Essay/Term paper: Another chance of life

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Sociology Term Papers

Another Chance of Life Can there be another you? The answer is no, but by human cloning you can reproduce an offspring that grows into an exact genetically double of you. All of us want to prolong the lives of our loved ones and have a healthy newborn baby. Many infertility couples wanted to have a baby that is genetically theirs, not from adopting a child from a different family background. In the cloning technology, eggs or sperms would not be needed to be conceived by a person because any cell would do. One parent contributes DNA, making the child almost an identical twin. He or she would differ from the parents much more than identical twins differ from each other. In many parts of the world, human cloning is banned. For example, Canada's new Human Reproductive and Genetics Technologies Act made it illegal to clone human embryos, research on human embryos later than 14 days after conception, and the creation of embryos for research purposes alone. This act will make it more difficult for the estimated 280,000 infertile couplesin Canada to obtain domestic assistance in having a genetic child of their own. Human cloning should not be banned because it has many promising benefits to infertility couples and to the basic research for treatment of various diseases. Most people would not want to clone themselves. Those people think a human clone resembles the person it is made from. The genes do not form our character and so identical twins would never get 100 percent identity because of the experiences and environment for everyone is never exactly the same. "It's a horrendous crime to make a Xerox copy of anyone," argue author and science critic Jeremy Rifkin. The child from cloning is not a copy, but a unique individual. 1.5 million identical twins are far from being identical. They have different brain structures, IQ's, fingerprints, and personalities. The concern is the way people think about cloning. "Its not that anyone thinks there is a commandment, Thou shalt not clone, but there are limits to what humans out to be thinking about doing," said Margaret O' Brien Steinfels of Catholic commonwealth magazine. People fear that cloning will become a tool to copy their greatest players. Now, Germany had developed laws governing the cloning procedures so that cloning is used solely for the benefits of the country. In the United States, the government cuts off funding for projects that seem offensive. Cloning is financed largely by the flourishing in-vitro fertilization business. Human cloning is the following step that started with in vitro fertilization to help couples who had troubles of getting pregnant. The embryo cloning increases the chances of a successful pregnancy for infertility couples. Fifteen percent of a dults suffer from infertility that cannot be cured by current medicine. Millions cannot have children because that cannot produce more than one embryo. The in vitro (out of the body) fertilization aimed at developing fertilized eggs in test tubes can be implanted into the wombs of women having difficulty becoming pregnant. However, these fertilized eggs do not develop into a stage that is suitable for transplantation into a human uterus. The hit or miss depends on the number of embryos used. Through in vitro fertilization, the woman with only one embryo has about 10% to 20% chances to be conceived with a baby. If that embryo could be cloned and turned into three or four, the chances of getting pregnant would increase significantly. Here are some ways how cloning had been used that helped our society. The gene cloning can provide large quantities of copied gene for use in medical research. If a child had an inherited disease, hemophilia or cystic fibrosis, the parents could have a couple of extra clones around to ensure that the defect gene does not pass on so that a perfect healthy child would be born. In recent years, the scientific techniques had the ability to isolate and make copies from embryonic cells that are easier to work with but human cloning is far beyond today's science. The Rosaline team was able to accomplish the difficulty of cloning from an adult cell. Dolly, the six years old ewe cloned, was a living proof that an adult cell can revert embryonic stage and produce a mature being. Dolly was like any other sheep. It gave birth to a healthy lamb. In the future, we can clone people the similar way they cloned Dolly. To do so, human cloning should not be banned for it is a new law of nature and a big step in science discovery.