What is Cloning?

Benefits of Cloning

Other Info

 The clone grows inside a womb like anything else (well, mammals - you get the point). There isn't some
sort of magic sci-fi cloning chamber that spits out fully-formed adults.
 Transfer of a nucleus from a donor adult cell (somatic cell) to an egg that has no nucleus. If the egg
begins to divide normally it is transferred into the uterus of the surrogate mother.
 “I see now that the circumstances of ones birth is irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that
determines who you are" -Mewtwo

Cons

 Cloning is basically just making exact copies but not particularly helpful. The real trick is genetic
modification which is happening on a large scale now in food products and in medicine, etc.
 It's expensive and slow and doesn't always work.
 From what I heard (which may be out of date, so I hope somebody corrects me in that case), cloning
requires doing many attempts until one works. So this means that to get one cloned baby you might
need to do several hundred attempts (Dolly took 277 fertilized eggs, producing 29 embryos, 3 births, 1
survival). That's several hundred women volunteering, with most of them having a (natural) abortion or
some sort of birth defect. You could also win the lottery and end up with a dozen healthy clones, and
then what do you do with those?
 One use of cloning is for organs harvesting but creating a sentient human just to donate his/her organs
is ethically wrong.
 The primary ethical problem inherent in current cloning methods seems to be that clones have a
tendency towards frailer health than individuals created from more conventional fertilization
procedures.
 Plenty of the cloned animals created have died early and had severe problems. Yes the problems are
getting ironed out but is it acceptable to create people with those problems even if we eventually refine
the techniques.
 Animal test have shown that the risks are still much higher than in normal pregnancies.
 To clone a human would require resources to keep a whole person alive, along with a place to keep
them. Considering the issues of over use of resources even at our current population, a select number,
and ideally, eventually everyone gets a clone or more. That's a huge drain on resources for things that
may never actually be used in case of replacing body parts.
 In addition, assuming we are working under the idea we can't increase growth speed or grow selective
body parts (since you say human cloning which suggests entirety to me), these would need to be
created with in a time period that they can develop enough to be usable (can't have a year old heart to
power a 50 year old man), which suggests creating a clone for every human born, and then additional
ones in case the clone sees failure as well.
 Then there is the issue of where you store all the bodies. Keep them in the house? Keep them in a clone
bank? Is it a private organization or a government funded one (since private could reject individuals on
any basis).
 Human Cloning isn’t perfected yet. Though scientists may perform experiments on animals and they
might be able to perfect it. The differences in growth and replication mean you have to perfect the
method from species to species meaning you can’t perfect human cloning without cloning humans.
 ''If you want to make it into something that will have commercial value, not only do you have to pull a
volume of material out of it, but the process has to be repeatable,'' she said. ''Your success cannot be 1
or 2 percent. A 2 percent success rate is not a success, it's a biological accident. Where's the other 98
percent? Show me them.''

Adapted from Pace et al., 2002.

This compares the death rates and abortion rates of cloned embryos versus embryos from embryo transfer.
There is a much higher rate of embryonic and post-partum deaths for cloned animals versus non-cloned.
Cons

1) IT'S EXPENSIVE AND SLOW

a. The cost of cloning animals would range between $20,000-$150,000 depending on the species
of the animal.
b. Cloning humans would cost approximately $2,000,000
c. High Maintenance for cloning humans
i. It would require a huge amount of resources in order to store clones for future use.
ii. It's a huge drain on resources for things that may never actually be used in case of
replacing body parts.
d. SLOW
i. If we’re talking about cloning ourselves for organ harvesting (VERY UNETHICAL), we’ll
have to do it on a very young age. Obviously, we can’t replace our 50-year-old organs
with the organs of our 10-year-old clone.
2) SUCCES RATE IS LOW (DATA GATHERED FROM CLONING ANIMALS)
a. Graph showing the number of successful trials per procedure for 3 animal species

b. The primary ethical problem in current cloning methods seems to be that clones have a
tendency towards frailer health than individuals created from more conventional fertilization
procedures.
i. Animal test have shown that the risks are still much higher than in normal pregnancies
c. If we want to make it into something that will have commercial value, not only do we have to
pull a volume of material out of it, but the process has to be repeatable. Your success cannot be
1 or 2 percent. A 2 percent success rate is not a success, it's a biological accident.
d. Human Cloning isn’t perfected yet. Animal cloning too is far from perfect. Though scientists may
perform experiments on animals and they might be able to perfect it. The differences in growth
and replication means you have to perfect the method from species to species meaning you
can’t perfect human cloning without cloning humans. In which I think is very unethical.
 i. Plenty of the cloned animals created have died early and had severe problems. Yes, the
problems are getting ironed out but is it acceptable to create people with those
problems even if we eventually refine the techniques.
e.