Even so, important questions about the process remain unanswered, Hunter said. A clone might contain all of the DNA of one parent, but other factors go into making babies the natural way, he said, and some of them aren't well understood. For example, each person normally inherits a sex chromosome from each parent - an X from the mother and an X or Y from the father. Apparently, the father's sperm brings something more than genes to the mating process, but nobody knows exactly what it is. But I want answers to all of the questions that I know are to be asked before I do something that involves humans. . . .
Human life is sacred.
Another practical obstacle is obtaining the eggs that would be needed for human cloning, said David Ball, who is laboratory director for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility Associates in St. Paul and also works with in-vitro fertilization programs in Kansas, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Zavos and his colleagues did not respond to requests for an interview about those and other objections to their proposal. Some religious groups argue that human cloning interferes with the very notions of family and what it means to be a parent and a unique spiritual being. Many of the broader ethical debates begin with questions of why anyone would do it. One cannot truly reproduce oneself in the sense of reproducing the prenatal factors, the environment, the type of family and social context that one grew up in.