Human cloning: ethical implications and scientific feasibility

Cloning

Our group is a morally committed organization that has had many successes in preventing various actions and activities when those activities raise moral objections. Among these would be our efforts to lobby for increased recognition of family rights so parents would have to be notified before an underage girl could get certain medical procedures, worked to prevent discrimination against people on the basis of religion in government actions, and work for tighter controls on abortions, though success in this last area has been difficult to achieve. More recently, we are committed to preventing human cloning and to protecting the integrity of human life by banning this dangerous procedure, which also challenges various moral prescriptions and takes the world down a wrong path. The cloning of animals has raised the possibility that some will want to clone human beings, and indeed some claim to have already done so, though with no proof offered at all. Passing laws against human cloning such as the U.S. has done is not enough, for other countries are still able to conduct this research if they choose, and some scientists have stated that they will go to a country that allows such research and do what they want. Our group intends to help create a moral atmosphere in which any such effort would be condemned as it should be so that all countries agree to ban human cloning as an immoral act.

The term "cloning" refers to three different processes with three different uses. Of the three, therapeutic cloning refers to the cloning of cells the removal of stem cells from the pre-embryo in order to produce tissue or a whole organ to be transplanted back into the person who supplied the DNA. The reason for this is: to produce a healthy copy of a sick person's tissues or organ for transplant, which "would be vastly superior to relying on organ transplants from other people" ("Embryo Cloning, Adult DNA Cloning and Therapeutic Cloning" para. 4). For one thing, the problem of rejection is overcome in this manner without the need for specialized drugs. The supply of tissue that could be cloned is virtually unlimited, and this would eliminate waiting lists for transplants.

Reproductive cloning is intended to produce a child, a duplicate of an existing animal, The process has been used to clone certain animals, such as sheep, and in the process, the DNA is removed from an ovum and replaced with the DNA from a cell taken from an adult animal. The fertilized embryo is called a pre-embryo, and it is implanted in a womb and develops into a new animal. This process has not yet been tried on human beings and is highly controversial, raising a number of legal and ethical issues as well as medical questions, none of which have been resolved. Some of the animals produced in this manner have been marked by genetic defects, so a human clone could be damaged as well. For this reason alone, many deem the procedure immoral ("Embryo Cloning, Adult DNA Cloning and Therapeutic Cloning" para. 3).

History of Cloning

Genetic Engineering

Genetic engineering involves several different ways of manipulating genetic material in plants and animals to produce different kinds of entity, and among the purposes are controlling for disease, altering characteristics, instilling completely new characteristics, and generally changing the strain of the plant or the animal. Cloning is just one form of genetic engineering. Such experiments can be dangerous, since it is never certain what effects the manipulation of genetic material may have and since any possible danger may not be evident for several generations as changes increase over time. Genetic engineering for food products may lead to damage in those who consume such foods, and given the long-term damage done by such substances as carcinogens, damage which may not be apparent for decades, the danger of adding to this problem through genetic engineering is simply too great.

Some genetic engineering has long taken place through the breeding of animals and plants for specific traits, but more recently it has been possible to make such changes at the genetic level and to produce new species virtually overnight and on a much wider basis, leading, for instance, to new crops with different characteristics from older crops of the same sort, such as higher yield, resistance to disease, the ability to repel insects, and so on. On the one hand, there have been concerns about making such changes, as if they might lead to new species that would destroy older crops, create new diseases, and so threaten the production of food or threaten human life more directly, a science fiction scenario that has not yet come to pass. Another concern, and one more difficult to refute, is these new foodstuffs may harm human life in the long run in ways not yet foreseen.

Wright cites a report by a National Research Council committee that "the most significant risk associated with animal biotechnology is the potential effect on the environment. In particular, the committee said that if engineered animals escaped into the wild, they could endanger native species" (Wright 4). No human risks were identified by this report, but it was noted that this might not prove there were none given that animal biotechnology is a new and changing field.

Another issue raised concerns genetically altered foods as noted by Charman, who points out that advocates of this type of research claim that this will lead to improved crops and that this is only a new way of doing what humans have been doing for thousands of years, though they fail to note that genetic engineering "gives humankind an unprecedented ability to create new life-forms by taking genes from one species and inserting them into another?

something long-time biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin characterizes as 'a laboratory-conceived second Genesis'" (Charman 74). Charman also notes that the goals of controlling disease and producing more and more nutritious food are good goals, but whether they will be met remains uncertain, for it is also possible that this biotechnology will instead "unleash greater problems than those generated by the polluting technologies it is purported to replace" (Charman 75).

