Far Eastern University Department of Arts and Sciences Cell Biology
Human Cloning
Bartocillo, Aye Mee F. Bio532
Introduction:
Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of a human. It does not usually refer to monozygotic multiple births, human cell or tissue reproduction. The ethics of cloning is an extremely controversial issue. The term is generally used to refer to artificial human cloning; human clones in the form of identical twins are commonplace, with their cloning occurring during the natural process of reproduction. There are two commonly discussed types of human cloning: therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. Therapeutic cloning involves cloning cells from an adult for use in medicine and is an active area of research, while reproductive cloning would involve making cloned humans. Such reproductive cloning has not been performed and is illegal in many countries. A third type of cloning called replacement cloning is a theoretical possibility, and would be a combination of therapeutic and reproductive cloning. Replacement cloning would entail the replacement of an extensively damaged, failed, or failing body through cloning followed by whole or partial brain transplant.
Significance of the Paper
This research was conducted to gain more information to further understand human cloning. This paper will also discuss the different types of cloning and present some researches on human cloning.
Objectives
At the end of this paper the researcher should be able to: Identify and differentiate the difference between therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. 2. To enumerate some researches that was done in the context of human cloning. 1.
Limitation of the Study
This research will only focus on the information about human cloning. It will also discuss the different types of human cloning and present some researches that include human cloning.
Definition of terms:
Human cloning - The term is generally used to refer to artificial human cloning; human clones in the form of identical twins are commonplace, with their cloning occurring during the natural process of reproduction. Therapeutic cloning - involves cloning cells from an adult for use in medicine and is an active area of research Reproductive cloning - would involve making cloned humans. Such reproductive cloning has not been performed and is illegal in many countries.
Researches: Artificial trimming of human embryos in 1993
Just five months later Jerry Hall of Washington University announced that he too had managed to artificially twin identical human embryos in a process that has always been perfectly legal in Britain, although requiring a licence. The embryos he used were defective and were destroyed shortly after the experiments. Nevertheless, his work caused public outcry. The event was reported in scientific language as part of a research paper in a journal but the significance was completely missed. The trouble is that genetics is complicated and understood by only a few journalists in any depth. Perhaps that is why the BBC decided when the news broke about Dolly the sheep that the story should not be covered at all because it was not news. This bizarre line was held for half a day after I first telephoned Press Association and the Sunday Telegraph to tell them that another paper was about to run the story on the front page. The Sunday Telegraph responded at 9pm Saturday night by stopping the paper and redoing their own front page. Press Association ran two pages on it, sent all over the world. Within an hour television companies globally were beginning to wake up. Within 48 hours President Clinton was issuing emergency measures having been shocked by what was possible under US law. Human cloning for new organs
One reason people have given for doing this kind of research is to make spare parts in the future. Once an embryo has been twinned, one embryo can be implanted and allowed to develop into a baby, while the other is frozen. If the child later develops an illness such as leukaemia, then the frozen twin could be thawed and implanted into a surrogate mother, to be culled for spare parts after a few months' gestation. You and I may react against such ideas, but when sick or dying children are involved, pressures can
be enormous to do all that is scientifically possible. Parents are very persuasive. Who can stare a beautiful child in the face and try to explain about ethics in the face of possible death, about statistical chances and moral dangers ? These things are extremely difficult and genetics is making choices more complex still. A number of steps have already been taken. For example, tissue from aborted foetuses is already used to treat adults. Time-warp twins have already been born - non-identical twins conceived in the laboratory on the same day, but implanted 18 months apart. And it is not unknown for a mother to agree to have another child for the express purpose of providing much needed transplant material for the older child. Spare part production from clones would extend these principles. For some time, I have speculated that we would be able to go further: instead of merely producing artificial twins identical to each other but not to their parents, we would one day be able to produce several hundred identical children, just using human eggs and cells from an adult (nuclear transfer). This too was dismissed out of hand as alarmist and fanciful by leading authorities, despite the fact that such experiments had already been carried out successfully in frogs as long ago as 1952. Frogs are easier than mammals to manipulate which is probably why we heard in 1997 of headless frogs rather than headless sheep. The truth is that when it comes to cloning of mammals there has been at times a deliberate conspiracy of silence. At the very moment of such protestations, advanced experiments of varying kinds were already taking place in utmost secrecy. Make no mistake: gene technology has the power to cure, feed, alter and destroy us, and many scientists are scared of a massive public reaction which could stop their work - if you find out what they are up to. There is a reluctance to tell the full story until afterwards. Cloning human embryos for research
Some scientists claim that cures for certain diseases will only be found by cloning human embryos for research. Investors are not convinced: since UK Parliament approved human cloning for research there have been less than five applications. One was a research facility in Newcastle, the other was the Edinburgh creators of Dolly. Neither facility succeeded in raising enough funds and most of the work quickly ground to a halt. The fact is that cloned human embryos have been left behind by huge advances in adult stem cell research, which has attracted large amounts of research funding.
