The Cloning of Plants and Animals Will Be Benefical.

You admit that very few xenotransplants are successful. But then you ask "But do you see another way of [getting] these 180,000 people working organs, when the numbers of organ donors are steadily decreasing?" I think the key phrase in that question is "working organs." No matter what solution you wish to propose, one key factor that must be present is that the transplanted organs actually work and function inside the recipient. The low success rate combined with the rejection of organs and the poor health of clones in general make your idea a poor solution. I mentioned the beginning of xenotransplants in humans and mentioned that both patients died. To this your reply is that the low success rate was due to the fact that they took place in 1906. But stating that more recent xenotransplants would have more success is not really true. Moving forward to 1964, you will find that six xenotransplants took place that year. All six were renal transplants and the donor in all cases was a baboon (which is genetically closer to humans than pigs). All six of these people died. Twenty years after that a baboon heart was transplanted into a human baby. That child died within weeks after the transplant. Moving forward to 1992, two liver transplants were performed. Once again the donor species was a baboon. Both of these patients died soon after as well. Now I know that you mentioned pigs rather than baboons, but since baboons are genetically closer to us, the chance of success with them would probably be even greater. Nevertheless, I will mention that in 1992 there were two xenotransplants performed with the liver of a pig. One of the two patients survived, but the one that did survive received a human liver shortly after the xenotransplant. The other that died was also waiting on a human liver. That illustrates a point that I've previously neglected. Even when xenotransplants are performed, they are very rarely intended to be permanent. They merely keep patients alive until human organs can be found. Cloning a whole bunch of pigs for this purpose will not solve the problem of decreasing organ donors. After the very short window of time that all of these patients would receive with such transplants, the amount of organs available would still be lacking. This is because human organs must be found soon after a xenotransplant. When I mention the poor health of clones in general you agree. But then you say that some simple steps could help prevent the health problems and increase a clone's longevity. The health problems are, for the most part, a mystery. No one has been able to discover why so many health problems are prevalent in clones. Without even knowing the reason, we cannot take steps to prevent this. As far as longevity is concerned, you state that using younger cells could help increase longevity. But in actuality, there have been numerous cloning experiments performed with younger cells. In fact, one of the current breakthroughs in cloning involving cows showed that aged cells have produced clones similar to those from young cells. It has led scientists to rethink their previous notion that the shortening of the telomeres is the factor that leads to aging and senescence. So your statement "Clones are made from adult cells" is incorrect. "Over time, the cloning process will be near-perfect, and many of these diseases and premature deaths will not occur as often." You have absolutely no way of knowing whether or not this is true. This is pure speculation. The future may hold many things in store. Perhaps scientists will discover why clones are less healthy, and perhaps they will discover that this will always be the case, even in theory. We don't know. When I speak of plant cloning helping third world countries but simultaneously hurting the farmer, you say that this probably won't happen. But although you point out that farmers rely not only on crops, but also livestock, you have to consider this a bit more. The farmers currently rely on both livestock and crops for income. Reducing that to only livestock will definitely hurt them, even if there is still a source of income present. As far as third world countries, you can look for many other ways to feed them. Cloning simply doesn't make sense. To spend all of the time and the money required to clone a huge amount of crops for a third world country would be counterproductive. If all of that time and money is going to be spent anyway, then they can clearly be fed natural food. It isn't like the world doesn't have enough food. Are you aware that the government pays farmers to burn crops to control the price of food? There is plenty of food that goes to waste. It does not need to be cloned. When it comes to deforestation, I pointed out that this would reduce the biodiversity. Reducing the biodiversity of any species can be fatal. Variety is essential to life. It is what drives evolution, and it is what allows certain members of a population to survive disasters. When it comes to this, you state "I'm sure many scientists, or whoever would conduct this procedure would see it as naive to clone these plants from one single plant. Scientists wouldn't be dumb enough to take the DNA of a single tree, clone it, and send it all over the world, for the sole purpose of preventing this spread of disease." But this misses the point. When cloning trees to prevent deforestation you must ask: How many different plants will be used? One? Two? Sixteen? Thirty? The thing is that no matter how many different plants are used, the biodiversity of that region would greatly plummet. Reducing the biodiversity does not mean that it must be reduced to a single genome. Any practical amount chosen to clone would still result in a lack of variety. And that spells a recipe for disaster. In your final sentence you once again speculate that the process of cloning will be perfected after a certain amount of tries. But in the real world, we cannot go based on what you predict might happen without any evidence to back it up. We must go with what we have. And what we have right now are large amounts of mutations that occur with cloning, unhealthy cloned animals that die of premature deaths, and xenotransplants that, more often than not, result in the death of the patient.