i need points on the topic of cloning a boon or bane? and should i be in favour of it or against it?
Answers
Answered by
0
HUMAN embryo has been cloned in South Korea. All the alpha pluses in the land will at once anxiously call to mind Aldous Huxley's dystopia. The word cloning is now mentally inseparable from Huxley's novel, but in fact Huxley was not a simple genetic determinist. He realised that a clone of a human being was not necessarily identical with the human being from which it had been cloned. The production of his dystopia required not merely cloning on a mass scale, by the imaginary Bokanovsky process, so that clones were produced not individually but industrially, by the score and the hundred, but it required also utter uniformity of environment for the cloned beings to grow up in.
From the standpoint of an ageing conservative, it often appears as if a large measure of social homogeneity of the Brave New World type has already been produced in Britain without resort to genetic engineering. There seems to be considerable uniformity of taste, dress, opinion and character among the young that has nothing whatever to do with the vagaries of DNA.
A clone of you or me would not be me. It would be very different physically, for a start: it would most likely be considerably taller than you or me, would live longer than you or me, have better teeth than you or me, and undergo puberty two or three years earlier than you or me. A clone of Hitler would not be Hitler, at least in the sense of being the Reichsfuhrer. More probably, he would work in the Health Service Modernisation Agency or some such bureaucratic refuge for the beta-minuses.
Although the Huxleyan nightmare is unlikely ever to come to pass, therefore, cloning for reproductive purposes would nevertheless be wholly reprehensible. The reason for this is not that it would result directly in a horrible dystopia, but because it would be a manifestation of our ever-increasing, and deeply unattractive, egotism. What good reason could anyone ever have for wishing to clone him or herself? Only someone who looks in the mirror and thinks what the world needs is another me would contemplate it; and a world of such people would be almost as horrible in its own way as the world Huxley sketched. In fact, the South Koreans have cloned an embryo with quite other reasons in mind. They wish to do further stem-cell research, which (it is hoped) will one day allow us to grow human cells that can be artificially stimulated into becoming special tissues, for example, the islet cells of the pancreas that secrete insulin — to replace those damaged in a disease process. Because such cloned tissues will be genetically identical to those of the recipient, there will, in theory, be no problems with rejection, the bane of transplantation as it is currently practised
From the standpoint of an ageing conservative, it often appears as if a large measure of social homogeneity of the Brave New World type has already been produced in Britain without resort to genetic engineering. There seems to be considerable uniformity of taste, dress, opinion and character among the young that has nothing whatever to do with the vagaries of DNA.
A clone of you or me would not be me. It would be very different physically, for a start: it would most likely be considerably taller than you or me, would live longer than you or me, have better teeth than you or me, and undergo puberty two or three years earlier than you or me. A clone of Hitler would not be Hitler, at least in the sense of being the Reichsfuhrer. More probably, he would work in the Health Service Modernisation Agency or some such bureaucratic refuge for the beta-minuses.
Although the Huxleyan nightmare is unlikely ever to come to pass, therefore, cloning for reproductive purposes would nevertheless be wholly reprehensible. The reason for this is not that it would result directly in a horrible dystopia, but because it would be a manifestation of our ever-increasing, and deeply unattractive, egotism. What good reason could anyone ever have for wishing to clone him or herself? Only someone who looks in the mirror and thinks what the world needs is another me would contemplate it; and a world of such people would be almost as horrible in its own way as the world Huxley sketched. In fact, the South Koreans have cloned an embryo with quite other reasons in mind. They wish to do further stem-cell research, which (it is hoped) will one day allow us to grow human cells that can be artificially stimulated into becoming special tissues, for example, the islet cells of the pancreas that secrete insulin — to replace those damaged in a disease process. Because such cloned tissues will be genetically identical to those of the recipient, there will, in theory, be no problems with rejection, the bane of transplantation as it is currently practised
Similar questions