by .::v0kaledGe::. » 1/26/2003, 3:29 pm
O.K. here it is. Still in the drafting process.
If you’ve ever watched the news before, it’s inevitable that you’ve heard about Dolly. Dolly who? Dolly the first ever cloned sheep. She was “born” in Edinburgh, Scotland and created by Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute (1997). After this breaking news, many more rumors of healthy, cloned animals have bubbled up. Nobody is sure if they’re true or just false claims to get attention. Whatever the case, it’s inevitable that Earth will have a world with human clones at the rate science is progressing. But in the journey to getting to that point and the consequences of a world with clones may be disastrous and that’s why we should stop trying to clone before it’s too late.
When the claims about cloned animals were made, did anybody ever stop to wonder about the terrifyingly large amount of animals that were destroyed in the womb or born with such horrible abnormalities that they died? No, because the animals that don’t survive never get mentioned. But in the journal Theriogenology (1999), under the heading “Clinical and pathological features of cloned transgenic calves and fetuses” tells the story of “calf 1”. When it was “born” it appeared normal, mooed and started breathing but inside its young body, the oxygen levels were 1/3 of what was normal, carbon dioxide 3 xs as much as normal. Scientists tried to save the clone but it died shortly after a few days and it was then discovered to have an enlarged heart, orange liver and its lungs never properly inflated. And that’s not the end of the horror. There were many lung and heart problems but some also enlarged tongues, squashed faces, bad kidneys, and intestinal blockages just to name a few. Jim Robl of the Massachusetts-based company Hematech states that “We saw consistent defects, so we thought we’d find consistent solutions.” But that didn’t work and later on he said “There’s no pattern, it’s perplexing.” How can we keep letting so many lives be lost? Dolly took 277 tries to make. And that’s for a sheep. Humans are much more complicated to clone so even more lives could be lost! Not only could the clone’s lives be lost which is already so sad, but 4/12 of surrogate mothers died from pregnancy complications. “We sacrifice the cow and the clone…all the heroics in the world can’t rescue those animals” states Michael Bishop of Wisconsin-based cloning company Infigen. We need to put an end to this right now!
Let’s say someone really did clone a human being and it lived. Ryuzo Yanagimanchi of the University of Hawaii at Manoa says “All cloned babies have some sort of errors; I’m surprised they can survive it”. So even clones that look healthy may have some sort of defect, whether great or small it’s still abnormal. Sometimes a baby can have no physical defects but suffer mental damage, because when Jon Hill from Cornell University studied the behaviour of newborn cow clones, he discovered that their I.Q. level was lower than average of normal cows. If we were to clone humans, they might be mentally retarded or physically defected. This is absolutely not fair to the clones because they are living, breathing animals who have moral rights! We can’t just clone them, it’s not ethical. Imagine growing up, knowing that your only purpose in life is to be studied scientifically, used for transplanting your organs at any moment or that you may harbour abnormalities? Not matter what any pro-cloners try and convince you, the cloned humans will always seem inferior to real humans, conceived naturally. How would you feel if you were growing up as a teenager, trying to establish your own identity and seeing your “mother” as your future self? God only knows how many challenges a clone may encounter in your emotional, growing up phase of life.
The pro side coaxes people into believing that cloning humans is a good idea because they could find cures for many diseases and use the clones’ organs for prolonging human life but really more lives would be lost and harmed in the process than saved.