Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
Just before Christmas a religious sect claimed they had “produced” the world’s first cloned human. Since then there have been numerous new stories, some suggesting cloning is bad, some on how the sect have been unable to prove the baby is a clone.
Before that there was animal cloning, and dolly the sheep. While dolly is interesting, and really what brought all this to my attention, I’m going to stick to humans only for this discussion.
I’ve read very little so far about the pros and more importantly the cons of cloning. So I thought I’d try and summarise some of those issues I can think of here, and then try and draw my own conclusion as to whether dabbling in this way is good or bad.
Lets start by looking at some of the positive effects of cloning.
Firstly ignoring whole person cloning, the ability to generate organs and tissues from single cells could well be quite handy for transplant/organ failure situations. I’m pretty sure that fixing a damaged spinal column is a little more tricky than rewiring a car, but it’s things like that which could become possible. Likewise gene therapy (replacing elements of DNA in dud cells) could probably cure a few human degenerative diseases.
On a whole human scale the idea of being able to understand fully the human genome, and then use that to remove disease, and improve humans is quite an interesting one.
Taken the right way cloning and gene therapy could lead to the eradication of most diseases, followed by the improvement of humans as a whole. More intelligence, better physical stamina and strength, well mannered. We could also reduce the predisposition some people have to disorders and diseases.
Let’s just take intelligence for a start. We’ve all seen how the human race has progressed, things like computers (which allow this sort of thing), which have only really appeared over the last 50 years, to motor cars which allow freedom of movement, to advances in medicine.
Most of these recent improvements have come about because every now and again some bright spark has a good idea. Now imagine if we had a whole raft of specially bread bright sparks, all brought up and tasked with coming up with fantastic ideas. Imagine how far we could advance society. Things like populating other planets could be possible in no time at all.
Likewise we could reasonably easily engineer “workers”, physically strong, plenty of stamina and with a temperament suited to tough repetitive work.
Without too much imagination would could soon be designing people to match their predestined jobs.
Those are, as far as I can see the main arguments for cloning:
- better understanding
- advancement in medicines
- super humans
So what good reasons are there for not cloning?
Let’s start by countering some of the upsides discussed above. Firstly super-humans. Certainly with some countries (this one included) currently dead set on dominating the world, the ability to produce specialist humans would most likely lead to specially created armies. In it’s rawest form, breeding humans to be killed. Not a particularly nice thought.
And then we take that simple thought and apply it to humanity as a whole. We’d be creating people suited to a job, but of course we’d then give them little choice as to what they could do in life. After all they’ve been specially created to do that one job.
Although cloning itself doesn’t remove any “free will” elements, the way society is likely to make use of it (the most sensible, if your only goal is human advancement), means that people are likely to be tied to their job before birth, and will most likely be branded with their identity, and quite likely produce a very segregated society.
Next up we’ve medical advancements. While it’s true that tinkering with the genes could bring around a fair degree of medical advancement it also introduces the possibility of things going horribly wrong.
We’ve all seen how certain diseases have a massively high mortality rate, things like AIDS, ebola and so on. Now imagine if our genetic tinkering lead to a whole planet predisposed to being wiped out by one simple disease. After all if we’re all clones of one or two base stock, the lack of genetic variation could quite easily lead to such a situation.
And so in summary I think we have some quite good downsides to cloning too:
- humans become property (again)
- removal of free will
- vulnerability to diseases
So with those in mind, where do I stand on this. First there’s no religious view in the above, no “god created us as we are” or anything like that. Simply because I don’t have a religion as such. With that out of the way, I think that looking at the upside it’s quite tempting. Wouldn’t it be great to jump our society forward many millennia in a short space of time. But then flip side is much worse, the removal of free will and the sudden abuse of people as they become property. I can’t think that we’d ever be able to avoid that, and while human advancement would be great, I wouldn’t want to live in a society like that briefly described.
But the biggest worry I have is that of lack of genetic variation. That alone, a few years down the line could quite simple lead to most of the human population being wiped out in a very short space of time.
I think we have enough problems killing us off to worry about without going down the route of making us even more vulnerable on purpose.
What I don’t think should stop is exploration into the human genome, gene therapy and the use of cloning to produce donor organs (as a last resort). I think that all of these would be beneficial to us but without the same nasty side-effects detailed above.
So in short, I think I’ve decided I’m pretty much against cloning as a whole, but still for tinkering with genes.
Posted by Phil on January 07, 2003 07:35 AM | Categories: Technology