Guiomar Goransson-MartinMedical Ethics Term PaperDecember 3, 2002 Should human cloning be banned? In the past, the possibility of cloning a human was remote, and so most discussions on the topic waned. However, after Dolly, the lamb, became the first mammal born from a cloning technique in 1997, the prospects of cloning a human became much more promising, and with that promise came great ethical and legal debates. This paper contends that the beneficial results cloning of humans would bring far outweigh the negative. All technologies can be applied for good or evil. There can not be progress without some risk. After Dolly’s birth was announced to the world, President Clinton immediately announced a ban on federal funding for clone research and asked for voluntary compliance from private researchers. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) submitted a report which concluded that it is morally unacceptable for anyone in any circumstance to create a child using somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning (technical description of technique used to create Dolly). I. Pro Cloning:I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.Max Born (1882-1970) German Physicist. Nobel Prize, 1954. The most likely uses of cloning are less likely to be the bizarre and horrific mutations of science fiction literature and more likely to be an aid to infertile couples, who would probably first turn to more conventional, and less expensive methods initially before attempting cloning. It is likely to be requested by couples who may have a severe genetic disease or can not conceive a child, rather than by powerful or famous persons wishing to replicate themselves endlessly for commercial gain. There would be no market for buying and selling human clone children as the same laws that prohibit buying and selling children would apply to clones as well. Couples now use assisted reproduction and genetic selection when planning their families. Cloning is merely an extension of this type of technology. Manipulating embryos and using gamete donors and surrogates are fairly common. And most fetuses in the U.S. and Western Europe are routinely screened for genetic or chromosomal abnormalities. These are widely accepted and considered a boon by most to an expectant couple planning their family. Additionally, cloning may serve to bring a child into the lives of parents who have found out through today’s conventional testing that they probably would have no child at all otherwise, due to genetic defects in their own biological make-up. Some fear that that a later-born twin of one of the persons in the couple, would lack her own identity and be so harmed that it is morally preferable for the child to not be born at all. The child would lack individuality or freedom to create her own identity because of sharing the same DNA with another person. However, having the same genome as another person is not in itself harmful, as maternal (identical) twins show. Being a twin does not limit either twin’s individuality or freedom and they are sometimes closer than non-twin siblings. Cloning may be used to ensure that biologic children are healthy, to maintain a family connection or to obtain matched tissue for transplantation and yet still be responsibly committed to the welfare of their clone child, which includes her own identity and interests. People sometimes naturally conceive children in order to have company in their old age, to fulfill what they perceive to be God’s will for them, prove their fertility, have someone to leave their worldly goods to, improve or stabilize their marital relationship, and in the not too distant past, as a source for cheap labor on farms and in cottage industry. These are all selfish purposes so there’s no reason to believe that a clone would be treated differently than a natural child, or viewed as a commodity. Clearly, banning privately funded cloning research is unwarranted and will squelch important types of research. Cloning is still in its infancy. There are not likely to be many takers for human cloning as it is right now, and it will be some time before human cloning is even a safe and reliable reality. Rather than trying to stop human cloning in its tracks, we ought to make sure that it is thoroughly researched and done to the best of our abilities. When legitimate uses of a technique, such as human cloning, are possible, regulatory policies should not prohibit but instead focus on ensuring that the technique is used with responsibility and for the good of those involved. II. Cloning Cons:“Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Proponents of the ban on human cloning say that cloning devalues people by depriving them of their uniqueness. And specifically, in the case of using children to replicate themselves (such as in the case of an infant who has died shortly after birth), it devalues them and treats them as interchangeable commodities. It’s not right to try to replicate the dead child as no one should have such dominion over a dead or dying child where her genes are used to replicate her. Cloning, state its critics, represents the height of genetic reductionism and genetic determinism. Cloning is not a treatment for infertility, but simply gives parents an unnecessary choice, since there are other laboratory methods of conception, such as in vitro fertilization. Cloning changes the very concept of infertility since no one would need a partner with which to replicate her genetic material. A primary reason stated in, Taking Sides, pgs. 203-204, for the banning of human clone technology is that the person who would be chosen to clone would be selected because of some outstanding characteristic, perhaps a mental or physical trait; which hopefully would manifest in the clone. This is a crime against the clone because she would be denied her “existential right to certain subjective terms of being” ––– particularly the “right to ignorance” of facts about her origin that are likely to be “paralyzing for the spontaneity of becoming herself”. Knowing the history of the person from whom the clone originated would impede the clone’s “condition for authentic growth” in seeking to answer the fundamental question of all beings, “Who am I”? The Feinstein-Kennedy bill was correct in distinguishing the cloning of cells and tissues from the cloning of human beings by somatic nuclear transplantation, banning the latter. Thesis: "A person is a person no matter how small!" -Dr. Seuss Imagine for a moment that your daughter needs a bone-marrow transplant and no one can provide a match; that an early bout with mumps has made you sterile; or that your two-year-old has drowned in a boating accident and your grief has made it impossible to confront your loss. Presently, the law allows people more freedom to destroy fetuses than to create them. Much more than an ethical issue, this is a medical issue as well. We have a duty to treat people who need cloning to complete the life cycle of reproduction. Teenaged couples engaging in premarital intercourse are not scientists; they do not care for ethical debates nor have some scientific criteria to meet before creating a child. Alas, many are even uninformed about methods of contraception and disease prevention, let alone t he conception, birthing and care of a tiny human being! It is hypocritical to outlaw a far more deliberate and