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The Cloning Debate

The morality versus the reality

Until the creation of Dolly the sheep no country had any legislation banning human cloning for the simple reason that scientists believed it to be impossible to clone mammals from adult tissue. The production of Dolly, a sheep cloned from a mammary epithelial cell, proved that belief to be mistaken. When the newspapers began making dire predictions about ‘Hitler clones’ or ‘a new Frankenstein’s Monster’ the public panicked. Calls for an outright ban on human cloning came from quarters ranging from the Vatican — arguing that human beings have a right to be “born in a human way, and not in a laboratory” — to the US Biotechnology Industry Organisation. Members of the European and British parliaments called for a moratorium on all research on animal and human cloning, while scientists warned that introducing over restrictive legislation would impede new avenues of research. When all the fuss died down we ended up with cloning of animals for research purposes still being legal but human cloning is now banned under UK, US and EU law. But what is cloning anyway; is it immoral or unnatural and should it really be illegal to do it to humans?

In basic terms, to clone an organism is to produce offspring of it that are genetically identical to the parent organism. This is simple in unicellular organisms such as bacteria and is their normal method of reproduction. It was previously thought that it was not possible to gain clones from the cells of an adult mammal because the cells have taken on specific roles within the body and are no longer able to produce any type of cell. However, in creating Dolly, the team at the Roslin Institute were able to take the DNA from an adult cell and inject it into a sheep egg cell that had the nucleus removed from it. This cell was able to form all the tissue types in an adult sheep and grew into a sheep that was genetically identical to its parent. Since the process of normal development in sheep is very similar to that in humans it is probable that the techniques used to form Dolly could be applied with the same degree of success in humans.

As to the morality of cloning it is hard to know what to use to decide. At first glance we could conclude that since the Bible has nothing to say about cloning then it can’t be wrong. However this is an unsound argument since the Bible has nothing to say about nuclear weapons or chemical warfare yet few people would claim that their use was therefore acceptable. We may not find ‘Thou shalt not clone thyself nor thy neighbour’ in any lists of forbidden practices in Leviticus, but that is scarcely surprising considering no one was even aware such things could ever be possible. New technologies will always be appearing about which we have no clear previous guidelines and few are likely to be wrong in themselves. For cloning as with any other innovation we should seek to ensure that it is used for good and not for evil.

Cloning is definitely not in itself unnatural. Most plants generally reproduce asexually so that the offspring are genetically identical to the parent plant and hence a clone. In taking and potting on cuttings from favourite pot plants many of us will ourselves have cloned a plant. It can of course be objected that animals are not plants and to make them reproduce in the same way would be unnatural. However although the examples are less obvious there are many species of animals that reproduce asexually to produce clones of themselves. One example of this can be found in the garden on many rose plants — the aphid. Female aphids give live birth to many clones of themselves throughout the summer months through the process of parthenogenesis (virgin birth — but for any one who might be wondering this could not have miraculously occurred in Mary since parthenogenesis only ever gives rise to female offspring!) giving offspring that are genetically identical to the parent. Not needing to mate allows them to reproduce rapidly, giving rise to large numbers of offspring, and is what makes them such a pest in the garden. When the weather gets cold in the autumn, males are produced and some aphids mate to produce offspring that can survive over the winter.

Having shown that cloning does occur in nature does not however necessarily prove that it is natural in humans. Human beings were created by God/evolved as a species that reproduces sexually. Sexual reproduction has advantages over asexual reproduction in that it allows the recombination of genetic material to produce an infinite variety of unique individuals. Since some animals and many plants do reproduce asexually it is feasible that human evolution/creation might have taken a different course to produce a species similar to our own but which reproduced asexually. But it obviously did not, so for people reproduction involves having a child with someone else. Although in some ways our concept of reproduction has been changed by the advent of techniques such as IVF giving rise to ‘test tube babies’, there is always an involvement of genetic material from more than one source. With cloning, the production of a child who is a genetic copy of a single person is possible although they would not be identical due to the generation gap and the different environmental influences they would encounter. It is doing this that is currently illegal although it may not remain so.

