Do you think it is a good idea to clone humans? Is there any value in it?
I think it helps to get it clear what cloning is and is not. If, for example, you could recover some of Hitler's DNA and clone him from it would you get a little man with a moustache, a racist demagogue? Probably not. The person we grow to be has two influences - our genes, and the environment in which our genes live. This means other genes, or physical body, and our social interactions. Would we get a little man? Probably not because there would be different nutrition. Would he have a moustache? Who can tell what influences a man to grow a moustache! But since whatever the influences were they would be different now, so maybe a moustache, maybe a handlebar moustache, maybe a beard, and maybe clean-shaven. And as for a racist demagogue, who can tell what influences Hitler experienced, but one major one would for certain be different: Hitler was a foot soldier in the First World War and whatever effect that had on him would be absent now. And then there is the unknown effect of his peers - say he went to school in Peterborough, then most likely he'd acquire attitudes similar to yours. So that's what cloning doesn't do: it doesn't produce a copy of an adult individual.
What cloning does do is produce a set of stem cells that can grow into any other cell in the body. This opens the possibility of developing treatments for serious diseases. Some of these are:
- Cloning healthy heart cells and using them to repair damage done in a heart attack.
- Using embryonic stem cells organs or tissue to repair spinal chord injuries, burns, and diseased liver, kidney and lungs.
- Repairing defective genes (the average person has 8 defective genes. It's a matter of luck if these are trivial or important.)
- Producing healthy bone marrow for children with leukaemia.
- Treatments for cancer and cystic fibrosis.
There is no guarantee of any of these, of course. But cloning offers the reasonable hope that treatments might be discovered. So the argument in favour is that great public good might be expected to follow. The only reasons that could possibly be advanced for not trying to achieve such benefits are religious ones that argue that the human zygote already has a soul or is for some other reason not available to be worked on. I've dealt with this under the abortion question, and I won't go into it again here. Just remember that when anaesthesia was invented religious people argued against its use for women in childbirth and in the same way argued against vaccination against smallpox. So their track record is not good. (And before I am corrected, Rev. Thomas Chalmers (Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland), and Rabbi Abraham De Sola (Canada's first Rabbi) were in written agreement with anaesthesia from the start. If only religious opinion formers could speak with one voice - but as it all boils down to opinion that isn't going to happen.)
But it seems clear to me that we must do this work for the benefit of generations to come.
