Reasons Against Cloning - VIDEOS & ARTICLES
Futurist Topics - Cloning
Human cloning: who is cloning humans and arguments against cloning
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How human clones are being made - for medical research. Arguments for and against human cloning research. Why some people want to clone themselves or even to clone the dead (and not just cloning pets).
Why investors are moving away from human cloning and why human cloning now looks a last-century way to fight disease.
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Watch Another Anti Cloning Video
Should we ban human cloning? Arguments against cloning
Many resources, articles, videos and free online book on cloning ethics by Dr Patrick Dixon who is often described in the media as a leading authority on the ethics of human cloning.
Here are three reasons why we should say no to cloning - disadvantages:
1. Health risks from mutation of genes
An abnormal baby would be a nightmare come true. The technique is extremely risky right now. A particular worry is the possibility that the genetic material used from the adult will continue to age so that the genes in a newborn baby clone could be - say - 30 years old or more on the day of birth. Many attempts at animal cloning produced disfigured monsters with severe abnormalities. So that would mean creating cloned embryos, implanting them and destroying (presumably) those that look imperfect as they grow in the womb. However some abnormalities may not appear till after birth. A cloned cow recently died several weeks after birth with a huge abnormality of blood cell production. Dolly the Sheep died prematurely of severe lung disease in February 2003, and also suffered from arthritis at an unexpectedly early age - probably linked to the cloning process.
Even if a few cloned babies are born apparently normal we will have to wait up to 20 years to be sure they are not going to have problems later -for example growing old too fast. Every time a clone is made it is like throwing the dice and even a string of "healthy" clones being born would not change the likelihood that many clones born in future may have severe medical problems. And of course, that's just the ones born. What about all the disfigured and highly abnormal clones that either spontaneously aborted or were destroyed / terminated by scientists worried about the horrors they might be creating.
2. Emotional risks
A child grows up knowing her mother is her sister, her grandmother is her mother. Her father is her brother-in-law. Every time her mother looks at her she is seeing herself growing up. Unbearable emotional pressures on a teenager trying to establish his or her identity. What happens to a marriage when the "father" sees his wife's clone grow up into the exact replica (by appearance) of the beautiful 18 year old he fell in love with 35 years ago? A sexual relationship would of course be with his wife's twin, no incest involved technically.
Or maybe the child knows it is the twin of a dead brother or sister. What kind of pressures will he or she feel, knowing they were made as a direct replacement for another? It is a human experiment doomed to failure because the child will NOT be identical in every way, despite the hopes of the parents. One huge reason will be that the child will be brought up in a highly abnormal household: one where grief has been diverted into makeing a clone instead of adjusting to loss. The family environment will be totally different than that the other twin experienced. That itself will place great pressures on the emotional development of the child. You will not find a child psychiatrist in the world who could possibly say that there will not be very significant emotional risk to the cloned child as a result of these pressures.
3. Risk of abuse of the technology
What would Hitler 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. Going ahead with cloning technology makes this far more likely. You cannot have so-called therapeutic cloning without reproductive cloning because the technique to make cloned babies is the same as to make a cloned embryo to try to make replacement tissues. And at the speed at which biotech is accelerating there will soon be other ways to get such cells - adult stem cell technology. It is rather crude to create a complete embryonic identical twin embryo just to get hold of stem cells to make - say - nervous tissue. Much better to take cells from the adult and trigger them directly to regress to a more primitive form without the ethical issues raised by inserting a full adult set of genes into an unfertilised egg.
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cloning is wrong in many ways!
Human cloning is stoopid and horrible! People should not be cloned unless they give permissioin to be cloned. Cloning without consent of the original person should remain illegal.
Would you want to have a clone and not even know???
I wouldn't.
>jazmine Smith
Manila, Phillipines.
I believe cloning could be used to benefit the whole human species but at the moment it is just too risky and would result in many lives being lost.
