There are many advantages and disadvantages of cloning humans and other mammals; I will now explore these advantages and the disadvantages. I will begin with the advantages.
Advantages of cloning
An advantage of cloning is that the offspring is totally predictable; they are guaranteed to have the characteristics that you chose through the parents.
Wild plants could be reproduced so that they will not become extinct.
The above advantage could also be used to stop the extinction of endangered species if the process of cloning was improved.
Scientists believe that they may be able to treat heart attack patients by cloning their healthy heart cells and injecting them into the areas of the heart that have been damaged.
Another advantage, which is only a theory, is that skin cells could be grown for burn victims so that they could replace burnt skin. They believe they could grow brain cells for the brain damaged and grow spinal cells for the paralysed. Obviously if this were to happen then this would be a huge advantage.
They also believe they could grow important organs such as livers, kidneys, lungs and even hearts. This would benefit us as a race hugely if this were to happen.
A major bonus for infertile couples is that they would be able to have children through cloning.
We could also clone bone marrow cells for people with leukaemia. This is again an obviously huge advantage. It would mean several diseases such as Alzheimer’s could also be cured using this method, but this is only a theory.
Disadvantages
Although there are not as many disadvantages to argue they are still very important ones, these arguments are what are keeping human cloning illegal in the United Kingdom.
If a farmer was to use cloning to create a field of the perfect crop and suddenly one of them became diseased, then the rest of the crop is also going to become diseased as all of the crops are the same and so therefore they are all vulnerable.
A very strong argument against cloning is that we are interfering with nature and anything could go wrong. Which leads me on to my next point. We are not certain of the side effects of cloning a human or mammal.
If a human were cloned it would be identical to someone else in the world and so would not be unique. This person may then feel depressed, as they are not an individual.
Clones that are produced may be seen as a lower class as they are not “real”. They may be thought of as a copy and so can be treated badly although they have feelings like anyone else. Clones maybe bought and sold on the “black market” as slaves, or they maybe illegally produced to do specific jobs.
As you can see from the reasons I have given for and against the cloning of humans, plants and human cells that the reasons for the approval of cloning are more but the reasons against are far more serious. We do not know enough about cloning at the moment and so I disagree with cloning at the moment while details are unclear. If certain answers were to be given to the disadvantages of cloning humans then I would be forced to reconsider my view on the cloning of humans.
