Featured Editorial

Alex Liao

Why Human Cloning is Unethical and Biologically Dangerous

So, on the outside, cloning appears to be a good thing. We can easily create humans, perform medical research, and potentially use them for blood and organ donations. However, this poses a lot of ethics issues and also biological hazards.

Firstly, it is difficult to determine ethically when the clone is considered to be “alive”, able to make its own choices, and deserving of all human rights. Because it is created mechanically and not born naturally, it is difficult to gauge when it can be considered to be “alive”.

In addition, even when we have determined the ethics, it then becomes clearly unethical to use them for medical research or for body parts. A clone deserves no fewer rights than any other person born naturally into the world. It is clearly unethical to use a present human for medical research or for body parts (unless they consent), so it should be no less unethical to use a clone for the same purposes (again, unless they consent). Thus, with the matter of consent in the way, it appears that cloning people for this purpose is obselete, and this can be proven as such.

There are many people in the world, and it is nearly impossible for over 50% of them, even within a region, to need to accept donations for blood or organs. There are clearly enough people to support donations, but yet it is still a very close cut to get enough donations. This is because not enough people are consenting. By cloning people, you are increasing the pool of people willing to donate by an amount, but you are also increasing the number of people who may need donations in their lifetime. Additionally, clones are subject to the same biological issues as their models (from whom they were cloned), so if done incorrectly, you may be increasing the number of people needing donations without increasing the donating party size.

Even with this in mind, there are further concrete issues relating purely to science and not to ethics. If clones of biologically unhealthy models are made, they will likely not survive as well. Clones will likely be made of very healthy models, such that they will have a higher chance of survival (we see that even if clones are made from random models, the healthier ones have a higher chance of survival and reproduction).

First off, this adds to the ever increasing issue of global overpopulation; we are not helping the situation by creating even more people. With this, the difficulty of survival increases, and natural selection becomes even stronger, thus enforcing the survival of the fittest rule.

With this in mind, a second point can be raised. With the survival of the fittest becoming stronger, these healthy clones are likely to survive. This point being mainly scientific, we see that with a large population consisting of mainly a few types of DNA, this reduces the size of the genetic pool. What this means is that when people reproduce, it will lower the amount of available genetic diversity. When people with the same genes have genetic overlaps in reproduction, it has a very high chance of causing various genetic disorders, mental illnesses, and other ailments. It seems then that it would not be beneficial to society to clone humans for research purposes or medical purposes, seeing as to how it will not be as simple as we first perceive, and secondly that it creates even more issues to society.

But what about other purposes of cloning? That is up to you to think about.