The Pros And Cons Of Cloning

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Cloning, especially human cloning attracts increasingly more attention after the first mammal cloning animal Dolly born in 1997. Cloning is divided into two categories: therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. Therapeutic cloning is more related to tissue level cloning to transplant healthy cells and reproductive cloning is individual level cloning. Thus, the term cloning in this essay is used to describe both individual level and tissue level cloning. Public have different views. Some people support it because of its medical value, yet some people argue that it may bring many safety risks and moral problems. Hence, decisions ought to be made to identify the extent of cloning. Therefore, this essay introduces two major benefits of human cloning on disease therapy and analysis two arguments against it on safety and ethical issues. Firstly, therapeutic cloning has numerous advantages in curing serious diseases by transplanting healthy cells derived from patient’s own bodies to replace the diseased tissue or organ, as well as medical research. One of the benefits is that it can treat a number of diseases, i.e. cancer, heart disease, burns and Parkinson’s disease. Lindvall (et al., 2011) reports that in 2008, scientists at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have successfully treated mice which had a condition like Parkinson’s disease, with cloned embryonic stem cells injecting to mice’s brains. In addition, this technology can avoid rejection reaction. Camporesi and Bortolotti (2009) explain that if transplanted cells are derived from the patient, as opposed to a donor, the cells will not be attacked by the patient’s immune system as foreign material so that patient will not suffer adverse effects brought by immune-suppr... ... middle of paper ... ...cloning can be divided into two broad category: potential safety risk and moral problems, and these concerns overweigh its achievement. In conclusion, with the development of cloning technology, public have different attitudes towards it. On one hand, serious diseases, like liver cancer, are likely to be cured by transplanting healthy cells and scientists have more access to medical research. It brings hope for infertile families to obtain a baby. On the other hand, it has raised public concerns about security risks due to high failure and malformation rate, and ethical issues about dignity, which are mainly caused by productive cloning. Hence, therapeutic cloning should be enhanced to minimize its potential safety risks in order to be put into clinical application, while reproductive cloning ought to be prohibited worldwide without the agreement on moral issues.

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