How Human Cloning Will Work On July 5, 1997, the most famous sheep in modern history was born. Ian Wilmut and a group of Scottish scientists announced that they had successfully cloned a sheep named Dolly. If you stood Dolly beside a "naturally" conceived sheep, you wouldn't notice any differences between the two. In fact, to pinpoint the only major distinguishing factor between the two, you'd have to go back to the time of conception because Dolly's embryo developed without the presence of sperm. Instead, Dolly began as a cell from another sheep that was fused via electricity with a donor egg. Just one sheep -- no hanky-panky involved. While Dolly's birth marked an incredible scientific breakthrough, it also set off questions in the scientific and global community about what -- or who -- might be next to be "duplicated." Cloning sheep and other nonhuman animals seemed more ethically benign to some than potentially cloning people. In response to such concerns in the United States, President Clinton signed a five-year moratorium on federal funding for human cloning the same year of Dolly's arrival. Today, after more than a decade since Dolly, human cloning remains in its infancy. Although cloning technology has improved, the process still has a slim success rate of 1 to 4 percent . That being said, science is headed in that direction -- pending governmental restraints. Scientists have cloned a variety of animals, including mice, sheep, pigs, cows and dogs. In 2006, scientists cloned the first primate embryos of a rhesus monkey. Then, in early 2008, the FDA officially deemed milk and meat products from cloned animals and their offspring safe to eat.
Figure 1. human clones
Benefits of human cloning There are many ways in which in which human cloning is expected to benefit mankind. Below is a list that is far from complete. •
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Dr. Richard Seed, one of the leading proponents of human cloning technology, suggests that it may someday be possible to reverse the aging process because of what we learn from cloning. Human cloning technology could be used to reverse heart attacks. Scientists believe that they may be able to treat heart attack victims by cloning their healthy heart cells and injecting them into the areas of the heart that have been damaged. Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States and several other industrialized countries. There has been a breakthrough with human stem cells. Embryonic stem cells can be grown to produce organs or tissues to repair or replace damaged ones. Skin for burn victims, brain cells for the brain damaged, spinal cord cells for quadriplegics and paraplegics, hearts, lungs, livers, and kidneys could be produced. By combining this technology with human cloning technology it may be possible to produce needed tissue for suffering people that will be free of rejection by their immune systems. Conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, heart failure, degenerative joint disease, and other problems may be made curable if human cloning and its technology are not banned. Infertility. With cloning, infertile couples could have children. Despite getting a fair amount of publicity in the news current treatments for infertility, in terms of percentages, are not very successful. One estimate is that current infertility treatments are less than 10 percent successful. Couples go through physically and emotionally painful procedures for a small chance of having children. Many couples run out of time and money without successfully having children. Human cloning could make it possible for many more infertile couples to have children than ever before possible. Plastic, reconstructive, and cosmetic surgery. Because of human cloning and its technology the days of silicone breast implants and other cosmetic procedures that may cause immune disease should soon be over. With the new technology, instead of using materials foreign to the body for such procedures, doctors will be able to manufacture bone, fat, connective tissue, or cartilage that matches the patients tissues exactly. Anyone will able to have their appearance altered to their satisfaction without the leaking of silicone gel into their bodies or the other problems that occur with present day plastic surgery. Victims of terrible accidents that deform the face should now be able to have their features repaired with new, safer, technology. Limbs for amputees may be able to be regenerated. Breast implants. Most people are aware of the breast implant fiasco in which hundreds of thousands of women received silicone breast implants for cosmetic reasons. Many came to believe that the implants were making them ill with diseases of their immune systems. With human cloning and its technology breast augmentation and other forms of cosmetic surgery could be done with implants that would not be any different from the person's normal tissues. Defective genes. The average person carries 8 defective genes inside them. These defective genes allow people to become sick when they would otherwise remain healthy.
