Nearly a month after the supposed cloning of two humans by the Raelians, a religious sect, the Duke community maintains mixed feelings over the implications of human cloning.
While many in the scientific community support cloning for both reproductive and therapeutic purposes, professors in the Divinity School strongly disagree with the fundamentals of cloning, which they said is tantamount to "playing God."
Although few scientists fully believe in the authenticity of the Raelians' claims, none of them could comfortably rule out the possibility that humans had been cloned.
"I don't think you can totally discount [the claims], but it's funny there hasn't been any hard-core scientific evidence," said Randy Jirtle, professor of radiation oncology, adding that DNA testing needed to be conducted by an independent entity to ascertain the veracity of the Raelians' claims.
Dr. Robert Cook-Deegan, director for the Center of Genome, Ethics, Law and Policy, agreed that the way in which the Raelians have been handling the potential cloning is unscientific. "I do find it frustrating that we don't have access to find out whether it's true or not," he said.
Regardless of the legitimacy of the claims, both Jirtle and Cook-Deegan argued that the primary concern about cloning was the lack of safety.
Cook-Deegan stated that before cloning could be safe for humans, there needed to be more promising animal research first. "I think it's unethical to clone human babies because if you review the animal research, all those show a fairly high rate of bad things happening," he said.
Jirtle has been at the forefront of research on a mouse gene that causes large offspring syndrome in mice when they are cloned, and he equated the syndrome to the unpredictable problems that might arise in humans.
Furthermore, Jirtle proposed that primate studies needed to serve as a stepping stone to human cloning, as it is impossible to extrapolate the results from smaller animals to humans.
Jirtle said that if the safety of cloning were equivalent to that of natural conception, he would support cloning as a general method of reproduction, regardless of his personal stance.
"I wouldn't want a clone of myself - I'd find it spooky," Jirtle said, but he conceded that different people would have different opinions on cloning.
Cook-Deegan agreed that he would not want to reproduce via cloning even though he is not convinced it was morally wrong.
However, Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe professor of theological ethics in the Divinity School, thought cloning was simply "evil."
"The crucial question about cloning is why you'd want to do it, and there's no good reason why you'd want to do it," he said.
Public opinion over cloning is very divided, and David Wong, professor of philosophy and an expert in ethics, cited the need to first differentiate between therapeutic and reproductive cloning because they present different ethical considerations.
Reproductive cloning involves duplicating a human that will develop into a person, whereas therapeutic cloning would produce a new tissue or organ to benefit the DNA donor.
"Assuming cloning technology could be [safe], one consideration is that it gives people options... that could be available to uses that are not so justifiable," such as parents wanting to tamper with genetics in reproductive cloning, he said.
Although Wong could not justify reproductive cloning, he said, "[The public] needs a clearer sense of what good could come of [cloning] so it can be weighed against the harmful effects."
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