Imagine it’s the year 2030 and you are walking down the street when a stranger approaches you and starts talking about the upcoming Cleveland Cavilers’ basketball season. You do not follow sports and have never even been to Cleveland before, so why is this person asking you about the Cavilers? You politely explain to the stranger that you are not a sports follower and the stranger replies, “You have to be, you’re the clone of LeBron James!” This could be the future if humans are able to be successfully cloned. Science has advanced to the point where we have the knowledge necessary for human cloning, but not the ethical approval. There are many logistical concerns surrounding human cloning, but also apprehensions about the loss of identity.
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There are three different type of cloning: gene cloning, therapeutic cloning, and reproductive cloning (NHGRI, 2015). The type of cloning that gets the attention from the movie industry, and this paper, is reproductive cloning. Reproductive cloning is the process in which a whole organism is copied. This is achieved by removing a mature somatic cell from the organism that is to be copied, and transferring that cell’s DNA into an enucleated egg of the same species. After the egg has matured to an early embryonic phase in vitro, it is implanted into an adult female to grow and develop. Since the clone’s DNA came from one organism rather than half from a male and half from a female, the clone has the exact same DNA as the donor organism (Dovey, …show more content…
Since then many other mammals have been cloned, will humans be next? To date, a human has never been cloned, however, in 2001the first clone of a human embryo was produced. The embryo was cloned for the purpose of harvesting stem cells, not reproduction, unfortunately the embryo stopped dividing before stem cells could be collected (Scientific American, 2001). In 2013, the first successful gathering of stem cells from a cloned embryo was performed. Subsequent scientists have been able to create embryonic stem cells from embryos cloned from adult cells (Baker, 2014). Scientists have the knowledge necessary to clone a human and have gotten as far as cloning an embryo, so why has it not been done yet? One of the many ethical debates surrounding human cloning is the issue of individuality. Would the clone of a person be forced to live their life exactly as the original and be denied the opportunity to be their own
There are three different type of cloning: gene cloning, therapeutic cloning, and reproductive cloning (NHGRI, 2015). The type of cloning that gets the attention from the movie industry, and this paper, is reproductive cloning. Reproductive cloning is the process in which a whole organism is copied. This is achieved by removing a mature somatic cell from the organism that is to be copied, and transferring that cell’s DNA into an enucleated egg of the same species. After the egg has matured to an early embryonic phase in vitro, it is implanted into an adult female to grow and develop. Since the clone’s DNA came from one organism rather than half from a male and half from a female, the clone has the exact same DNA as the donor organism (Dovey, …show more content…
Since then many other mammals have been cloned, will humans be next? To date, a human has never been cloned, however, in 2001the first clone of a human embryo was produced. The embryo was cloned for the purpose of harvesting stem cells, not reproduction, unfortunately the embryo stopped dividing before stem cells could be collected (Scientific American, 2001). In 2013, the first successful gathering of stem cells from a cloned embryo was performed. Subsequent scientists have been able to create embryonic stem cells from embryos cloned from adult cells (Baker, 2014). Scientists have the knowledge necessary to clone a human and have gotten as far as cloning an embryo, so why has it not been done yet? One of the many ethical debates surrounding human cloning is the issue of individuality. Would the clone of a person be forced to live their life exactly as the original and be denied the opportunity to be their own