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The Ethics of Human Cloning By Chloe Huen | Illustration by Isabelle Zee | Layout by Shuwen Wen
It was six years before Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, passed away- but what if it had been a human? Cloning is the process that produces an identical copy of an organism which has the exact genetic material of the original. However, although cloning is viewed by the public as something unnatural and apocalyptic, cloning is not limited to laboratory based research, as natural cloning can often occur in plants or single celled organisms. For instance, many bacteria that reproduce asexually, create genetically idential daughter cells from the parent organism. In fact, monozygotic twins are an example of natural cloning, where the two embryos contain almost perfectly identical DNA. Artificial cloning is split into three parts: gene cloning, therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. Gene cloning is controlled very rigorously in laboratory environments, where copies of genes in bacteria, viruses or yeast cells are created
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for further study. On the other hand, the use of therapeutic cloning has increased in the field of medicine in order to create genetically identical stem cells to replace injured, diseased or dead tissue in humans. By creating stem cells or tissue that match the patient, this match reduces the risk of rejection which can happen if the immune system attacks donor stem cells.
showed that her telomeres were half the size of a regular sheep of her age because the DNA was copied from an adult sheep, providing a potential reason for her premature death as Dolly’s DNA was double her actual age. Telomeres protect DNA from damage, and as the individual ages, the telomeres shorten and their protective properties begin to deteriorate.
Instead of producing copies of single cells or simple organisms, reproductive cloning is able to produce genetically identical copies of whole animals. To do this, scientists take the DNA from an original organism’s somatic cell and insert it into an egg cell which has had its DNA removedthis can be done by using electrical current or injection. A historical event of the scientific world, was when The Roslin Institute successfully produced Dolly by cloning an adult sheep. Scientists were ecstatic because this opened a door for producing genetically modified livestock, or bringing back extinct species. Nevertheless, there proved to be many negative consequences to this process as Dolly only survived for six and a half years (half the lifespan of normal sheep) before being euthanized due to a variety of complications, such as Jaagsiekte sheep retrovirus, arthritis and a lung tumour. Analysis of Dolly’s DNA
The creation of Dolly sparked a lot of debate regarding reproductive cloning, and whether this should be investigated due to ethical issues and physical effects on the clone. The public were divided between whether human cloning would ever occur, arguing about the prospect of bringing back extinct species, and the scientific community saw the cloning of Dolly as a catalyst for numerous developments in medicine and biology, creating more personalised treatments for patients through the cloning of entire organs. While the advantages cloning could provide were very clear, cloning was still not encouraged and even banned in certain countries due to arguments in regards to the ethical concerns of the process if it were to be utilised on humans.
XIAO HUA 27/5/2022 7:23 AM
