Cloning

• Almost everyone has wished that he could have a clone of himself to do homework while he goes out with his friends. Now we have the technology to make this wish come true. Cloning is the creation of an organism that is an exact genetic copy of another.

1. Some of the reasons people give to justify cloning are medical purposes, reviving endangered or extinct species, reproducing deceased pet and finally cloning humans.
2. Whatever the benefits of human cloning are, I believe that there are serious risks which could even endanger the life of human kind. Therefore human cloning should not be allowed.

• There are several arguments against cloning

1. One is “the health risks from mutation of genes”

1. An abnormal baby would be a nightmare come true. A particular worry is that the genes used from an adult to create a baby would continue to grow, so that on the day of birth, the genes would be as old as the adult. But many attempts at animal cloning produced disfigured monsters. For example this is a cloned calf which was born in this way and died after a while. This is a mouse with an ear on its back, created by scientists.
2. However, some abnormalities may appear long after the birth. Even if a few cloned babies are born apparently normal we will have to wait up to twenty years to be sure they are not going to have problems later – for example growing old too fast.

1. There are also emotional and ethical risks

1. What happens when a woman clones herself and the clone grows up and finds out her mother is also her sister, and her grandmother is her mother. And what happens to a marriage when the “father” sees his wife clone grow into the woman he fell in love with.
2. The emotional pressure is also unbearable for a child that knows it is the clone of his dead brother. It is an experiment doomed to failure because the child would not be identical in every way in spite of his parents hopes.
3. The destruction of the embryo is unethical and immoral because of the removing of a soul, a human life. This can cause a lot of religious reactions and it was one of the main reason that cloning was banned in many countries.

1. In addition there is the risk of abuse of technology

1. We can imagine what Hitler would have done with cloning technology if available in the 1940s. There are powerful leaders in every generation who will seek to abuse this technology for their own purposes.

• There are many examples of failed cloning experiments.

1. A cloned cow died several weeks birth with a huge abnormality of blood production. Dolly the sheep died prematurely of severe lung disease. There have been reports that Dolly may have been getting old before her time, developing arthritis.
2. In general there is a high failure rate in cloning attempts. The success rate ranges from 0.1 to 3 percent which means there could be up to 999 failures in 1000 tries.

• John Gurdon discovered that ordinary cells of the body can be reprogrammed into stem cells, which then can turn into any kind of tissue WHAT THAT MEANS it means that
• This discovery is very useful because now scientists can

 Create replacement tissues like muscles or organs for treating diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes without causing the ethical dilemma creating embryos and killing human lifes.

• In conclusion I believe that we are not ready to take the risk of cloning.

• This is technology that we can definitely live without, but we might not be able to live with it……..

BIOGRAPHY:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/human-cloning2.htm

• http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/cloning3.htm

• http://prezi.com/rhpiezxmt1vm/therapeutic-cloning/

• http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF07K08.pdf

• http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cloning/whyclone/

The fact that a 65 year old woman can be enabled to give birth to a child, in the minds of some at least, means that it should be done. So we now have a number of reported cases of women in their sixties, long past menopause, who have given birth - usually her daughter has provided the egg and then the mother gestated the child, so the gestational mother is actually the grandmother. It gets very complicated. And the daughter is the child's what?