Therapeutic Cloning

Ethical Question: Is therapeutic cloning ethical? Definition: Therapeutic cloning is the cloning of stem cells to produce a cloned organ vital for living. First off, thank you for challenging us to a debate on the topic of therapeutic cloning. Here are our arguments for round 1. Playing God/Individual Rights If a clone wants to donate an organ it is entirely up to the clone, not the creator. It is similar to becoming impregnated and then selling the baby to science for dissection. Cloning people for various tasks originally relegated to the clonee is not unlike slavery in that the clone is given no consideration as to what its wants and desires are. As a society, people should feel ashamed to have put forth the proposition of creating slaves; how is a clone’s rights and privileges any different from the original person’s? Clones should not be considered to be of a lower standard than naturally conceived humans are. Eugenics is, in a nutshell, attempting to manipulate offspring by examining the genes of its parents. As an example, when a woman goes to the sperm bank for a donor, she is given the statistics of each donor’s abilities, including standardized intelligence, strength, mechanical comprehension, and what job they held when they donated. If a woman wants her child to be smart, she merely has to (hypothetically) choose a donor that is exceptionally intelligent, and hope that his DNA takes effect in the growing fetus. When applied to cloning, it is already known that we can clone, and that we can splice DNA. It is a small step from those being individual sciences to using them in a combined effort to create a "super-human." In effect, as it has already been hypothesized, many world leaders will probably create an entire race of identical super-humans in an attempt to better their armies and instill fear in the rest of humanity. A prophesized eugenics war could take place in the near future, maybe 10-50 years from now, in which no humans will be involved, except as prisoners or hostages. To recap, cloning’s benefits by no means justify the grave risks associated by the pursuit of this science, as it will likely end humanity’s term of ruling this planet. Technology Not Controlled Stability of stem cells: As of 2003-MAR, therapeutic cloning is still in its early stages of development. Stem cells have sometimes mutated, and thus been rejected by the recipient's body. In other cases, at least with experiments on animals, they have produced tumors. It is obvious that therapeutic cloning will not be feasible until these deficiencies have been overcome but even then would be unethical. Extracting eggs from women is "painful, costly and unreliable." 7 Focus on the Family, a Fundamentalist Christian group, cited an unknown expert who has said that the process of harvesting eggs would seriously injure about one percent of all female donors. 8 We have been unable to determine what form this injury might take. Assuming two dozen eggs per woman, this would still require over a half million women willing to donate eggs and run the risk of some type of injury. Therapeutic cloning will probably only become generally useful when a method is found to use non-human eggs as source material. Research is underway to use rabbit eggs. During the process, "the embryo will lose all traces of its rabbit origin." 7 The stem cells are then removed from the resulting embryo. In theory, these stem cells can be prompted to become any type of cell, though the methodology for achieving this is still largely unknown. He went on to say that it was 'clearly risky to continue to rely on the inefficiency of cloning as the main barrier to it being done'. He stressed that reproductive cloning was likely to have terrible consequences, judging from the results of animal cloning experiments. Developing cures: Methods have to be developed that will cure or treat diseases with embryonic stem cells. This looks promising. Research with adult stem cells, which has been underway for many years, have shown great promise. Unfortunately, adult cells are limited in their application. Research using therapeutic cloning is a new field, but it has already shown that stem cells from embryos have much greater flexibility than adult stem cells and thus have a lower success rate and are usually rejected by the human body. http://www.religioustolerance.org... The scientific limitations are that the number of embryos successfully created in this fashion is very low, sometimes as few as one or two out of every 100 attempts. http://scienceray.com... Unless or until this success rate can be improved, it makes the widespread use of embryonic stems cells for medical purposes unlikely. Cost/Black Market Organs As of right now, the cost of cloning is undeniably expensive. The cloning of Dolly the sheep cost over 5 million dollars alone. With humans, a more complex organism, it is estimated for the cloning of a human to cost over 50 million dollars when considering all the research, test trials, and services (btech.net). To break this down into the cloning of stem cells, it has been projected that millions of dollars would still be the cost to such a service. When we look at the cost of such a service, we must think to ourselves, “Would everyone have a fair opportunity for this service.” The answer is NO. The cost would be a service for the wealthy. This is another classic example of “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” The only difference is that rich in this case refers to a better chance at a better life. Cost isn’t always monetary. Cost can also be the emotional strain that it puts on families. Imagine Little Johnny, a sick little boy, who needs a cloned organ to live. Every time Johnny goes in for the organ something goes wrong and the hopes of the family get shattered. Another big issue that therapeutic cloning brings in the opportunity for companies to take over a service that is similar to “black market organs.” Though the organ and tissue donation market are highly regulated in the United States, underhanded dealings between shadowy operators are not unheard of. It's illegal in the U.S., and most other nations, to offer or receive compensation for an organ donation. But a black market for human organs does exist. Therapeutic cloning also plays a great cost to the adoption or orphans. There are millions of orphans waiting to be adopted but wouldn’t be able to because families who would normally get adopted after a death of child, would be left as an orphan. Surplus Population/Crime By keeping people alive by creating organs through therapeutic cloning, the death rate will decline, while the birth-rate would be staying the same. This will naturally cause an increase in the overall population. The increase in population would cause our resources to be used up faster, which will cause an increase in the amount of poverty and competition for resources. Competition for resources means that people who don’t have the necessities will find these resources by any means possible. The means of acquiring resources would require stealing,