Week-12 Discussion
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Should we clone humans? A scientist team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience announced in January 2018 that they successfully cloned two macaque monkeysLinks to an external site.. These are the first primates to be cloned and thus the technical hurdles to clone humans are cleared. First attempts at cloning macaque monkeys from adults were done in 2007 at the Oregon Health and Science UniversityLinks to an external site., but the resulting embryos were not implanted. Given the possibility of human cloning, would you feel this to be ethical? Note that this success is based on using fetal cells, not adult stem cells. The use of the latter has not been successful, which means that you cannot clone yourself right now, but could resurrect a miscarried embryo. See also the news report about the first cloned mammalLinks to an external site., Dolly the Sheep.
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The fact that scientists in China were able to clone two macaque monkeys is such an impressive milestone in biology and human advancement. Although it was just monkeys and not humans, the possibilities that are presented by this experiment are endless as a massive hurdle was knocked down with primates being cloned. The cloning of these two monkeys does present the possibility of human cloning down the line which leads to a lot of questions regarding the ethics of all this. Although I can see the logic in arguments for both sides, I don’t believe that cloning would be ethical especially since the process involves fetal cells and not adult stem cells. I feel like this could be considered exploiting fetuses and the possibility of being able to resurrect a fetus that died in a miscarriage is also a tricky topic. I feel like using a miscarried embryo and cloning it would not necessarily be “resurrecting” it, instead it would just be a genetic copy of the embryo that was supposed to live. A very important factor when it comes to ethics in most of these advanced biology technologies is the fact that these procedures or services would only be available to the wealthy, leaving a majority of the population unable to benefit from this.
