Annie the Cloned Cow
Photo Source: USDA

Cloning, is it a modern miracle or a modern curse? Dolly the sheep was a harmless enough clone or was she? One must remember that before Dolly, many scientists thought it was impossible to clone a complex living organism. Dolly was the darling of the media. She was probably the most famous sheep to ever live. She was a sheep but she was more than that, she was a promise, a promise for the future that smacked of never ending food supplies, replacement body parts and maybe even eternal life. But Dolly herself had a short life. Ethical questions were being raised all over the world about human cloning. Even with the banning of human cloning everyone knew that it would be tried by someone, they just weren't ready to admit it.

Would it be correct for someone to raise a clone for parts? This seems to be about as unethical as one can get, but given the state of the world it is not unreasonable to suppose that it will happen. Another use for clones would be as the perfect double. Take a leader like Sadam. Just think if he could have employed several clones as doubles. We would have never known if we had him or the clone. Dolly suffered from arthritis and early death but since there was only one of her, scientists have no way of knowing if this was caused by the cloning. One thing seems to be true, when one is cloning animals there are a lot of problems, including diseases and premature death. But, many times, there are also problems with the pregnancy. Cloning should not be considered lightly. One of Dolly's problems, premature aging, might have been caused by the fact that an adult sheep was used to clone her. She aged much faster genetically. A paper was written on the subject by the scientists in the project and the essence of it was that even though Dolly was young, she had the genes that were of the age of the adult sheep she was cloned from.

So far it looks like scientists that want to clone for spare parts would have to preserve cells when the animal or human was very young or the clone might suffer the same fate as Dolly.

Movies have been made and stories written about cloned dinosaurs, but could this really be done, can ancient dna be revived and used to clone one of these monsters? It is theoretically possible. If you had a cell from a dinosaur and some of its dna and you knew haw to combine them, you could create a clone. It was suggested that you could find a blood sucking insect trapped in amber, there are quite a few, and extract tissue from the insect. There is a lot more to it, but I don't want to get too technical, lets just say the materials are available. Trying to identify the correct cells from a bug is a real problem and the technology to carry out this type of cloning is also a problem. When all is said and done you would need a host to carry the embryo. Some suggest using an Elephant as a carrier. Would the animal's system reject this foreign embryo.? Who knows.

Already in this country some scientists are insisting on going ahead with human cloning. A Kentucky based researcher told the National Academy of Sciences based in Washington that his group plans to impregnate over 200 women with clones in November 2004. Imagine this, since your clone is a perfect double, his fingerprints are the same as yours. Your clone, due to his environment, may be different in personality. He could even be a killer. This killer could leave his finger prints at the scene of a murder and you could be convicted of the crime. This could be especially problematic if you were cloned and didn't know it. Something like identity theft today. Just the thought of other thems walking around might be repulsive to some people.

The Kentucky researchers state that they will not be stopped by US laws against cloning or by the laws anywhere else. They said they will go to a country with no laws against it or even use a ship in international waters.

Is there really any way we can prevent human cloning, it doesn't look like it. Now lets look at another aspect of cloning. Could someone clone human organs and bones without creating a human being and if they did would this be more acceptable than growing people for parts? The answer may be yes. Scientists have been able to clone some organs and have already tested them on cows and the organs have not been rejected. The next step will be to clone human organs and see if they will be rejected. Since the organs are going into the body that was used to create them, the chances of rejection seem to be very small. And cloning organs for parts is acceptable while cloning people for parts is not.

It is beginning to look like the cloning of parts at least has a bright future. This is called therapeutic cloning. One big hurtle is that we don't know how to grow the organs by themselves. The way they are grown now is by cutting them out of the foetus as soon as they are formed. This is not only unethical but unlawful.