It is a fundamental principle of a democracy that human freedom should not be limited without good cause being shown This means that those who oppose human cloning need to show not merely that we can easily imagine abuses of it that are undesirable but that it is in itself as a process morally wrong in a degree that justifies criminalizing those who would attempt it. After all the existence of natural human clones is something of which we have long experience. Identical twins are ‘clones’ formed by splitting an embryo early in its development; they are the product of one in every 270 pregnancies and there is no evidence that they lack individuality. Because genes influence, but do not determine, what traits people have, so identical twins do not turn out to be identical people and neither would artificially created clones. If it were otherwise then there would be no place for ideas of free will and responsibility in our concepts of ourselves.

Many researchers feel that there are humane and beneficial uses of cloning technology that justify opposing the ban on human cloning. Examples of such uses are using cloning as a means of genetic parenthood, cloning to avoid disease and cloning to treat disease. Cloning could help to overcome present hazards of graft procedure if embryonic cells could be taken from cloned embryos and cultured to form tissues of pancreatic cells to treat diabetes or brain nerve cells to treat Parkinson’s or other neurodegenerative diseases. Although this would certainly be beneficial to the patients treated, it is questionable whether it is morally justifiable to use human embryos for purposes other than making a human individual. Many Christians believe that an embryo is human from the time of conception onwards and so to abort it or allow it to be used even for such purposes as those outlined above would be little short of murder and clearly wrong.

Not all possible uses of cloning meet these kinds of moral objections; in use for reproductive purposes the clone develops into a human being not a ‘treatment’. Cloning could be used for a couple to avoid having children born with a genetic disease. For example if a couple wants children but one partner had a severe genetic disorder they could use the other partners DNA to produce a clone. There are also ways in which cloning could be used to allow people to experience genetic parenthood. In a couple where the male partner is infertile, using the man’s DNA in the woman's egg would give a child genetically related to both of them because the egg would contain mitochondrial DNA from the mother.

For a couple where both partners were sterile a donated egg could be cloned with the DNA of one of them. A couple unable to have further children and with their only child dying of an infection could clone one of that child’s cells so as to have another child. A single woman who wanted a child but wanted to use all her own DNA could have an embryo cloned from one of her own cells. If people find the last example less acceptable than the previous four then I would argue that the objection is more to single parenthood than to cloning in itself. Whatever the emotional responses we may have to such possible scenarios, such applications and many more would be possible if human cloning were legalised, there would be a need for detailed legislation about what kinds of applications were permissible.

So am I really advocating the legalisation of human cloning? Well not yet anyway; the major problem with the whole cloning procedure is the success rate, or rather the high rate of failure. A closer look at the paper that gave the news about Dolly, shows that she was the only lamb to result from 277 fusions involving adult cells. In fact, the cloning program that led to Dolly was originally supposed to have been using cattle, they switched to sheep to do the pioneering work because it was simply too expensive to have that many cattle die and sheep were much cheaper. Human lives are infinitely more valuable than those of cattle and 276 deaths before a live birth would be far too high a price to pay for the development of any technology. Even in our society, no ethics committee is remotely likely to approve human research carrying such high risks of deformation or early death. At the same time, these hurdles are unlikely to be overcome without human experiments so the risks may effectively bar development of human cloning for the foreseeable future. In the mean time, animal cloning could bring advances in agriculture, facilitate the production of pharmaceuticals in animal milk and help to conserve endangered species. Application of cloning techniques in these areas should allow rapid progress in basic research and perhaps the development of a more efficient technique with a better success rate. In that case, just maybe, human clones may be a feature of our future.

Fiona Worthy

Do you want to continue this debate on cloning? Do you disagree with Fiona? Write and tell us at submissions@christis.org.uk or put a note in our societies pigeonhole in the SU building.

Last modified: 25th November 2005