Well it would be great to clone.Imagine losing your girlfriend and she dies and you just clone her
Even if you did lose your girlfriend, the clone would not be the exact same in many senses. The clone would not have everything that your girlfriend like the love for you and everything you and your girlfriend have been through. It just wouldn't be the same.
i believe cloning is illegal because you mess around with genes and this could harm many people with many deaths.--
i strongly disagree
i agree with matt.
I stongry dissagree with you zoya.
you are stupid, cloning is great i am a clone and i love it, you are a racist towards clones
Do people have the right to reproduce?
only if you are an elephant
it should not be done because god made one of us and everyone of us he made special. so i dont think we should make the mistake and go and mess around with nature. if god really wanted only two or more of the same person then everyone would have a natrual twin. but scince he made us special then i dont think the we should do any of it. so i think it is wrong to do stuff like that.(i am only 15 and i am putting those scientitis to shame)(my teacher said that)
While your opinion is respectable, please learn how to actually spell and use proper grammer before "putting scientists to shame".
thing is ... god dont exist my friend :)
while everyone has the right to his/her own opinion, i think that cloning may not be totaly bad.we could create body parts for people that their body won't reject. thus saving their lives. if we improved technology to this point humans could live longer, healthier lives. If god is against this, then he is probably not as good as we make him out to be(no offense). but for now, it is probably best to just stick to cloning animals whilethe kinks are still being worked out. (also, if you think your smarter than the scientists who created the possibility of cloning, why don't you try cloning an organism, no offense)
God is a concept made up by the government because people want answers. The question of where we came from can't be answered until after.
it should not be done because god made one of us and everyone of us he made special. so i dont think we should make the mistake and go and mess around with nature. if god really wanted only two or more of the same person then everyone would have a natrual twin. but scince he made us special then i dont think the we should do any of it. so i think it is wrong to do stuff like that.(i am only 15 and i am putting those scientitis to shame)(my teacher said that)
i recently did a report and this sight helped me very much. Lailah, I am only 13 but i think that your opinon was amazing. Your opinion helped me form my report (I am against it too), although i am in a different situation, i am jewish, therefor not obliged to be against it. Anyone who is interested in cloning, but likes interesting books, read the YA novel: "My Sister's Keeper" By Judi Picoult. And thanks to everyone again!
boo
What do you think about cloning?? Are you for of against or mixed (both, in different ways)???I really want to know...can you please reply me as soon as possible???>>>>>hehe thx a lot.
i was for cloning before i started to really think about it. Read my sister's keeper by jodi picoult. it really helped when i did my cloning report. now i am against cloning although i wish there was a different way to help those where cloning is the only way to save their lives. hope i helped
it should not be done because god made one of us and everyone of us he made special. so i dont think we should make the mistake and go and mess around with nature. if god really wanted only two or more of the same person then everyone would have a natrual twin. but scince he made us special then i dont think the we should do any of it. so i think it is wrong to do stuff like that.(i am only 15 and i am putting those scientitis to shame)(my teacher said that)
Cloning is bull . :)
im laeelya from indonesia, eighteen years old. despite from the other opinion, i have a funny question.. how do you think if i will meet a person that straightly looks like me but she hasn't normal body..lame.. of course it so bad. and i think the result is still zero about human clone.. its a law breaking action...
Dear Dr Dixon
I am a student in Biology (final year of secondary college-newhaven college, australia) doing a research piece on reproductive cloning and i greatly appreciate your thoughts and video. They have helped me out greatly in my research, especially the way you explain cloning and it's effects so well. I strongly agree with the point you make about the emotional impact on a clone. Its impossible to imagine the feeling one would get if they knew they were just a copy of someone else, just a freak of our developments in science, because it has never happened before and hopefully it never will, because then i for one wouldn't be able to stand for it in society.
