Ethical Issues Essay #1

Welcome to the 21st Century

Surprise, surprise, technology is on a rise. Cloning is the topic and even though the concept has been around for years, scientific cloning breakthroughs are relatively recent. The information about this laboratory activity has become widespread and has given many people, including myself, a little shock at the advancement of the technologies of not only today, but of tomorrow. Cloning may be seen on the news displayed as a horrific event that should frighten us all until we fight the government, without learning the facts. My goal: to give further insight on the pros and cons of the three main hopeful uses of cloning for the future. Again there are three main types of cloning. There is recombinant DNA technology, otherwise known as DNA cloning. There is reproductive cloning and there is also therapeutic cloning. Each are quite different and need to be analyzed separately.

Up first is recombinant DNA, which has been around since the 1970's. Simply, the process is to replicate the DNA from an organism and transfer it to a sort of bacterial plasmid, where it will grow. These plasmids are able to hold up to as many as twenty-thousand bp of DNA from another organism. These plasmids are not alone, however, for there are other alternatives to be used such as injecting the DNA into viruses, or bacteria/yeast artificial chromosomes,which can withstand 45 kb of foreign DNA.

These host cells are probably seen as the least destructive and in many ways they are. Recombinant DNA has been used to genetically engineer food sources as well as organisms. Scientists are now able to alter the taste of a food product or even its characteristics. Through the use of DNA cloning, genes can be tweaked to create crops with more food production, or they can make our other food sources such as salmon, to be fuller and heavier, and reproduce faster. Those who oppose further development and use of recombinant DNA have problems with the depleting of the environments' creatures. Some crops have been genetically modified to keep pests away. Problem is that those pests are losing their food source, thus they are being killed off. Furthermore, these pests are no longer eating off the other creatures and while their population declines, the population of these other creatures is increasing, creating more complications.This can also lead to hardships that have been unheard of before to where the human population, perhaps mainly farmers, would need to find new ways to deal with these new pests.

Without a doubt the most confrontational of the three, reproductive cloning, has the eyes and ears of just about every news station and/or of the most fanatical conservatives. Reproductive cloning is far from cheap and so far it has gathered poor statistics of failures being over 90%. Dolly, a member of the privileged surviving 10% and the sheep that only lived to be half its expected age, is most closely linked to this form of cloning. Though her death was by lethal injection rather than by natural causes, she still "[suffered] from lung cancer and crippling arthritis." Despite everything, Dolly managed to give birth to 6 lambs and is famous for being the only success out of 276 attempts. Her existance began with a process called somatic cell nuclear transfusion. This is where an animal is created with the same DNA of another animal may it be living or dead. Another way to understand this would be to think of Dolly as the twin of her "parent" (the sheep from which her DNA was extracted).

Dolly served the scientific community in another way. Her existance proved that a specialized cell, in this case, an udder cell, can be used to create an entire living thing rather than just duplicating the same cell. Every miracle seems to have its price, however, as most reproductive clones have a series of problems including high death rates, deformity, disability, poor immune systems, more infections, tumor growth, and growing to be much larger than they should be. As with those advertisements for those popular pills (birth control, steroids, weight loss, hair loss, etc.), there are always risks. Pushing that to the side, it is hoped that with further research, meaning further cloning, one day the ability to reproduce animals with characteristics they never had before, may exist. Perhaps, the endangered species list could be dramatically shortened with the advancement of this cloning technology. Sardinia has even managed to clone an endangered mouflon, which lives on. On the otherhand, some argue that by performing this embryotic procedure, with each failure could have been the loss of a possibility for life, the natural way, if things weren't tampered with.

Many animals have been cloned. A tadpole in 1952 was the first success (with the embryotic procedure). Later, through the process of nuclear transfusion, came the sheep, goats, cows, mice, pigs, cats, rabbits, gaur, and mouflon. Unfortunately, monkeys, dogs, chickens, and horses remain to be unsuccessful in the cloning process but it doesn't stop there; human cloning is still on the top of the list. Even though more information on the brain and it's functioning have been discovered in the past 10 years than ever before, our brains still remains a mystery. Key points still needing to be deciphered are our intelligence capacity and our moods which are highly important to function in our daily lives. At the moment, with the help of the media, reproductive cloning of humans remains a scare. This has led to a controversial ban in the U.S. on whether human cloning should be legal.

Finally for what may be the most hopeful of all three types: therapeutic cloning, otherwise known as embryo cloning, is correlated with stem cell research. This kind of research deals with obtaining the stem cells from an egg after a short 5 days of division. Like abortion, the problem with this procedure is that the embryo no longer can continue on to create a baby. This is seen as an almost absolute loss of a possible life and creates huge concerns. Scientists debate that their research is for the greater good, that with it they hope to find cures to the many cancers that threaten so many lives. So far, pigs are our best hope for an organ transplant. The act of putting an organ made from an animal into a human is referred to as xenotransplantation. Perhaps healthy organs may be developed from single cells to replace defective ones.

Though cloning may seem to be a generic term, there remains different forms of cloning: recombinant DNA cloning, reproductive cloning, and therapeutic cloning. Of those three, we have discussed the most controversial, the easiest and most used, and the most hoped for types of cloning. The concept still may be relatively young, but its technological advances are coming quickly and its wise that we know what we are dealing with.