Cloning is said to have started in 1952 when scientists successfully cloned a frog by removing the nucleus from a frog cell and replacing it with the nucleus of an embryonic frog cell.[1] More than three decades after, or on July 15, 1996, Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, was born.
This was followed by cloning of other mammals such as pigs, goats, cows, mice and rabbits. While this proved to be a significant scientific breakthrough, some segments of the population were outraged. The possibility that a lunatic scientist will conduct discreet scientific experiments designed to duplicate every human being on Earth immediately crossed the mind of some people. Instead of welcoming this development, cloning was perceived as a mad science experiment with a religious and moral issue that should be abandoned and stopped.
This essay seeks to shed some light on the issue of cloning. The objective of this paper is to prove that cloning is not necessarily about producing and duplicating human beings and that cloning can be used to help people find cure to dreaded diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and diabetes.
Reproductive vs. Therapeutic Cloning
Distinction must be made between two kinds of cloning: reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning.[2] There is a general consensus that reproductive cloning is morally reprehensible.[3] Therapeutic cloning, however, is different as it does not entail the creation and duplication of human beings or the degradation of the value of human life. Therapeutic cloning, as the name suggests, seeks to find ways to treat human diseases and improve quality of life that has eluded mankind.
It is also called embryo cloning since it involves the production of human embryos for use in research. Its goal is not to create cloned human beings but to harvest stem cells that can be used to study human development and to treat diseases. While both reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning involves the removal of DNA from an egg of an animal and replacing it with DNA from another animal people should not confuse the two concepts. In Therapeutic cloning, these stem cells are developed are into specific cells.[4] In reproductive cloning, these stem cells are implanted into a womb to develop a baby.[5]