Cloning Perspectives

After reading Talia's take on cloning and my own, it seems clear that we both believe that cloning to duplicate humans wouldn't be in the best interests of our society. In both of our blogs we state that cloning of organs or tissues are an acceptable form of cloning for both of us, however Talia brings up another controversial issue when she states, "Creating human life in a lab, in my opinion, is not right based on my reasoning above." People have been creating life in labs for decades now, the process of in-vitro fertilization starts with a woman's egg and a mans sperm and they are joined together in a petri dish or test tube and then reinserted into the woman's uterus via her vaginal opening. If making people in a lab is Talia's main issue, then that aspect of cloning is already legal. However, she makes points about being able to procreate asexually and I completely agree that this is not a good idea. I feel that this will lead to a form of eugenics and people will strive to create the "perfect baby". I believe a quote by Franklin Thomas gets right to the core of the issue very effectively, he says, "One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings." This quote makes the point that it is what we share with others, emotions, intellect, empathy, fears, and understanding that makes us important humans, not what we look like and the focus of our future should always be on what kind of people we are, not what we look like on the outside.

In conclusion I think that Talia and I agree on most everything about cloning. We share the same thoughts about cloning being something we believe can be helpful to our world in a medical sense, but is better left alone when trying to clone a human in whole. Cloning humans takes many, many human eggs and the way to retrieve human eggs is very uncomfortable, meaning people would not do this unless they got paid to donate their eggs, and then the success rate of the eggs making it to embryo status is very very low. To me, this is a waste of time, resources, and money; money that could be spent on cloning tissue and organs for the people who are already living.