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With human cloning and its technology it may be possible to ensure that we no longer suffer because of our defective genes. Down's syndrome. Those women at high risk for Down's syndrome can avoid that risk by cloning. Tay-Sachs disease. This is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder could be prevented by using cloning to ensure that a child does not express the gene for the disorder Liver failure. We may be able to clone livers for liver transplants Kidney failure. We may be able to clone kidneys for kidney transplants Leukemia. We should be able to clone the bone marrow for children and adults suffering from leukemia. This is expected to be one of the first benefits to come from cloning technology. Cancer. We may learn how to switch cells on and off through cloning and thus be able to cure cancer. Scientists still do not know exactly how cells differentiate into specific kinds of tissue, nor to they understand why cancerous cells lose their differentiation. Cloning, at long last, may be the key to understanding differentiation and cancer. Cystic fibrosis. We may be able to produce effective genetic therapy against cystic fibrosis. Ian Wilmut and colleagues are already working on this problem. Spinal cord injury. We may learn to grow nerves or the spinal cord back again when they are injured. Quadriplegics might be able to get out of their wheelchairs and walk again. Christopher Reeves, the man who played Superman, might be able to walk again. Testing for genetic disease. Cloning technology can be used to test for and perhaps cure genetic diseases.
The above list only scratches the surface of what human cloning technology can do for mankind. The suffering that can be relieved is staggering. This new technology heralds a new era of unparalleled advancement in medicine if people will release their fears and let the benefits begin. Why should another child die from leukemia when if the technology is allowed we should be able to cure it in a few years time? From various e-mail sent to the Human Cloning Foundation, it is clear that many people would support human cloning in the following situations:
1) A couple has one child then they become infertile and cannot have more children. Cloning would enable such a couple to have a second child, perhaps a younger twin of the child they already have. 2) A child is lost soon after birth to a tragic accident. Many parents have written the HCF after losing a baby in a fire, car accident, or other unavoidable disaster. These grief stricken parents often say that they would like to have their perfect baby back. Human cloning would allow such parents to have a twin of their lost baby, but it would be like other twins, a unique individual and not a carbon copy of the child that was lost under heartbreaking circumstances. 3) A woman who through some medical emergency ended up having a hysterectomy before being married or having children. Such women have been stripped of their ability to have children. These women need a surrogate mother to have a child of their own DNA, which can be done either by human cloning or by in vitro fertilization.
4) A boy graduates from high school at age 18. He goes to a pool party to celebrate. He confuses the deep end and shallow end and dives head first into the pool, breaking his neck and becoming a quadriplegic. At age 19 he has his first urinary tract infection because of an indwelling urinary catheter and continues to suffer from them the rest of his life. At age 20 he comes down with herpes zoster of the trigeminal nerve. He suffers chronic unbearable pain. At age 21 he inherits a 10 million dollar trust fund. He never marries or has children. At age 40 after hearing about Dolly being a clone, he changes his will and has his DNA stored for future human cloning. His future mother will be awarded one million dollars to have him and raise him. His DNA clone will inherit a trust fund. He leaves five million to spinal cord research. He dies feeling that although he was robbed of normal life, his twin/clone will lead a better life. 5) Two parents have a baby boy. Unfortunately the baby has muscular dystrophy. They have another child and it's another boy with muscular dystrophy. They decide not to have any more children. Each boy has over 20 operations as doctors attempt to keep them healthy and mobile. Both boys die as teenagers. The childless parents donate their estate to curing muscular dystrophy and to having their boys cloned when medical science advances enough so that their DNA can live again, but free of muscular dystrophy.
Conclusion:
Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of an existing, or previously existing, human being or growing cloned tissue from that individual. The term is generally used to refer to artificial human cloning; human clones in the form of identical twins are commonplace, with their cloning occurring during the natural process of reproduction. Although genes are recognized as influencing behavior and cognition, genetically identical does not mean altogether identical; almost no one would deny that identical twins, despite being natural human clones with identical DNA, are separate people, with separate experiences and not altogether overlapping personalities. However undramatic it may sound, the relationship between an "original" and a clone is rather like that between identical twins raised apart; they share all the same DNA, but little of the same environment.
References:
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Simon Smith. The Benefits of Human Cloning. http://www.humancloning.org/benefits.php
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Human cloning. Science daily. Date reteived: http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/h/human_cloning.htm
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