Human cloning :Pro/Con

Well, I think what TDHung said above is about biological cloning, not human cloning. Does any one agree with me?
From hcn8295: Each baby should be a totally new and unique individual, not a " carbon copy" of someone else, don't you thinks so?----------> Whatta great sentence!
To JohnTrung: how about what u think about human cloning? Would you think it's acceptable or not? Many people here are looking forward to hear your point of view!

to: Johntrung; TDHung and Quanbanh97202:
I'm riding the fence on the cloning issue. I think that it would help in the medical field tremendously, but my ethical views come into play. I do not believe that cloning is ok. I believe that is playing God, and another way of murder. If I had a young child I may look at it differently if he or she was terminally.
Another reason I do not believe in cloning is, it could easily used to cause mischief it got in the wrong hands. I believe that if it did get in the wrong hands, the clone would not be exactly that same as the individual that was cloned, but who is to say.
Until we know more about cloning nether I nor you can make an educated hypothesis.

hi hcn,
Could you explain more on your saying that human cloning is another way of murder? In which way?
For those who are religious practicers, human cloning defies the power of God; but what about those who are atheists?
I,too, agree with you that human cloning is against ethical practice. Yet, "ethical" seems to be too general to me. Why is it unethical ?

It's not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered,to be generous, to be independent

To Johntrung
Hmmmm... a toughie
The fact is that is the blastocyst is allowed to implant in the uterus for it nourishment, it will grow into fully developed human baby. The idea of a " pre-embryo" is one that is to liking of those who espouse therapeutic cloning. From biological point of view, however, each one of us was a zygote, a morula, and a blastocyst with 46 chromosomes that direct its genetic development. The growth into a recognizable human being is continuous unless interrupted. Another fact is that the developing embryo is merely a fertillized egg. The egg has only 23 chromosomes and the sperm has 23 chromosomes, when this two entities unite, the resulting zygote ( single cell) has a compliment of 46 chromosomes and is genetically complete and distinct from either of it parents. The " disassembling" of the embryo, as scientists call the extraction of the undifferentiated stem cells in the interior of the blastocyst, results in the death of the embryo.
Well there are some real issues with it. For example, you don't try once and have instant success. Maybe that will true in the furture, but it isn't now in animal cloning. So what do you do with the mistakes if they don't die? If your produce a mutation, most likely negative, do you kill the festus? and what do you do with them when you don't need them any more? throw them away?

Second Cloned Baby Said Imminent, but No DNA TestsBy Catherine Bremer
PARIS (Reuters) - A second cloned baby will be born this week, a firm claiming to have produced the first human clone said on Thursday, although it has failed to carry out genetic tests it promised to provide as proof.
Reuters
Slideshow: Human Cloning


Chief executive Brigitte Boisselier of Clonaid, set up by a cult that believes mankind was created by aliens, told France 2 television and BBC Two in Britain that another cloned baby was due to be born somewhere in Europe before the end of the week.
But in interviews with both TV stations, the French scientist and cult member said DNA tests on baby Eve, born to a 31-year-old American woman last Friday, had been put off because the parents were anxious about keeping their identity secret.
Clonaid had said it would take DNA samples on Tuesday to pacify skeptics and would provide the results a week later.
"These tests have not been carried out. We have had to push them back," Boisselier said, saying the baby's parents felt under pressure after a Florida lawyer this week asked a state court to appoint a legal guardian for the baby.
"For the time being the parents told me they are giving themselves another 48 hours to decide whether or not they will do the tests. The parents have gone home and they just want some peace and to spend time with their child," she told France 2.
"Perhaps the second child will be more accessible because it is in Europe and the country in which he or she will be born may be less sensitive," she said, adding the birth was due in days.
"It will be this week," she said.
CLONES ARE "BELATED TWINS"
Clonaid was founded by the creator of the Raelian Movement, a religious cult that believes aliens landed on earth 25,000 years ago and started the human race through cloning.
Clonaid, which says it has a list of 2,000 people willing to pay $200,000 to have themselves or a loved one cloned, announced its breakthrough last Friday and said four more cloned babies would be born by the end of January.
The news sparked condemnation from world leaders, religious figures and scientists, who are calling for proof.
"I am confident these tests will be done soon and will be given to you as proof soon enough," Boisselier told BBC 2's Newsnight current affairs program.
She said the obstacle was a filing by a U.S. lawyer on Tuesday asking a Florida court to appoint a guardian for the baby. Under Florida law anyone can file a petition for court protection if they have information that a child is in danger.
The baby's parents were concerned that the person appointed by Clonaid to carry out DNA tests would have to reveal their identity to the Florida court, even though the baby may well fall outside the court's jurisdiction.
"The parents are not ready to take that chance yet. I'm discussing with them, because they said they would go public, that was the agreement we had. Right now I have no heart to push them knowing they could lose so much," Boisselier said.
Cattle, mice, sheep and other animals have been cloned with mixed success. Some have shown defects later in life.
Boisselier is a member of the Raelians, who claim 55,000 followers around the world. The cult's founder, Rael, says he learned about the origin of life on earth from a visitor from space and sees cloning as a way of achieving eternal life.
Boisselier attacked the media portrayal of Raelian beliefs, saying they were "much more rational than other visions of the origin of life" and defended the right of parents to replace children who had died with what she said were "belated twins."