The potential has been raised for using genetic engineering to shape future human generations, and this raises troubling issues of ethics and social control, as Resnik notes, after first pointing out the nature of both sides of the issue, and he finds that what is likely to happen is that such control over human genetics will lead to efforts to allow parents to select traits for their children, "and the long-term results of parental control over human genetics may further exacerbate existing social and economic inequalities and create a genetic caste system" (Resnik 428). Jeremy Rifkin notes how far some geneticists seem willing to go in shaping human life in spite of the potential problems that this could create (Rifkin 648).

Thus the matter goes beyond simply altering a life form and extends to altering life itself, determining why people are born as they are and then changing the equation to produce humans who are somehow more acceptable, and determining even mood and modes of thinking by altering genetic makeup. The dangers inherent in this sort of program are even greater and more apparent than those involved in reshaping food or animal life. Genetic engineering needs to be reexamined and rethought before these dangers become real.

From Plants to Animals

The word "clone" is derived from the Greek "klon," meaning twig or slip. Clone refers to asexual reproduction, or vegetative reproduction. The cloning of plants is an established practice because of the ease with which plants are propagated or cloned from a twig or a slip:

The edible part of the potato is an expanded stem known as a tuber, which, like other stems, has a number of buds or eyes. When placed in soil, each bud is capable of yielding an entire plant, and the crop so produced is a clone (McKinnell 6).

The essential fact of sex in both plants and animals, that hereditary material from two individuals is joined to form a new creature. The sex cells provide diversity so that each offspring produced is unique in its combination of traits. Cloning does not involve sexual reproduction, and so the cloned plant is not the result of a union of different material. The plant produced by cloning is a manifestation of the capacity for new growth of the old plant body, so the new plant is usually genetically identical to the old plant. Cloning is used in agriculture to produce high-quality, uniform products (McKinnell 6-7).

Cloning of animals is less common, but there is a procedure well established for permitting asexual reproduction in amphibians such as toads, frogs, and salamanders. This procedure is known as nuclear transplantation and is widely referred to as cloning. Frogs were the first multicellular animals cloned because they have an abundant supply of eggs and sperm that experimenters can use. The fertilization and embryonic development of the frog ordinarily takes place outside the animal's body in ponds, and so it is more easily accomplished in the laboratory in glass dishes, a method which permits direct observation of and experimentation with all stages of development. Experiments in the late nineteenth century on frogs provided the groundwork for cloning (McKinnell 9-10).

The method used a decade ago for the successful nuclear transplantation in amphibians required that the egg be enucleated, which meant removing the maternal hereditary material contained in the egg nucleus. Other hereditary material contained in the nucleus from a body cell would then be placed in the enucleated egg, and the resulting clone would be parentless:

Biologically, a mother is a mother by virtue of the fact that she contributes hereditary material via the chromosomes of an egg. . . A father is a biological father by virtue of the fact that he has contributed hereditary material via his sperm. Since no sperm has participated in the development of the cloned individual, there is no male parent (McKinnell 10-11).

Cloning higher animals has proven to be difficult, but scientists have persevered and have produced clones of livestock, including sheep. Researchers in Scotland recently succeeded in cloning cheep using a technique that has the potential to produce hundreds of animals. The researchers expect to combine the method with genetic engineering to create animals with specific traits. The method is called nuclear transfer and replaces the nucleus of an immature egg with a nucleus from another cell. In earlier methods, scientists obtained replacement nuclei directly from cells in embryos, but the new method uses nuclei from cells grown in a laboratory culture. An embryo has no more than 30 or 40 usable cells, while a culture usually features an almost endless supply. Genetic engineering with these donor cells is more feasible because a lab culture can supply so many cells to manipulate. A company would first select cells for cloning from prize animals and would then improve them further, such as with a gene that makes the animals produce milk rich in a therapeutic protein. This experiment was conducted with the embryo cells of Welsh mountain sheep grown in the laboratory. The researchers then transferred 244 of the nuclei to the stripped-down eggs of Scottish blackface ewes. This experiment produced five genetically identical Welsh mountain lambs, two of which died within 10 days of birth for reasons that remain unclear (Adler 148).

This experiment at the Roslin Institute in Scotland comes after a decade of the use of genetic technology to produce biologically identical copies of animals, but the old method limited the number of clones that could be produced. The new method makes it possible, when perfected, to produce thousands of identical sheep and cattle at a time. It is suggested that this will make it possible one day to produce cattle with leaner meat and cows that produce low-fat milk. The new method allows greater fine-tuning and more precise genetic changes in the cells used (Nichols 55).

