A Brave New World Heading Towards Disaster.
Human cloning is an emerging science in which genetic material is altered and manipulated in various ways in order to modify the characteristics of an organism. This new technology has been met with both acceptance and disbelief. Some people believe that human cloning is beneficial to our society and will open up a vast new world. There are, however, serious concerns that human cloning could tragically effect our society which many people fail to recognize: clones could suffer an identity crisis, no emotional family ties would be made between the clone and its parents, parents may view the clone as a product and not a true human being, scientists in a sense would be "playing the role of God," possibilities for a uniformed society would be in effect, and if taken to the highest extreme parents would eventually be able to create and design their own children. How then, knowing of all the drawbacks of human cloning, can we convince scientists to rethink their cloning fantasies and introduce them to the possible dangers and controversies human clones would bring to our society? Human cloning is an immoral act and would only cause tragedy and turmoil for our nation.
The concept of cloning has been around much longer than many people realize. Cloning was first used by scientists in agriculture. Scientists realized they could clone multiple types of crops which farmers could grow that would be immune to most pesticides. As a result, their crops would turn out larger, healthier, and more profitable. After the cloning of plants came the cloning of animals which led up to the creation of Dolly, the cloned sheep, in February of 1997 (Heinberg ix). Dolly was created out of the genetic material from an udder cell of a six-year-old sheep (Kolata 3). This represented the first time that a mammal had been cloned from the cell of an adult. Scientists then utilized this technology to begin studying the possibilities of human cloning.