Cloning: New high-tech and ancient morality

Ethical discussions of cloning and other high-flown technologies don’t seem to get to the heart of things; they tend to be too fine-grained. When Dolly first became known to the world in 1997, people at large began naturally enough to speculate on human cloning. Several medical doctors and at least one physicist are already planning to offer a clinical service. One well known professor said he would like to be cloned out of curiosity, as if this was justification enough, and another said that human cloning “raises no new questions of ethics”.
At present, cloned human beings exist only in science fiction, lurid tabloids and in the boastful and bogus claims of sham scientists and cult kooks. For now, the only destiny for cloned human cells is to help scientists understand and cure diseases. The reason to clone embryos is that the resulting cells and tissues will have the same genetic makeup as the person they come from. Therefore, they can be transplanted back to the person without fear of rejection. The reason that adult stem cells do not offer an equally valuable alternative is that embryonic cells are the only cells capable of turning into all the various types of cells that are needed to fight disease, disability and death. And no one has figured out yet how to get adult stem cells to revert back into this omnipotent state.
If your child is dying, you want all research avenues pursued and that includes both embryonic and adult stem cell research. The bottom line is that cloning for cures has the potential to do enormous good by saving the lives of millions of people and ending agony for millions more. These human beings and their loved ones aren’t interested in pieties and abstractions and science fiction. They are desperately seeking help for their ailments and they need to have medical scientists free to pursue those answers and cures. Banning all human cloning would be a highly unethical thing to do. The needs of children confined to wheelchairs, of parents dependent on oxygen tanks to breathe and of friends imprisoned by the creeping paralysis of Parkinson’s far outweigh the moral status of cloned cells that will never leave the Petri dish. Myths should not be the basis for public policy when cures hang in the balance.
The latent totipotency of adult mammalian nuclei suggests that it may be feasible to reprogram adult human cells for use in the treatment of disease. Thus, investigators may be able to develop strategies to facilitate the repair and regeneration of human tissues. Nucleo-cytoplasmic interactions that restore potency to differentiated cells are an important research focus with great potential in treating diseases such as cancer, diabetes and neurodegeneration.
Another potential application of mammalian cloning is the production of clones of genetically-engineered domestic animals, such as sheep, pigs and cattle. For example, bovine nuclei could be engineered so that medically-significant proteins would be selectively secreted into the milk of cattle produced by nuclear transplantation. Presently, the Indian Council for Medical Research(ICMR) has banned all forms of human cloning while the USA and Israel have put a moratorium for four years on research in human cloning. Cloning is a difficult topic, fraught with empirical uncertainties and uncertain moral boundaries. Indeed, we agree with those countries who would impose a moratorium on cloning – only we wish the ICMR would impose a moratorium, and not a ban, on all cloning, keeping the debate open on all of its possible applications.