With all the experiments done and all the repeats you would think that scientists would understand that this technology is still too complicated for us to mess with, there are lots of things we don't know about ourselves, our genetic material and how we function to be able to produce a clone of a human without anything going wrong. Even still if we did, then there would be no way to prevent the negative emotional effects which you have mentioned. Thanks for the giving us readers the opportunity to leave our thoughts, i do have a great deal more, but i am not a great typer and it is getting very late so i will leave it at that.
Regards,
Kyrill Kosaruk
Thanks - really interesting comments - do please help others by sharing more of your thoughts here. This is one of the busiest pages on cloning on the web so they will gain a wide audience. I suggest you post longer messages in no more than a couple of paragraphs each for easier reading. With appreciation. Patrick
It's me again. I have one more point to make. A little less religious this time, but just as important, I think. There are so many people in this world already, suffering lack of food, shelter, and decent health. Why don't the scientists working on those cloning projects use thier genius to make some sort of super firtalizer, and sell it at a reasonable price to farmers so, although the gas prices are killer, we might have extra for people in 3rd world countries? Or the could come up with some sort of very sturdy material for homes for those people? Something stronger than stone or concrete or metal. Or use all the money thier spending on cloning to look for cures for diseases we can't quite treat yet? That money could have such a better purpose. The research may have benefits, but to get to those benefits, you gotta sacrafice an aweful lot. I also wish people in America would stop buying those super-big homes and spoiling themselves. I'm comfortably middle class and Im doing just fine.
-Lailah
Thanks for another interesting post. A huge issue is that cloning is costly and involves great risk for any child cloned (medical problems as we have seen in cloned animals). In my view it would be far better to spend those resources meeting important and urgent needs in our world.
I'm a bit young to know much about this. I'm only fifteen, but im in a homeschool program which requires a report on this stuff and my opinion. I'm Catholic, so I know I'm obliged to be against it, but it goes further than that. I never really developed a strong opinion untill now, when I read the article on three reasons why it's not a good idea. But I still have to explain the opposing side's argument, and do my best to understand it. But here's the thing; God gave us free will. Some people say that if we weren't supposed to do it, God wouldn't have made it possible. But God doesn't condone murder, and thats possible. He doesn't permit fornication, torture, slavery, or cruelty, but we all know too well that those actions are very possible. The reason we have free will is that God is giving us an opportunity to prove that we love Him and are willing to obey. And that does not include trying to mimic His ability to make new life (except for intermarital sex). How exactly does the soul get into the body? I wouldn't know, non of us would. But if you're artaficially cloning, don't you think the person would be a little less normal? Not normal as in like everybody else, but not normal as in a direct creation of God. We're not worthy of the place science offers us. Although much of science is useful and wonderful, not all of it abides by the Laws of God (birth-control, fancy ways for killing people, etc.). And so even though I'm still just a kid and not exactly expected to meddle in this sort of thing, I do not believe that human cloning is a good, virtuous, or just thing. Cloning pigs and cows is one thing; God gave us contol (to an extent, a very small one, if you know how stubborn my cat is) over them: they are here for our purpose and companionship (USE DONT ABUSE). So as far as I'm concerned, making another piggy is just fine, as long as you don't make some super intelligent one that'll breed an army and try to take over the world (I doubt this situation is very possible, but i threw it in 'cos the idea of Tyrannical pigs cracks me up). But Humans are the race chosen by God to have the intelligence superior to all other animals, and it only goes so far. You just can't do God's job. Can you picture that? Humans trying to do a vital part of God's job. Can you say "super-huge disaster"?
Thanks for listening, yours,
Lailah
Dear Lailah, Thanks so much for your interesting and well written post. You make many points. I cannot with 11 million users of my pages / youtube videos answer in detail but I really hope (other visitors please note) that you will see many replies here so keep a note of the page. I had a separately human cloning bulletin board which had 200,000 messages read and 20,000 posts but got deleted accidentally so am keen to rebuild a human cloning debate here.
Wow, thank you very much for your insight on this issue Lailah. Like you i am currently doing a report on cloning and hearing someone else's opinion opinion on the issue greatly helps my work.
Thank You,
Kyrill
