Editorial: Say no to clones

Although the recent announcement of a religious sect, the Raelians, that a woman gave birth to a child who is her clone is most likely a hoax, the situation does bring to the fore important questions about the ethics of human cloning, especially since more credible organizations may soon clone humans. When discussing cloning, one must distinguish between therapeutic cloning--which aims to use cloning technology toward some other medical goal--and cloning that makes a human who will develop and grow to fruition. Any law addressing cloning must differentiate between these two goals.

Therapeutic cloning should be allowed to continue, because although its current contributions to medical science are few, it has the potential to greatly improve human life in the future. Thus, while the true value of therapeutic cloning and the extent of its uses are currently unclear, the future value of the technology necessitates that experiments in it continue.

Cloning humans and allowing those clones to develop fully, however, raises very different questions, both of scientific and ethical natures, and should be prohibited. Some of the problems with cloning humans stem from the low success rate inherent in cloning, that although it is theoretically possible to clone a human, there would be several unsuccessful attempts to do so beforehand.

This low success rate could also lead to other difficulties, such as deformed children, when the cloning fails to work properly. Indeed, even clones that appear to be perfectly normal at birth may experience unforeseen problems later in life. This is what happened with Dolly, the first cloned sheep, who looked normal but then suffered from numerous problems as she grew older.

However, these types of success-rate-based problems could be temporary and might disappear as cloning technology improves. Even if this happens, cloning still remains a grave Pandora's box, the adverse biological impacts of which cannot be predicted. Humans have no way of knowing what sort of impacts cloning would have. One possibility is an increasing homogeneity in genetic structures, making humanity more susceptible to certain diseases or the manifestation of recessive traits. The costs of cloning are unknown, but potentially devastating.

One must be careful to distinguish between things such as in vitro fertilization or gene selection and cloning. While both in vitro fertilization and gene selection technologies run counter to natural forces, neither changes the basic sexual nature of human reproduction. Cloning does alter reproduction from a sexual process to an asexual process. Hence, while in vitro fertilization is a minor change, cloning is a complete shift in the way reproduction occurs and should be viewed with much greater suspicion.

Moreover, cloning does not seem to have any benefits, other than giving people the unmitigated ability to do whatever they want, something that seems to have very little value. Thus, balancing the potential costs with the potential benefits clearly require that cloning be banned.