Unsettling, Maybe, But Not Unethical
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, January 2, 2003; Page A19
I am a twin -- no big deal, really. My other half is my sister, and so we are fraternal twins, no different from ordinary siblings, except that we were conceived at the same time. Still, I know from a lifetime of experience that just to say "I am a twin" causes people to take a step back. They are in the presence of the different.
This being the case, I can easily understand how people feel about cloning. It gives us all the willies, and we recoil from it as unnatural, an affront to God, or just plain weird. It hardly helps matters that the cult that recently announced it had cloned a child also believes that all human beings stem from a race of alien scientists who cloned themselves. They produced you, me and, somehow, Liza Minnelli.
Yet a form of cloning already exists in nature: identical twins. They are a genetic match of one another -- no different in that sense from a clone produced from the genetic material of a dead sibling. The difference is that one is produced in nature, the other in the lab.
The distinction is not, I grant you, insignificant. It raises all sorts of questions. But these questions ought to be debated and studied -- and not dismissed by fiat, as is the intention of a whole bunch of politicians, religious leaders and conservative intellectuals who would, if they could, close the spigot on cloning and stop it cold.
It cannot be done. Congress might revive and pass a bill like the one that failed two years ago, banning all sorts of cloning, but the rest of the world is not necessarily going to follow. Women desperate for a child will simply go where cloning is either legal or merely tolerated -- and come back pregnant. There is, as far as I know, no law banning pregnant women from entering the United States.
The word that keeps getting attached to cloning is "unethical." It's a powerful word, but in the case of cloning it merely gets asserted, never proved. It just so happens that at the moment, cloning is unethical because the procedure is experimental -- and you don't go skinny-dipping in the gene pool. But someday, the procedure will not be all that chancy. What then would make cloning unethical?
Nothing. It would be just be another form of reproduction. It's hard to see how it's less ethical than the drunken coupling of teenagers in the back of a car or the impregnation of a woman through rape or incest -- not grounds for abortion, some very ethical people insist. And while cloning may always involve some risk, so too does the usual method.
This is bravest of new worlds. And it will require some brave, new thinking. Terms like "ethical" or "human dignity" simply cloud the debate. I, for one, don't find it particularly ethical to persist in dangerous pregnancies or to have a brood of children. Others insist otherwise. I don't think it's particularly ethical to tell teenagers that the way to deal with their ***uality is through abstinence -- and not, above all, through knowledge of contraceptive devices and procedures. Others, including George W. Bush, insist otherwise.
In the debate about cloning -- even cloning designed to produce cures for diseases that are now incurable -- the same old language gets used. But it is language rooted in religion and religious values -- and specific, narrow ones at that. They are hardly universal. I can see nothing wrong in therapeutic cloning, just as I see nothing wrong in certain kinds of abortions. As for reproductive cloning, I can appreciate the objections -- but they are not ethical in nature.
The Raelians, the sect that triggered the latest cloning controversy, stand accused of giving the entire science a black eye. Who could argue? And yet, these wackos -- at least I hope they're wacky -- have also done us a favor. They have offered us a glimpse into the future -- not just of cloning, but of a science forced into medical back alleys by politicians who utter oaths to "ethics" when their true allegiance is to tra***ion. They confuse ethics with familiarity.
Therapeutic cloning holds great promise. Reproductive cloning is a different matter, but it too could have its uses. We cannot permit either our repugnance for a weird cult or our fear of the different to produce a retreat from a knowledge that is almost certain to be used anyway and that -- just maybe -- could save or enrich lives. Now that would be unethical.