Such experiments are only a portion of the types of work being done in this area. Recombinant DNA is DNA molecules derived from different sources that have been artificially spliced together in vitro to form novel hybrid DNA molecules not normally encountered in nature. Modern genetic engineering techniques based on recombinant DNA permit genetic exchanges between species that do not normally interbreed thus offering the opportunity for us to transcend the limits imposed by nature on hereditary processes. Using these techniques, scientists can manipulate genes individually by directly modifying the DNA molecules in which genetic information is encoded. This means that the technique has the potential to transform the genes of all species into a global resource that can be used to shape novel life forms obedient to the scientist rather than to the dictates of natural selection (Suzuki and Knudtson 115-116).

The sorts of genetic changes science has been seeking can be seen in the recently announcement by a combination of U.S. And British researchers that they have genetically engineered sheep and goats to secrete drugs in their milk as a means of giving the biotech industry a streamlined means for producing many pharmaceuticals. The livestock produced in this manner are called transgenics because their cells contain foreign genes which direct the production of proteins with medicinal purposes. Goats developed at Tufts University and Genzyme Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, bear the gene for TPA, or tissue plasminogen activator, a drug used to dissolve blood clots in heart-attack patients. To create the livestock, genes were inserted with a needle into fertilized eggs which were then returned to the female's uterus. Only a small fraction of offspring grew up bearing the foreign genes. Today, dozens of drugs are made in vats filled with genetically engineered bacteria, which are much easier to manipulate genetically than mammals, but milk can contain 100 to 1,000 times the drug concentration of a lab culture. Before livestock start producing drugs commercially, though, someone must invent ways to extract the drugs from milk, which is a trifling problem compared with the decade it took to develop transgenic animals ("Animal Pharmacy" 10)

Stem Cell Research

Cloning is also involved in stem cell research, which has itself been controversial because it has become enmeshed in the abortion debate. The issue of stem cell research has been argued for several years now and remains a contentious question, whether or not to allow this type of research. Those who argue for it point to the possibility that such research will lead to treatments or cures for a variety of ailments including diseases like diabetes and trauma damage like spinal cord injury. To date, none of these potential cures has been realized. Those who oppose such research claim either that this line of research is not as promising as proponents claim or that research on human stem cells is a moral issue and should be prevented for that reason.

This sort of research has been a possibility since November 1998, after two decades of research, scientists successfully isolated and cultured human stem cells, or "undifferentiated" cells, which may be considered the building-block cells of the human organism. These develop into the 210 different kinds of tissue in the human body. Medical researchers believe these cells may allow them to incubate tissue that can be used to treat people suffering from Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart disease, diabetes, and other cell-degenerative afflictions. Scientists harvest stem cells from embryos acquired at fertility clinics and tissue recovered from fetal cadavers from abortion clinics, but some ethicists are concerned that researchers may also use in vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques to create their "in-house" embryos (Cowley 52).

Stem cell research is related to cloning and is also called therapeutic cloning, a term that refers to the cloning of cells the removal of stem cells from the pre-embryo in order to produce tissue or a whole organ to be transplanted back into the person who supplied the DNA. The reason for this is "to produce a healthy copy of a sick person's tissues or organ for transplant," which "would be vastly superior to relying on organ transplants from other people" ("Embryo Cloning, Adult DNA Cloning and Therapeutic Cloning" para. 4). For one thing, the problem of rejection is overcome in this manner without the need for specialized drugs. The supply of tissue that could be cloned is virtually unlimited, and this would eliminate waiting lists for transplants.

Given the fact that such research is highly speculative and can be conducted on adult stem cells for most purposes, embryonic stem cell research should not be allowed because of the threat it poses to the unborn, with the possibility of future harvesting of fetuses for this purpose. The Constitution protects human life, and stem cell research could threaten it.

Potential Benefits

One of the benefits of human cloning has already been noted -if it could produce organs for transplant, it would do so for more people and in a way that avoids the need for the lifelong use of immunosuppressant drugs ("Embryo Cloning, Adult DNA Cloning and Therapeutic Cloning" para. 4). This would be only one of the possibilities for curing disease by means of cloning technology, and among the other possibilities raised are curing diabetes, Parkinson's, and other afflictions; reversing the bad effects suffered from heart attacks; avoiding the risk of down's syndrome; curing Tay-Sachs disease; reversing liver failure and kidney failure; cloning bone marrow for treating leukemia; and curing cancer. The technique may also make it possible to reverse the effects of spinal cord injury. Cloning technology could be used to test for and perhaps cure genetic diseases (Smith paras. 1-16).

Cloning techniques can help infertile couples have children, for the method would be more successful than current efforts in this area. Current infertility treatments are thought to be less then ten percent successful, while human cloning would increase this percentage considerably (Smith para. 4). Cloning technology has the potential to produce more and healthier children and can be used to perpetuate the genetic makeup of the parents even when they are no longer able to have children and even no longer alive.