Human Cloning

            On February 22, 1996, Ian Wilmut brought cloning of animals to our attention, when the first animal was successfully cloned, on that history-making day the cloned sheep named Dolly was born. Wilmut took a cell from the udder of a six-year -old ewe and sparked a jolt of electricity to fuse it to the egg of another sheep, which was then implanted into a third female. The only questionable aspect of the experiment was if the cloned cell was an adult cell or the offspring that the ewe was carrying at the time. Three reports in the July 23 issue of the journal Nature now lay those doubts to rest; Dolly is descended directly from a mature cell from the donor sheep.
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             Soon after, Ryuzo Yanagimachi, a student at the University of Hawaii, further proved that adult cells could be cloned. He performed an experiment that produced twenty-two cloned mice. In one run, Yanangimachi used the natural color coding of mice for extra proof, taking cumulus cells from coffee-colored animals, ovaries from the black ones and using a white albino mouse as surrogate mother. As expected, the clones were coffee-colored.
             Despite the great technological discovery, cloning is causing great controversy because the more we learn about cloning, the closer we are getting to duplicate humans. This brings up a large array of ethical issues. Human cloning is inevitable, and at the same time the public thinks of it as both practical and impractical.
             Human Cloning would be impractical because it would take a lot of money, resources, and it would be very risky-it could waste a lot of money. It is a very difficult procedure to do plus it is very unethical, especially right now, because of the extremely low success rate. One problem is that humans could be born with horrible developmental problems. Yanagimachi, the scientist who cloned mice from adult cells, does not think that humans should clone other humans. "If all humans on the face of the earth were infertile," he told reporters, "cloning human beings may be justified.