Cloning

            Cloning is the process of creating a genetic duplicate of an individual. Since the February 1997 announcement of the birth of Dolly, a sheep cloned by Ian Wilmut, cloning research has increased considerably. Now it is time society must put an end to the debate on human cloning. Scientists are de-coding the last strands of the human DNA, so human cloning will no longer be a possibility; it is a reality that society has the ability to create but the decision to do so is still in our hands. Many arguments can be made for or against human cloning, but the bottom line is that this practice is unethical and would take away individuality and disrupt social values; thus, this procedure is one that the government should ban and society should not accept. .
             Because the risks of this practice greatly outweigh the benefits, cloning is unethical. There are two ways of cloning that are being used. One ways is therapeutic cloning, which is used mainly to create body parts rather than a whole new human. The other is adult DNA cloning which is how Dolly was created. Adult DNA cloning creates an exact duplicate copy of the original. The technique that produced Dolly the sheep was successful in only 1 out of 277 attempts. If this technique was attempted on humans, it would risk miscarriages in the mother and severe developmental problems in the child. Standard medical practice would never allow the use of any drug or device with such little study and without extensive human research. Ian Wilmut, one of the creators of Dolly, discovered later that Dolly was aging prematurely. Dollys cells were six years older than that of her chronological age. The cell that was used to create Dolly came from a female sheep at age six. A normal life expectancy of a sheep is twelve, but because her cell was already six years old, she only had 6 more years to live. The cells kept tracked of its age, which caused Dolly to die at age six and a half.