cloning
...icle, “Human Cloning? Don't Just Say No.” Early farmers used breeding techniques to re-grow plants faster, and produce larger and sweeter fruits. They combined these breeding techniques with cloning to create many plants with more preferable traits. “These early stages of cloning and breeding were slow and sometimes unpredictable,” as the article goes on to say. By the late 20th century, scientists developed genetic engineering, in which they manipulated deoxyribonucleic acid, better known as DNA, the genetics of all living things, to more precisely alter a plant’s genes. Scientists combined genetic engineering with cloning to quickly and inexpensively produce thousands of plants with more desirable characteristics. However, though the same concept, Dolly’s procedure was much more difficult and required years of study and research. However, in the end, Dolly emerged from the procedure in the July of 1996, and proved to the world that human cloning was no longer a possibility, but a reality. Scientists have been split entirely down the middle since the emergence of cloning. Dr. Lee M. Silver is a voice that supports the idea whole-heartedly. Dr. Silver is a Professor at Princeton University in the Departments of Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and the Program in Neuroscience. He is also the author of “Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family,” which goes in depth to describe the incredible new ways in which people will be able to reproduce and choose the genes they provide to their children in the near future. In his book, Dr. Silver argues that cloning is a legitimate treatment of infertility, and can be used to replace a lost loved one with a twin, an example from his book, a child accidentally and tragically killed in a car accident. Human cloning could be the beginning of research that will benefit mankind by exploding the knowledge of medicine and biology. He goes on to say that once we study human genetic makeup, cancer could be cured within the next ten years, as if it were a common cold. Lee also believes that human cloning could someday take a 65-year-old and turn the age of that person back to zero to the one cell stage, which could drastically increase our lifespan and even bring forth immortality. Silver argues, “It is not unreasonable to expect that in the future we can turn the age of the 65-year-old back to 25! Bio-ethicists are naysayers. The bio-ethicist movement started in the 1970's. For the most part, the role of bio-ethicists in society is to say no to change and to resist progress. Historically, they have been wrong over and over again.” In the journal, “Cloning Humans Unethical, Unsafe and Unnecessary,” by Dr. David A. Prentice, a Professor of Life Sciences at Indiana State University, and Professor of Medical and Molecular Genetics at Indiana University School of Medicine, it states some very good reasons why cloning should be banned. It has an incredibly large failure rate, “95-99% of clones die before or soon after birth.” “Out of 277 cloned embryos, one Dolly the sheep was produced, and even this ‘successful’ clone is beset with abnormalities-it was recently disclosed that she has developed early arthritis and may need to be put down.” He continues by explaining how this summer, a group at the Whitehead Institute achieved 5 born mice from 613 cloned embryos. About .8%, and all of the born mice showed defects in expression of their ge...