a precise copy of the cloned subject; however, that is misleading. Cloning organisms does not work completely like the copy machine making copies, but more like breeding animals where two desired breeds are being bred to produce a new offspring where it grows into something that is somewhat similar to the expected outcome. To further understand cloning, the difference between therapeutic and reproductive cloning must be recognized. As Susan Aldridge illustrates in her article “Human Cloning”, therapeutic cloning is the creation of an embryo which will later develop into tissues and cells for the purpose of research. On the contrary, reproductive

For instance, some scientists claim that the practice of regenerative medicine through therapeutic cloning to heal patients with permanent disabilities will possibly become a huge accomplishment if it is developed. However, despite all of these benefits which have the potential to be achieved through cloning, there are things that must not be overlooked. The large amount of researches simultaneously requires countless ooyotes - human eggs - which comes at the price of endangering women’s health. According to the article, “Issue Analysis: Human Cloning” by the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commision, not only does the egg extraction process cause side effects like “ovarian cysts and cancers”, loss of fertility, and strokes, “the superovulation drugs” and “numerous hormone treatments” are also often performed to increase the sufficiency of egg extraction. It is inequitable to conduct these researches even if it is for medical purposes because the cost of operating them comes at the sacrifices of the women donors’ health. In addition, one question has to be answered - why are women willing to experiment with something so dangerous that can potentially put their health in fatal conditions? The answer is money. “Most women who are lured into this process are economically disenfranchised and

Conventional wisdom claims that cloning means creating an exact copy. However, according to author from the National Academy of Sciences, Francisco J. Ayala “[t]he genes of an individual, the genome, can be cloned, but the individual itself cannot be cloned…. The character, personality,… are not precisely determined by the genotype.” Therefore, even if an individual is cloned, the clone will not be exactly like the individual because is it the environment that controls a person’s unique phenotype features, and the environment is something that cannot be reproduced unlike the genes. In addition, the phenotype does not only include the external appearance but also the physiology and one’s behavior and values, and those characteristics are not innate. Attempting to create an exact duplicate of an individual is merely impossible to