Ethics of Embryonic Cloning
Ethics of Embryonic CloningEmbryonic Wars
The specific objective of this major essay is to clarify and summarise the controversial debate concerning the ethical decency of embryonic cloning for therapeutic purposes. This is the form of cloning that is supposedly beneficial to a barrage of medical applications. We will identify the key opposing ethical perspectives such as those of the justification of embryonic research based on the normative theory of consequentialism. This paper will also probe into the relatively brief history of the debate while gauging the particular stumbling blocks of disagreement which bioethicists have arrived at. The topical aspects of therapeutic cloning will be closely studied by weighing the pros and cons and gaining a greater understanding of the present scenario.
Formally speaking, embryonic cloning is a technique used by researchers and animal breeders to split a single embryo into two or more embryos that will all have the same genetic information. Some more extreme forms of Embryonic or Therapeutic cloning involve the deliberate creation of an identical twin to be destroyed before implantation in order to make replacement tissues. However, these identical twins are usually only six day old embryos, a minuscule collection of cells without a nervous system. Therapeutically, the notion of cloning is medically significant because cloned individuals at the embryonic stage “share the same immune characteristics as each other” (Harris 26). The possibility of cloning an individual at the embryo stage allows one clone to be used as a cell tissue and organ bank for the other.
Embryonic cloning has a history of significant developments and discoveries that have occurred only in the past ten or twenty years. In the nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties, sophisticated foetal and embryological research was banned by the United States’ Reagan and Bush administrations due to pressure from pro-life factions of the Republican party. However, these regulations against research into the controversial field were relaxed considerably with the inception of the more pro-choice Clinton administration. In October 1994, Robert J. Stillman shocked the world with the news of his successful “cloning of seventeen flawed human embryos at George Washington Medical Center” (Dyson & Harris 276) in the United States. Events such as this have continued to spark furious debate over the past few years. In December 1998, Professor Lee Bo-Yeon of Korea created and killed the first human clone, much to the dismay of numerous pressure groups. In July this year, scientists of the United Kingdom began to publicly exploit a loophole in the Government’s ruling of the rejection of spare-part cloning research. The loophole allows the researchers to continue with experiments by importing stem cells from cloned embryos which have been created and destroyed in another country.
There is a rather surprising amount of medical benefits arising from therapeutic cloning research which have to be weighed before we assess where the debate is currently at. Doctors lay well founded expectations that by being able to study the multiple embryos developed...
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