responsible act of creating another human being. The risks the child produced from the teenagers’ union will bear are well documented....low birth weight, poverty, premature delivery, to name a few; yet there are no laws, no punishments, levied against the teenagers for producing a child. It could even be argued that the teenagers’ child might become a burden (financially) on society, however, this is unlikely to happen with a clone since the clone is a wanted and planned for family member and obtained at great monetary cost. Experience worldwide shows that infertile couples may go to enormous lengths to pass on their genes. Given that the alternative is to accept a sperm or egg donation, and have a child that is genetically half their own, there will be couples who would prefer to have a child who is a clone of one of them. We can not disallow human clones using higher standards than those which are applied to the hypothetical teenagers whose only claim to producing a child is having normally functioning reproductive organs. First reactions are often emotional and most new medical technologies have been feared and rejected, rather than accepted at first throughout history. The belief that tampering with God’s domain can only breed a monstrosity, is still prevalent in our time as it was during Mary Shelley’s. Eight feet tall and hideously ugly, her monster was rejected by society. However, his monstrosity results not only from his grotesque appearance but also from the unnatural manner of his creation, which involved the secretive animation of a mix of stolen body parts and strange chemicals. He is a product not of collaborative scientific effort but of dark, supernatural workings. Eugenics is unfavorably connected to cloning and still leaves a nasty taste in our collective mouths because of the Nazis who seized on theories of racial superiority and extended them to the most fiendish ends. This refusal to consider the positive uses of eugenics lingers on for more than 50 years after its demise. Some fear that it is a small step from human cloning to eugenics - a pseudo-science aimed at improving the human race through selective reproduction. Eugenics, as embraced by the Nazis, was for reducing the fertility of persons with low intelligence and physical defects that could be passed on to future generations. Cloning could operate as a positive use of eugenics by increasing the number of births of persons who have good health and above average intelligence and negating “defects” normally passed on genetically to the child from the parents, if the parents so wish it, by adding or subtracting to the genes in the process of cloning. Sperm banks give you a shot at passing along certain traits; cloning all but assures it. In some primitive societies identical twins were regarded with such superstitious fear that the second was customarily killed. In our modern age could it be that identical twins are in some way less desirable than fraternal twins or other siblings? A prescribed amount of cloning would minimally increase the number of identical twins in society - hardly the horror it is made out to be by the sensation-hungry media. One of the main scientific objections raised against cloning is that it reduces genetic variability in a population. While this is true, the magnitude of this reduction in any conceivable circumstances is insignificant. For instance, cheetahs have gone through such a narrow genetic bottleneck in the past that at one point there may have been only one or two breeding pairs alive. Genetic bottlenecks are a crucial component in evolution, and our ancestral hominids lived under conditions of extremely tight interbreeding, a condition that actually facilitated rapid selective evolution. Modern society has greatly halted the process of natural selection, but every generation remains a genetic bottleneck. With the declining importance of natural selection in our present society, our future as a race, hinges on the fact that it is not necessarily the more fit segments, either mentally or physically, of the world community that will shape the genetic quality of posterity, but only the more prolific.¹ Changes in attitude towards reproductive technologies can be very fast, however. Less than a century ago, people were horrified by the artificial insemination of animals. Twenty years ago, the birth of the first test-tube baby created a lot of controversy and in-vitro fertilization was illegal in many states. The idea of transplanting a heart was once considered Frankenstein-ish. Public opinion on cloning will evolve just as it did on these issues. Nowadays, IVF is just another acronym in the dictionary. Banning outright even fundamental research for cloning humans would be like banning cars because they can kill people. There are dangers, but like any other technological discovery, cloning can be subjected to intelligent controls. An excellent reason for keeping human cloning legal is that a law banning it would be unenforceable. Cloning will take place whether such a law is passed or not. It will be done in other countries if illegal in the United States. If a worldwide ban were enacted, cloning would be done illegally in the countries that swear nothing is going on, or even legally aboard ships in international waters. If the United States fails to lead, many other nations have enough knowledge and resources to develop this new resource. Meanwhile, the crusaders are mostly driven underground, unaccountable, and posing a real threat. The risk lies not just with potential children born deformed, as many animal clones are; not just with desperate couples and cancer patients and other potential illicit clients who may be cruelly disappointed with little or no results. The immediate risk is that a backlash against renegade science might strike at responsible science as well. Many researchers see enormous potential in therapeutic cloning, of growing tissue for patients that is genetically identical to their own. Neural cells could be made for people with Parkinson's disease, new muscle for ailing heart patients and perhaps even whole organs might be grown, all free from the threat of tissue rejection. Trying to block one line of research could impede another and so reduce the chances of finding cures for these ailments and more! Cloning humans is a technology that is frightening to some people, but one that could be reasonably regulated. It adds a burden of responsibility to those involved but the benefits of human cloning so clearly outweigh the risks, fears, and misgivings of its opponents that it seems like a step backwards in our evolutionary path to refuse it. We could use current reproductive technologies in the U.S. as a model of public policy for human cloning. Currently, most private health insurance plans and government assistance programs do not cover the cost of fertility treatment. However, if you want it you pay for it yourself, its not illegal and its practice is controlled by ethical standards imposed by the fertility industry itself. It would be interesting, indeed, to know what Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley would have to say about the ethics of cloning were she alive today. Between 1815 to 1819, three of her four children died in infancy. 1. The Case FOR Cloning By Roger Pearson Institute for the Study of Man The Mankind Quarterly , vol. 38, number 3, pp. 69-73