what are your thought on human or animal cloning? What are some positive and negative results from cloning?

Answer 1

Cloning is basically producing a genetically identical copy of living tissue. In a sense, you're making a twin. It doesn't necessarily mean the production of a whole human being - many scientists are working on just producing one tissue or organ.

It has a lot of potential applications. If we have tissue that is cloned from your own DNA, then there is no possibility of rejection. This could make existing surgeries (heart or skin transplants) much easier, and impossible operations (capillary replacement or neural regeneration) possible.

Likewise, it has a lot of commercial aspects. If you have a goat that's been genetically engineered to produce insulin in its milk for diabetics (this has been done already, by the way), it would be much more beneficial to clone such a goat a hundred times rather than engineer a new goat each time or trust normal breeding to not mess things up. Or if some animal is born that is otherwise massively beneficial, it might be reproduced as well. Those in favor of eugenics might use it to clone brilliant people so the world might have more of them.

Right now the PROCESS of cloning is far from perfect. This alone is causing much of the social backpressure you may see. It's not like scientists can take any piece of DNA, jam it into a stem cell, and invariably produce a full-grown creature from it. There are problems all along and it usually takes hundreds and hundreds of tries to actually produce a clone. Worse yet, there is reason to believe that without more modification of the transferred DNA, many clones might suffer aging and other diseases at much greater rates.

There are also ethical concerns. A cell with its DNA removed is still alive... but it's not really the same cell. And certainly an embryo with all its cells removed for separate projects is no longer an embryo, again even if all those individual cells survive. Are any of these processes 'killing' something? A matter more of belief than biology.

Likewise, there is some concern that a clone might be thought of as being the same as an original, which it isn't by a longshot. Lots of genes are variably expressed based on environmental conditions, so it's even quite possible for a clone to appear rather different. To say nothing about psychology. Some worry about inflicting psychological harm on the clone because of this, say a clone of Einstein being forced into science if he happens not to like it.

It could also be argued that cloning might make rare and precious things seem like commodities, or even be valueless. If you can produce as many geniuses as you like, would that make geniuses of little value, and people less than a genius worthles?

It's a mixed bag, to be sure. But it's been said that no technology that has ever been discovered has not been used. We're probably better preparing for eventualities rather than trying to prevent them...

Answer 2

We are already over run with animals we have to kill all the time because no one wants to care for them.
And humans- it's plain creepy to clone people too. We have plenty of them as well. Let's not go there.

Answer 3

I'm split. I think it's sometimes a good thing to save a species, but otherwise I think it is pointless.

Answer 4

You've seen Star Wars, right?